Yet another disappointing change made by the developer. Game version b141 completely replaced the default ship textures so that each ship texture no longer has a unique appearance.
All ship textures have been changed to essentially be identical to one another except for a slight color change...which we could already do to our ships in the in-game ship customization if we wanted color on the ships.
As a result of this, there is absolutely no reason to continue offering each SOL-V ship as a separate download composed of different ship texture combinations when all of the textures are essentially identical now.
I have now redone all of the ships to use the "Default" main/detail/glow textures.
The ships are available in a single download pack file in this one texture combination instead of the vast range of appearances they could come in prior to this horrible change to the ship textures.
I've updated and removed some outdated mod pics, but I'm still working to update the rest that show the old (better) ship textures in use.
Holy s#*!, No one is going to pick through the fucking infinite amount of insignificant variations of each ship in each separate file. This is why nobody is endorsing the mod bruh. make a play-ready file format of 1 variation and stick all this s#*! in ONE file.
Straight up deleted everything when I saw the installation instructions. I already have a job, don't need another one tbh.
Nobody is endorsing my ships (or other creator's ships) because people generally don't endorse mods on Nexus. Standard across all games on Nexus is about 1 in 12 or so unique downloaders actually endorses even a popular mod on popular games, so 1 in ~15 on a little-known indy game isn't too bad. Also not being allowed to endorse for at least 15 minutes after downloading means people need to come back to hit endorse and can't do it at the time of downloading. People are generally just lazy, forgetful and/or very busy and won't bother, remember or have time to come back later on just to endorse since they'll be busy playing the game.
Anyway, installation is the same for these ships as with ALL other ships for this game. If you can't follow a few VERY straight-forward instructions that are the same to add ANY ship available on nexus to your game, why are you bothering with looking to add custom ships to it?
As for the different variations, is it really too difficult for you to see that you like one # skin combination and to only add that number's ship file? Or if variation doesn't matter, just pick any one ship variation and add only that one ship variation. You're not forced to use them all. If you want only one variation, use only one variation. Your preference =/= all people's preferences.
It really can't be any easier for this game: - Want the ship to have battle stats/bonuses? Add ship files from the 'Battle' folder to your game's "ships" folder. - Want the ship to have excavation stats/bonuses? Add ship files from the 'Excavation' folder to your game's "ships" folder. - Only like style/texture variation #4? Add only that number's files. You can choose and actually make a choice on your own since you're not forced to use only the textures I set them to use and can pick the one you want.
You sound like you shouldn't even be looking to use any custom ships for this game if dragging and dropping a couple files is too much effort. Stick to the default ships that come with the game. If you want to add custom ships you will be doing this minimal effort of installation for any ships you download.
I was going to install these and include them in my next playthrough, but... nah. Your response put me off.
It would be more trivial for you to package all of the ships into a single download than it is for users to download a ridiculous number of files one at a time with 5 second delays between each download.
You make several assumptions and also ignore that you could download all of the ships in a single file. Thanks for looking at my ships though. Shame a few words on the screen and assumptions and oversights you've made are what was preventing you from using my ships in your game. I do hope that you enjoy using the official ships and/or ships created by others though.
Game version b136 added the ability to scale parts in the ship editor.
This new ability greatly opens up the possibilities for ship designs, as well as ways to optimize existing designs to reduce the number of parts used and clean them up a bit.
I will need some time, but I will try to get in and mess around with this new ability more to see how it can be used to alter existing ship designs, as well as see what new styles of ships can be designed.
Using "Aphelion" (Escort) as an example, all I did was: - stretch the 4 front nose parts forward - widen the top and bottom front nose parts slightly - stretch the rear fins backward slightly
The ship quickly became a Cruiser/Battlecruiser class version of the ship using the same number of parts.
This will allow for larger class ships of the same design as a smaller ship to be quickly made instead of needing to try to create a larger class version of a ship using more parts while trying to keep the same general design as the smaller one.
Hi StinVec, First of all, great Ship-Pack - you clearly put a lot of effort into making it.
I want to ask you for permission to use your textures in my upcoming Ship Uploads? I'll credit you and link to this Mod aswell, so its also advertising for your Mod/Ship-Pack aswell. (EDIT: I dont want to modify the textures, so they'll stay exactly like you made them.)
Hi. Thank you very much! You absolutely can use the SOLB textures that I am using on that ship pack, but also don't feel obligated to link to my ships. Thank you if you do, though!
The SOLB textures are just a combination of some official textures with various adjustments to coloring and with some effects added to them. You can also absolutely modify the SOLB textures further if you would like!
I would only ask that you please change the names of the texture files to replace "solb" with what you would name your ship collection (and maybe have them use a custom manufacturer even). So if I do make changes to my versions of the textures, or you make changes to them, people using both of our ship packs will not encounter errors of the ships not displaying properly because installing one ship overwrote the textures of the other.
Hi! Thank you very much. I'm glad to hear you like them and I hope you enjoy using the ships. I haven't worked on making any NPC ship versions or even tried testing out setting the ships for mercenaries to use yet, but I will look at doing so to see how it goes.
However, Daering noted on his ATC NPC Ship Pack that he encountered a problem of some ships in his player ship pack not being able to be used by mercenaries due to being composed of too many parts. That doesn't seem to make sense to me unless there is a text or line limit in the NPC files that isn't present on the player ship files where too many parts would mean too many lines/text in the file and cause the files to give errors.
If there is such a limitation, I would likely encounter the same issues with many of these ships and not all of them might be able to be made into NPC versions. I will try to look at the nature of that problem if I do encounter it as many of these ships are composed of quite a lot of parts.
You're welcome! It appears it isn't specifically a part or a line limitation, but a vertex limit. For NPC ships, the engine merges all of the meshes for the ship into a single object and there is a vertex count limit for the complexity of the merged mesh. It appears the game engine is using a format for the merged mesh object that has a lower maximum vertex count limit (for better performance/less fps hit with many ships on screen) instead of the format that it could be using that would allow for a higher vertex count (but also lower performance from more detailed ships on-screen).
It looks like between 21 and 27 or so of the ships as they currently exist have few enough parts that the vertex count will be low enough that they can be configured for NPC versions. I might be able to remove extra detail parts I've added to some of the ships to get more of them to fall below the vertex limit, but the ships will pretty much look like stripped down versions with fewer glowing parts/areas. There's no way I could strip down at least 11 or so of the ships enough to get below the limit though.
I'll be going through and testing each ship to see which ones can be put into an NPC pack, and then I'll work on configuring each one's loadout for what active and passive modules to have on them for different roles and then their inventories of ammo where needed. NPC ships also cannot/do not currently use drones, so I'd also remove that aspect of them and the associated bonuses.
It will take me quite some time to do this, however, but that is what I will be working on and testing out.
There are still 3 more that I will work on later that might be able to be reduced down below the limit with enough adjustments.
The next ships beyond these 3 have many more parts and many more vertices, so they would require stripping out maybe 30-50% of their parts to get the vertex count low enough.
I've configured these 25 ships for the Battle ship type so far: - Primarily starting out with level-appropriate lasers (pulse, focused) and beams (pulse, ion) - Progressing to adding in missile launchers (assault, tactical) with a supply of level-appropriate missiles - Then reducing/dropping beams and adding in level-appropriate projectile guns (20mm/60mm single shots and higher levels with the multi-shot autoguns) with a supply of level-appropriate munitions
I will also have Excavation versions included: outfitted with harvesters and optimized for cargo space and energy, with a little defense I will also have Transport versions included: outfitted with salvagers and optimized for cargo space and speed, with a little defense
Still more testing to do on the configurations, but I welcome any thoughts on how you would prefer the NPC ships to be outfitted or how you use the NPC ships for your style of play!
Hey again. I've completed and uploaded the 25 ship NPC collection file.
The ships seem configured well enough for my purposes, but I don't know how others tend to use mercenaries in their games. If you do add the mercs to your stations and give them a try, I would appreciate it if you would consider letting me know how they work for you, your thoughts on how to adjust them in a more ideal way if you do not like how they are configured, and especially if you encounter a problem with one or more of them.
Thank you for requesting that I create this pack again and I hope you will give it a try!
Hi. I do not have any black and red ships. Most default coloring on the ships are as they are in my images; bright white with red or orange glow/engine, while others I have updated to being dark with orange glow/engine as in my images.
The textures used are also all included with the game and the combinations are noted and numbered in the description and in the ship file names.
If you are seeing the ships in black and red, perhaps you have another mod installed that alters the official ship textures. If so, as the ships use the official textures, altering these textures will also alter how these ships appear.
Is this the case?
If not, can you give me any examples of specific SOL-V ships with their ship name and the number in the ID name or file name that are appearing black and red for you?
I hope my responses previously helped to answer your question.
Also as an update if you are interested, I have now added the current 35 ships in a single pack that have customized textures with a dark base color. The base color will remain dark when changing the ship color and only the accent hue will change. Accent hue, glow hue and engine hue can all be different colors, but the base will remain dark. The included collage image shows them with a solid red accent hue at 50% color/intensity (0.50), but that can be changed to any color and intensity.
Over the course of the past 13 weeks I have gone from sharing 5 ship designs in a single file to having designed and shared 31 ship designs and in 27 individual download files so only desired ship designs can be downloaded.
I have put many hours toward configuring and including files for each design that are configured for two ship types so the ships fit in with different styles of gameplay, as well as toward providing each type in 15 different texture/detail combinations so players have options for the appearance of the ships.
I have also spent many hours on taking screenshots and configuring graphics for visually presenting every ship design in every texture combination from multiple angles and in multiple hues so that players can clearly see what it is they are downloading.
In this time there have been 215 total file downloads by 40 unique downloaders. That does surprise me considering it is a lesser-known indie game.
However, there has also only been a single endorsement of my ships made. This single endorsement was not given by a player because they liked my ship designs, it was given on day one when I uploaded my first five ships and made by a moderator from the game's Steam forums just to encourage further participation with the game.
As evidence shows that my designs are only liked by me (no endorsements by players, no requests for more of a style, no comments at all, very few to no downloads of recent ship uploads), I have decided to stop sharing any more ship designs and to just leave the current 31 ship designs which I have already uploaded available.
_____ Update 2022, May 25: Just an update for 4 ships to correct minor texture flickering and 1 or 2 attributes, but I also decided to add 3 more ships at the same time that I have had completed.
21 comments
All ship textures have been changed to essentially be identical to one another except for a slight color change...which we could already do to our ships in the in-game ship customization if we wanted color on the ships.
As a result of this, there is absolutely no reason to continue offering each SOL-V ship as a separate download composed of different ship texture combinations when all of the textures are essentially identical now.
I have now redone all of the ships to use the "Default" main/detail/glow textures.
The ships are available in a single download pack file in this one texture combination instead of the vast range of appearances they could come in prior to this horrible change to the ship textures.
I've updated and removed some outdated mod pics, but I'm still working to update the rest that show the old (better) ship textures in use.
This is why nobody is endorsing the mod bruh. make a play-ready file format of 1 variation and stick all this s#*! in ONE file.
Straight up deleted everything when I saw the installation instructions. I already have a job, don't need another one tbh.
Anyway, installation is the same for these ships as with ALL other ships for this game. If you can't follow a few VERY straight-forward instructions that are the same to add ANY ship available on nexus to your game, why are you bothering with looking to add custom ships to it?
As for the different variations, is it really too difficult for you to see that you like one # skin combination and to only add that number's ship file? Or if variation doesn't matter, just pick any one ship variation and add only that one ship variation. You're not forced to use them all. If you want only one variation, use only one variation. Your preference =/= all people's preferences.
It really can't be any easier for this game:
- Want the ship to have battle stats/bonuses? Add ship files from the 'Battle' folder to your game's "ships" folder.
- Want the ship to have excavation stats/bonuses? Add ship files from the 'Excavation' folder to your game's "ships" folder.
- Only like style/texture variation #4? Add only that number's files. You can choose and actually make a choice on your own since you're not forced to use only the textures I set them to use and can pick the one you want.
You sound like you shouldn't even be looking to use any custom ships for this game if dragging and dropping a couple files is too much effort. Stick to the default ships that come with the game. If you want to add custom ships you will be doing this minimal effort of installation for any ships you download.
It would be more trivial for you to package all of the ships into a single download than it is for users to download a ridiculous number of files one at a time with 5 second delays between each download.
But no, you can't be bothered.
Good luck with that.
Not sure why he's kicking off lmao....
Nice mod anyway mate, they look great!
This new ability greatly opens up the possibilities for ship designs, as well as ways to optimize existing designs to reduce the number of parts used and clean them up a bit.
I will need some time, but I will try to get in and mess around with this new ability more to see how it can be used to alter existing ship designs, as well as see what new styles of ships can be designed.
Using "Aphelion" (Escort) as an example, all I did was:
- stretch the 4 front nose parts forward
- widen the top and bottom front nose parts slightly
- stretch the rear fins backward slightly
The ship quickly became a Cruiser/Battlecruiser class version of the ship using the same number of parts.
This will allow for larger class ships of the same design as a smaller ship to be quickly made instead of needing to try to create a larger class version of a ship using more parts while trying to keep the same general design as the smaller one.
First of all, great Ship-Pack - you clearly put a lot of effort into making it.
I want to ask you for permission to use your textures in my upcoming Ship Uploads?
I'll credit you and link to this Mod aswell, so its also advertising for your Mod/Ship-Pack aswell.
(EDIT: I dont want to modify the textures, so they'll stay exactly like you made them.)
Have a nice Day.
The SOLB textures are just a combination of some official textures with various adjustments to coloring and with some effects added to them. You can also absolutely modify the SOLB textures further if you would like!
I would only ask that you please change the names of the texture files to replace "solb" with what you would name your ship collection (and maybe have them use a custom manufacturer even). So if I do make changes to my versions of the textures, or you make changes to them, people using both of our ship packs will not encounter errors of the ships not displaying properly because installing one ship overwrote the textures of the other.
I look forward to seeing and piloting your ships!
I will rename the textures then and create a different manufacturer logo etc.
thx again and have a nice day!
However, Daering noted on his ATC NPC Ship Pack that he encountered a problem of some ships in his player ship pack not being able to be used by mercenaries due to being composed of too many parts. That doesn't seem to make sense to me unless there is a text or line limit in the NPC files that isn't present on the player ship files where too many parts would mean too many lines/text in the file and cause the files to give errors.
If there is such a limitation, I would likely encounter the same issues with many of these ships and not all of them might be able to be made into NPC versions. I will try to look at the nature of that problem if I do encounter it as many of these ships are composed of quite a lot of parts.
It looks like between 21 and 27 or so of the ships as they currently exist have few enough parts that the vertex count will be low enough that they can be configured for NPC versions. I might be able to remove extra detail parts I've added to some of the ships to get more of them to fall below the vertex limit, but the ships will pretty much look like stripped down versions with fewer glowing parts/areas. There's no way I could strip down at least 11 or so of the ships enough to get below the limit though.
I'll be going through and testing each ship to see which ones can be put into an NPC pack, and then I'll work on configuring each one's loadout for what active and passive modules to have on them for different roles and then their inventories of ammo where needed. NPC ships also cannot/do not currently use drones, so I'd also remove that aspect of them and the associated bonuses.
It will take me quite some time to do this, however, but that is what I will be working on and testing out.
20 of the ships could be made to be piloted by NPCs without any changes.
Ship 1 (I) - Cruiser - SV PulsarShip 2 (II) - Cruiser - SV Prominence
Ship 3 (III) - Dreadnought - SV Equinox
Ship 7 (VII) - Frigate - SV MicroNova
Ship 10 (X) - Cruiser - SV Halo
Ship 11 (XI) - Escort - SV Coma
Ship 15 (XV) - Escort - SV Aphelion
Ship 16 (XVI) - Carrier - SV Catena
Ship 17 (XVII) - Destroyer - SV Torus
Ship 18 (XVIII) - Cruiser - SV Magnitude
Ship 19 (XIX) - Cruiser - SV Jansky
Ship 20 (XX) - Utility - SV Patera
Ship 21 (XXI) - Cruiser - SV Antipode
Ship 25 (XXV) - Utility - SV Perihelion
Ship 26 (XXVI) - Utility - SV Chaos
Ship 28 (XXVIII) - Escort - SV Mascon
Ship 31 (XXXI) - Cruiser - SV Saros
Ship 32 (XXXII) - Escort - SV Neap
Ship 33 (XXXIII) - Escort - SV Flare
Ship 34 (XXXIV) - Cruiser - SV Meridian
I altered 5 more ships slightly to remove excess glow/detail parts or remove bulk or engine housing parts to get them below the vertex limit.
Ship 13 (XIII) - Carrier - SV Resonance (removed engine housings)
Ship 23 (XXIII) - Battlecruiser - SV Planemo (removed undercarriage piping)
Ship 24 (XXIV) - Destroyer - SV Apastron (removed runner glow lights)
Ship 27 (XXVII) - Battlecruiser - SV Rille (removed runner glow lights)
Ship 35 (XXXV) - Battlecruiser - SV Arp (removed some excess flair/detail/bulk parts)
There are still 3 more that I will work on later that might be able to be reduced down below the limit with enough adjustments.
The next ships beyond these 3 have many more parts and many more vertices, so they would require stripping out maybe 30-50% of their parts to get the vertex count low enough.
I've configured these 25 ships for the Battle ship type so far:
- Primarily starting out with level-appropriate lasers (pulse, focused) and beams (pulse, ion)
- Progressing to adding in missile launchers (assault, tactical) with a supply of level-appropriate missiles
- Then reducing/dropping beams and adding in level-appropriate projectile guns (20mm/60mm single shots and higher levels with the multi-shot autoguns) with a supply of level-appropriate munitions
I will also have Excavation versions included: outfitted with harvesters and optimized for cargo space and energy, with a little defense
I will also have Transport versions included: outfitted with salvagers and optimized for cargo space and speed, with a little defense
Still more testing to do on the configurations, but I welcome any thoughts on how you would prefer the NPC ships to be outfitted or how you use the NPC ships for your style of play!
The ships seem configured well enough for my purposes, but I don't know how others tend to use mercenaries in their games. If you do add the mercs to your stations and give them a try, I would appreciate it if you would consider letting me know how they work for you, your thoughts on how to adjust them in a more ideal way if you do not like how they are configured, and especially if you encounter a problem with one or more of them.
Thank you for requesting that I create this pack again and I hope you will give it a try!
The textures used are also all included with the game and the combinations are noted and numbered in the description and in the ship file names.
If you are seeing the ships in black and red, perhaps you have another mod installed that alters the official ship textures. If so, as the ships use the official textures, altering these textures will also alter how these ships appear.
Is this the case?
If not, can you give me any examples of specific SOL-V ships with their ship name and the number in the ID name or file name that are appearing black and red for you?
If so:
The dark ship images on the left are #4 "Alpha | GEM"
The white ship images on the right are #7 "ATC | Aurora"
Ship 30 "Ephemeris" as an example:
That is #4 on the left at 20% (0.20) for the colors, and #7 on the right at 100% (1.0) for the colors.
Also as an update if you are interested, I have now added the current 35 ships in a single pack that have customized textures with a dark base color. The base color will remain dark when changing the ship color and only the accent hue will change. Accent hue, glow hue and engine hue can all be different colors, but the base will remain dark. The included collage image shows them with a solid red accent hue at 50% color/intensity (0.50), but that can be changed to any color and intensity.
Over the course of the past 13 weeks I have gone from sharing 5 ship designs in a single file to having designed and shared 31 ship designs and in 27 individual download files so only desired ship designs can be downloaded.
I have put many hours toward configuring and including files for each design that are configured for two ship types so the ships fit in with different styles of gameplay, as well as toward providing each type in 15 different texture/detail combinations so players have options for the appearance of the ships.
I have also spent many hours on taking screenshots and configuring graphics for visually presenting every ship design in every texture combination from multiple angles and in multiple hues so that players can clearly see what it is they are downloading.
In this time there have been 215 total file downloads by 40 unique downloaders. That does surprise me considering it is a lesser-known indie game.
However, there has also only been a single endorsement of my ships made. This single endorsement was not given by a player because they liked my ship designs, it was given on day one when I uploaded my first five ships and made by a moderator from the game's Steam forums just to encourage further participation with the game.
As evidence shows that my designs are only liked by me (no endorsements by players, no requests for more of a style, no comments at all, very few to no downloads of recent ship uploads), I have decided to stop sharing any more ship designs and to just leave the current 31 ship designs which I have already uploaded available.
_____
Update 2022, May 25:
Just an update for 4 ships to correct minor texture flickering and 1 or 2 attributes, but I also decided to add 3 more ships at the same time that I have had completed.