Ships Parts for Everybody

[galagagalaxian]

Oct 23, 2016 2:56:50 GMT -6 ccip said:

Meanwhile, I've been working on a brand new project! Might take me a bit to get it ready... and I will likely start a new thread for it as it's not designed to be compatible with the current parts etc., but here's a preview of what I'm going for:

Hot damn! this is brilliant! I like the idea of using pieces from actual Brassey's diagrams, but how big of a sample size do you have? Maybe it'd be "easier" to just draw ship pieces that emulate their style. Either way, I love it. It very much fits the Jane's/Brassey's style of the ship display too.

[ccip]

Glad you guys like it

And I have a big sample - archive.org had scans of the 1902, 1912, 1920 and 1923 editions which I'm using. There is a fair bit of "redrawing" going on anyway, however - because when you're working with this few pixels, you end up having to fix practically everything by hand. Some shapes and lines have to be changed a bit because they're just too complex for the tiny RTW scale. So it's a bit of a mix! But there's no lack of samples, that's for sure.

It'll take me a few more days of work to get anything out since all the parts have to be done from scratch; I have a semi-decent collection of masts, but I haven't even started on cruiser or DD hulls, guns are half-done, and superstructures and accessories are barely started at all. But it's coming along - here's another quick one:

[galagagalaxian]

That fits pretty well for that template. I think this is one of the cooler things about it. Someone could easily make a handful of profile pictures that match the various templates the AI uses, if they wish to have profile pictures for other nations.

Someone really ambitious could even make slight changes for each nation's style (US with cage masts, the French's interesting early funnel exhaust tips, etc).

[archelaos]

Great work ccip! I really like the look (esp as I use those images available on wiki to design superstructures on my ships)

How much time does it take to make those pics compared to the ones we have now? I find I need 2-3 hours to produce good looking side views for big ships and this is way too long to finish all of mine designs, not to mention AI ones...

[galagagalaxian]

These will undoubtedly be faster because (assuming you're like me) you don't have to worry about fine details like portholes, lifeboats, wakes, funnel smoke, minor shading, all the other little greebles that many of the super detailed ships posted in this thread are made of.

If you're someone who just throws the basic stuff together it'll probably be a similar amount of time, but, assuming you like the style, produced a better look for that amount of effort.

[ccip]

Yeah, that was actually one of my main motivations! I originally wanted to have AI ship profiles, and then quickly realized that at any level of detail, that was really labour-intensive... Then one thing led to another, and here we are!

I think the best way to do nationalities is actually just a separate "set" for each - in fact the 3 sets I'm working on were originally something along those lines, but I figured it was going to be too much. I am trying to include a set of accessories etc. that cover all the nations though!



Now there is an odd one! This set isn't really designed for dreadnoughts, thus the sparse armor coverage compared to what you'd expect. But I'm surprised - somehow the turrets even manage to mostly align here. Not counting the casemates (which all have to be placed by hand unfortunately), I only had to place 2 masts and 5 bits of superstructure here after generating the ship, so it's pretty low-maintenance!

[galagagalaxian]

I'm actually pretty ok with placing casemates by hand, given I tend to rearrange them vs whats shown on the top-down view anyways.

For your comment about the turrets aligning, do you mean the barbettes? Are you not doing those as a separate piece or as part of the turret graphic?

[ccip]

Oct 25, 2016 14:16:03 GMT -6 galagagalaxian said:

For your comment about the turrets aligning, do you mean the barbettes? Are you not doing those as a separate piece or as part of the turret graphic?

They're one piece with the turret - I've worked out a compromise where they go down to the main belt/deck level and, in most situations, blend in. I'll include separate barbette pieces too so you'll be able to "fix" them if need be. But they do seem to align pretty well on average!


Here's one that's aligned well with the belt/deck edges from the start:




And here's one that's a little less so, but should be easily fixable with just plopping a barbette piece to connect it later:

[ccip]

Progress for today







(the text labels are made up of accessories as well - might be a little overkill though, considering most of that info is already on the ship screen, but why not!)

[garrisonchisholm]

that is Amazing. This should be stock as well. Two tabs, one for a "real" pic that we piece together, and one for the line drawing.

[axe99]

That's really impressive ccip, great work .

[jwsmith26]

Oct 26, 2016 8:12:40 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

that is Amazing. This should be stock as well. Two tabs, one for a "real" pic that we piece together, and one for the line drawing.

It would be great to see this included organically in the game, but for the RTW team using these images would probably cause some copyright issues. That's not a big deal for the end user, but for a company making profit (what little there is ;-) it could be an issue. Providing some level of support for using these types of images, without actually including them in the game, would probably be acceptable. 

[galagagalaxian]

Well, you could always create similar ship components from scratch.

[ccip]

Oct 27, 2016 11:38:56 GMT -6 jwsmith26 said:

Oct 26, 2016 8:12:40 GMT -6 garrisonchisholm said:

that is Amazing. This should be stock as well. Two tabs, one for a "real" pic that we piece together, and one for the line drawing.

It would be great to see this included organically in the game, but for the RTW team using these images would probably cause some copyright issues. That's not a big deal for the end user, but for a company making profit (what little there is ;-) it could be an issue. Providing some level of support for using these types of images, without actually including them in the game, would probably be acceptable. 

Actually, I've looked into this, and this should not be a problem - all the sources I used (which are from archive.org) are public-domain. In fact the reason my latest source is the 1923 annual is that it's the cutoff publication date for public domain in the US right now. They're public domain in Britain as well from what I was able to gather.

I also shouldn't underplay my own input into these either, because as I said, a very large part of it had to be redrawn/recombined to the point of being only "kind of like" the original. And as I've been going further into this, I'm going more and more down the path that galagagalaxian suggested, because I find that drawing small parts from scratch makes for much better results. Big, simple shapes copy over well, but small stuff with so many pixels to work with is really hard to shrink down. Ironically, some of the smallest parts have been taking me the longest time to do!

I'll check with Fredrik if he's interested, after these are in a ready form
And if there's still concerns, well, I can always redraw some of the parts that are actually direct copies!

[galagagalaxian]

Well, I'm certainly looking forward to it. It'll let me create an even better (and more period appropriate) version of the "Goon's Warships Annual" pages I made for a Let's play/AAR I'm writing on the Something Awful forums (several people in the RtW thread there also think this stuff is amazing and have loved the other stuff put out in this thread so Nunos, CCIP, others, rest assured, your effort is being enjoyed).
 
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