[PlayerShip] P1X3lShip Lives!

[Cygnus.X1]

Inspired by a conversation in IRC about how lots of people have thought about making a ship the size of a single pixel, but no-one has actually published such a thing. They told me it would be a joke, they told me nobody would actually take such a thing seriously, and that although many many people have had the same idea, none of them were willing to waste their time on it. I obviously have some time to waste

http://xelerus.de/index.php?s=mod&id=1227

I actually used 2 pixels, a green pixel for the ship body, and a red pixel so you can tell what direction you are facing. You may not think there is much 'art' to it, but yanno, it was a tedious pain in my arse to make 40 facings outta 2 pixels, so neener neener neener

Most of the code is cloned from my Athena godmod ship, however I made her a custom weapon called the Pixel Cannon (which is really just an overpowered Morningstar Cannon) that fires a stream of DarkSteel rainbow-colored particles

Some +90% of all incoming fire misses this ship, even when holding still. Area of effect weapons like explosions still hit pretty often. Fun!


PS: Interesting side effect of the "Large" image on the ship selection screen... apparently if you use a graphic that is way too small, Trans upscales it for you. Uh, ok.

[RPC]

Cygnus, can I guess Shrike was the one with the idea?
Also, nice mod, I'll review it!

[FourFire]

Could you give it an laser line of aiming?

[Cygnus.X1]

Could you give it an laser line of aiming?

Not really. The game engine uses a technique called sprite collision detection to determine hits, so every pixel added to the ship's gfx makes it more likely to get hit. The original idea was to use just a single pixel (like, a 1x1 single-pixel bmp file and no facings) for the ship graphics, but when I considered how that would play, I realized there was no way to see which way you are facing unless you fired the engines to see the rocket exhaust. Not really fun... and a fun factor was what I was going for with this ship.

In other words, if I added a line of red dots to aim with, the aim-er itself would get hit more often than not. Plus, with only 9 degrees of separation between facings, I'd have to use a lot of anti-aliasing to make the lines look right, which means even more pixels used.

PS: Shrike was one of the ones that told me this ship would be a joke Joke's on me now

[RPC]

You could add overlays on the pixelship that point in the direction you're facing. They don't count as part of the ship
(check out Agauptera or Sandbox Teaser ADVLRS for examples of implementation).

[Song]

Cygnus, can I guess Shrike was the one with the idea?
Also, nice mod, I'll review it!

Actually, it isn't my idea at all. It's the sort of thing I would come up with, but I didn't.

[Cygnus.X1]

You could add overlays on the pixelship that point in the direction you're facing. They don't count as part of the ship
(check out Agauptera or Sandbox Teaser ADVLRS for examples of implementation).

Ah, that's a bit of a learning curve for me never coded anything using overlays (yet).

But your suggestions do give me two ideas that could make for great functionality enhancement mods on their own...

Inspired by Wing Commander 3, when targeting an enemy ship, have an overlay reticle show you where to aim in order to lead your shots with a forward firing weapon to intercept your target. (As seen in the WC3 "Excalibur" experimental ship you get during the end-game, yes, I liked it so much I can still remember the name of the ship)

And directly inspired by FourFire's query, an overlay aiming reticle (or series) that show, well, where you are aiming.

[Cygnus.X1]

Success! The first prototype aiming system is working!

Some testing and tweaking still needs to be done to get it working perfectly (for me anyways), but expect a nice update soon

If I get everything worked out right, I'm going to create a specific version exclusive to the PixelShip that has just a series of aiming reticles (and the thought just occurred to me that the ship is easy to lose track of, so I'm also looking to create a few more overlays that make it easier to spot), and then a standalone version of the Excalibur device that can be used with any playership, which will have more advanced features such as a leading reticle for targeted enemies (and that's going to take me a while to figure out )


The yellow arrow is pointing to the yellow pixel that's the body of the ship. Yup, that's right, it's now a true single-pixel-ship and for more fun, the 40 facings are now a rainbow gradient, so the single pixel has a different color for every possible direction.
The 3 "X" graphics are crude placeholders for the reticules, but the important part is that they are working as intended.

Stay Tuned...

[Cygnus.X1]

PixelShip has been re-born as P1X3lShip

Re-uploaded at 22 downloads.

I used a series of overlays to create a pixel constellation shaped like a sword. I made a new main ship graphic that is a single pixel in effective size, and colored with a 40-faces looping rainbow gradient, and the central overlays use the same graphic as well. The outer overlays use the same effect graphic used by the P1X3l Cannon and P1X3l Burst that makes randomly colored particle pixels.

In addition to the over-powered P1X3l Cannon, I also created an over-powered launcher weapon called P1X3l Burst that releases a large cloud of particles that can wipe out just about anything on the SRS screen. I also made her an inertial-less drive just for kicks.

I forgot, I direct linked the screenshot from Xel, so the image in the OP has been automagically updated. However, it doesn't really do the ship justice in a still shot. Might take me a while but I'm going to attempt to make an animated GIF showing the ship spinning. That'll be tedious, fer sure...

UGH! Hideous process, that.

[RPC]

You should make a pixel faction and pixel stations! >:D

[Cygnus.X1]

Hmmm... If I can make a CPU sucking 'grey ooze' out of weapons fire, I wonder what I could do with stations...

Useless trivia tidbit: The overlay pixels are spaced exactly 1 light-second apart