A new tool

I'm working on a TC (current probability of vaporware: 97%), and I ran into a problem: I want to start building the setting, balancing the ships, and so on - but it takes me half an hour to put together even the world's crappiest placeholder ship graphics. This is not acceptable, given that I need a lot of new ships.

So I made a program to fix this. It's a simple 2D vector graphics editor (written in java), but it outputs directly into the formats EVN requires: a 36 frame spin, a corresponding mask, a 200x200 shipyard pic, and a 128x64 target pic.

And, on the off-chance that anyone else wants to churn out some quick placeholder ships, I'm posting it up here. Be aware: This is essentially an alpha build. It works fine on my machine, but I make no guarantees what it'll do on yours. As the bible says, may cause cancer in lab rats.

(edit) Updated version here. Or scroll down. (/edit)

This post has been edited by Wyvern : 17 March 2008 - 09:55 AM

And I've got a bug report in already: hitting render with no ship name produces a bunch of files starting with ".". Which OSX assumes should be not visible. So, um, you probably shouldn't do that. I'll go fix that now...

(edit) Fixed, and I've re-uploaded the program in its fixed version. Though you can still get similar errors by starting the file name with a ".", but that'll be your own fault, not mine. (/edit)

This post has been edited by Wyvern : 04 March 2008 - 11:07 PM

Works great, I love it!. Quick, simple and easy! Now I can make placeholder images until I learn more Maya.

Won't work at all on my computer maybe I need a newer version of Java...

@yamfries, on Mar 5 2008, 06:36 AM, said in Quick Ship Creator:

Won't work at all on my computer maybe I need a newer version of Java...

Any sort of error message or anything? What OS are you using?

Java programs run inside Java Runtime and are independent of OS (if it really matters I tested it on Win XP and Vista).

Yoda: Did you decompress the .tar file with Stuffit before using?

Awesome and hilarious!!

No goats so far!

Two suggestions (if you are interested in such things):

• Turn the target depiction 90 degrees and center it.
• Add a "bilateral symmetry" option to take the points from the left half of a shape and use them to replace the points in the right half. Sort of a 2D "lathe" function to make it easier to avoid ships unintentionally turning out lopsided.

@dr--trowel, on Mar 5 2008, 01:51 PM, said in Quick Ship Creator:

Two suggestions (if you are interested in such things):

• Turn the target depiction 90 degrees and center it.
• Add a "bilateral symmetry" option to take the points from the left half of a shape and use them to replace the points in the right half. Sort of a 2D "lathe" function to make it easier to avoid ships unintentionally turning out lopsided.

Hm. Yeah, I can do that to the target image. I'd want to make that an option, though; I know I plan on, for my TC, using the target image a little differently than normal EVN does. On the left half, we have an image of the ship - and on the right half, I'll have a bunch of indicator lights, threat level meters, jamming level meters, and whatever other information I feel like throwing in.

So, I'll need an options file to store general user settings - like rotation, offset, and size for the target image and maybe even the shipyard image, too.

I agree, it could really use some kind of symmetry function - that's something I'd actually been thinking of doing anyway.

And, come to think of it, I need to let something like shift-click delete vertices, just in case someone doesn't have a multiple button mouse.

Ok, revised version here.

• Changed target graphic - centered & rotated 90ş counterclockwise.
• Added a "mirror" button, which will reflect existing points in the current layer around the vertical axis. Warning: clicking this multiple times is unlikely to generate useful results.
• Added a circle to the grid display, so you can see if you've made a ship that may get oddly clipped when it spins. (To see what I mean by this, imagine a ship that's a square. At 45ş rotation, the corners are going to extend out past the sides of its original edges - protruding into other images in the spin and getting clipped off of where they should be.)

Note: This version is backwards compatible with anything you made using the first version.

I still need to assemble some sort of user specific settings, in case you need different sizes of shipyard or targeting images, for example. Some other day, perhaps.

(edit) Updated version here. Or scroll down. (/edit)

This post has been edited by Wyvern : 17 March 2008 - 09:56 AM

I haven't tested this, but it sounds like an useful little program.
Quick question, is 36 frames the only option? I ask because my bigger ships use more, like 72.

Seems to work alright. I had some trouble getting the buttons to always work but it's probably just me. Made my 'Bridge into an image that dwarfed the Manticore.

Great new version!

Shall I keep prodding you along?

How about an auto-center button to make sure a ship is in the center of the sprite frame? (You could just do the shift automatically when the "render" button is hit, but I'd rather you didn't because sometimes it's fun to experiment with the altered apparent turning characteristics of ships that are drawn fore or aft of their center of rotation.)

@desprez, on Mar 13 2008, 09:59 PM, said in Quick Ship Creator:

I haven't tested this, but it sounds like an useful little program.
Quick question, is 36 frames the only option? I ask because my bigger ships use more, like 72.

Yes; I haven't implemented anything else. The notion of this is to quickly generate placeholder graphics; sure, a big ship needs more images to turn smoothly - but it didn't seem to me that a placeholder graphic needed smooth rotation (or anti-aliased graphics, or animation support...)

That said, the hardest part of implementing higher frame counts is figuring out where to stuff that option into the (already fairly cluttered) UI. I'll toss it on the list of stuff I should look into doing something about.

@ant-iglias-ii, on Mar 13 2008, 10:16 PM, said in Quick Ship Creator:

Seems to work alright. I had some trouble getting the buttons to always work but it's probably just me. Made my 'Bridge into an image that dwarfed the Manticore.

Maybe it's just you - but I'd still like to fix it if I can. Anything more you can tell me? What happens when it doesn't work? Anything you can determine about when it doesn't work? Do you know what version of Java you're using? What operating system? Etcetera.

@dr--trowel, on Mar 13 2008, 10:22 PM, said in Quick Ship Creator:

Shall I keep prodding you along?

Yes. Makes it much more likely that I'll actually do anything.
Hm... Auto-centering is tricky; what is mathematically centered in terms of the farthest out points can easily end up looking off-center. (Consider a ship that's mostly a circle, but has a few gun ports sticking out the front.) I'll poke at it, though; maybe just add some way of moving points in groups instead of one at a time? Dunno.

It was me. I think my touchpad and buttons were interfering with each other.

WOW thanks. Just what I needed!

New version - just two minor fixes.
• Shift-clicking will now delete vertices; this functionality no longer requires a multiple button mouse. Right-clicking still works, too, of course.
• Image scaling fixed; ships drawn within the bounds of the circle should no longer be capable of overlapping into other frames of their spin.

I am also taking the prior versions out of my previous posts, as I don't want people downloading the old version by accident.

Attached File(s)

• QuickShip.zip (17.42K)
  Number of downloads: 18