How about a mix of brown bagging paper, newspaper, crumpled up scrap paper and magazine clippings?

If you like the Lint field Desprez, I'll look around for other pieces of trash to scan for more debris... :laugh:

How about recycling bins and paper shredders as space monsters?

(Yeah, I know -- too 3D. Still....)

Or the dog that ate your homework? :laugh:

Do you think it would be possible to work in an airship style... uhh... ship? Or something with helium balloons.

@buffalo-the-kid, on Mar 13 2008, 05:20 AM, said in Paper TC - New Idea:

Do you think it would be possible to work in an airship style... uhh... ship? Or something with helium balloons.

Um. Not real sure.
So far all the ships are drawn showing the top. Balloons are going to be rather nondescript from this angle.
I could do a side view, but the resulting spin looks very odd when it is moving in different directions.
It could be done in rendered perspective similar to nova ships, but drawn. I'd actually considered making one faction have perspective ships, but the amount of graphic work necessary to do that is prohibitive.
Now I'll probably add something like that as a spob. A non-top view drawing works fine for these. A floating station, if you will. Theme-wise, this works well for the steam punk guys.
At any rate, one of the steam punk faction ships resembles a zeppelin shape, well, sort of...

Behold, the Poitevin!
(these guys like to name their ships after horse breeds.)
Poitevin.gif (22.91K)
Number of downloads: 41
Sheesh. I swear, the boarder they added to reduce the image size ends up making the thing larger that it would have been in the first place.

very nice

as for nebulas, you could try to take a picture of an oilslick, or something like that...

I think lint makes more sense in this paper universe than oilslicks...

What about a pen, or an inkwell?

That's the shipyard

Hmm...

Tracing or graph paper?

Tracing and graph paper can be different ship building materials, depending on tech level... Lint could be alien tech...

Eraser guns? White-out blasters?

An ink spill isn't a bad idea.

Different papers are already what the ships are drawn on.
Scraps are asteroids.

This will be more noticeable with some factions over others. The graph paper is currently hard to make out on the Grapen ships, but will be more noticeable on outfit picts and spobs.
Seriously considering putting the steam punk guys on some kind of parchment or otherwise aged paper.

Development update:
The steam punk guys now have an outfit commodity called Salvaged Parts.
These parts can be plundered from almost every other disable ship, and are sold for profit. I might work out something where these items can also be converted into something, but I'm not sure what yet. Possibly an abortable mission to repair the hull.

Also, these guys are survivors and fighters, so they get more crew member points.

Begun work on colored marker ships. These are to look like a younger hand drew them. I guess I'm calling them Markara.
I made military ships in blue, freighters in green, and customizable civilian ships orange. The orange ships can be made into cargo or warships, where as the others are more suited to their color roles.
Because of these distinct color roles, I've decided to make Markara society vary classed based. Everything has it's place.
Additionally, One of the hostile factions has roots with ancient Markara, as can be evidenced by the fact that they too are drawn in marker. But it's big black permanent marker on cardboard.

Here's what the ships look like on a parchment-like paper. Compare to an older graphic.

I think it works well. You guys like?

Old_ship.gif (19.16K)
Number of downloads: 29 Holsteiner.gif (23.51K)
Number of downloads: 42
The Holsteiner Battlecruiser, before and after.

The parchemnt fits to much better. Parchment++

I like the concept of using parchment (or maybe just old, yellowed paper), but I guess I'm not that fond of the color cast it gives to the ship. Play with different blending modes?

You'll have to remember that it looks different when it's against an almost completely black screen. Your irises dilate more and it ends up looking lighter.
My original parchment was lighter. this one I found it looked a bit muddy normally, but in-game looked better.

Why not make the background colour white to match the paper?

@lnsu, on Mar 15 2008, 12:44 AM, said in Paper TC - New Idea:

Why not make the background colour white to match the paper?

Number of reasons.

1. Stars become invisible, has to do with the fact that they are transparent. You can't make stars darker than the background.
2. Without stars, it's very hard to navigate as you have no motion reference. Try it!
3. I tried to make the background look like lined paper, but this gave sub-par results. Also led to performance issues, and some severe system building constraints.

Not relevant, but running lights and engine glows will not show either. Same problem as the stars.

This post has been edited by Desprez : 16 March 2008 - 05:43 AM