Jesus tittyfucking Christ, Angry. You're certifiable, you know that?
I probably am, but maybe not as certifiable as you imagine.
And this is coming from me after I've built something like my fifth skull castle. I guess I should be thankful. You've effectively raised the bar enough that I can finally stop trying.
Maybe don't thank me so quickly, depending on how legitimate you like your game.
I've looked into it, and you can apparently build (out of blocks) a ship entirely with modding. This entails writing a JSON file linking materials+objects to colors, and then drawing a PNG with all the blocks you want. Problem is, if you want, say, objects in front of walls or materials stacked on different materials, that has to be a different color. If you're making something that isn't terribly simple, you'd imagine it'd get pretty tedious to specify colors for all the material+material and material+object combinations, let alone actually writing each one up in JSON.
Suppose, instead, that you wrote one text file (specifying all the
uncombined colors) and drew
two PNGs. What my code currently does, is it reads in these three files and produces an alpha-blended PNG and new JSON with all those tedious combinations automatically generated. Then, you just drop those two files into a ship mod in the appropriate place(s).
This is actually how I made my big castle ship. It's not a tedium-free workflow--there's still a lot of business about choosing (base) colors and designing the thing, along with general image bookkeeping (I pretty much had to use GIMP's layer groups to keep it all straight)--but it's much less tedious than the alternatives for something of this size.
Also: in my defense, I'd been hearing about an imminent wipe (which appears, now, to not be so imminent as I thought) and did actually do a fair bit of work on it legitimately before changing method.
The code's available, if anyone wants it, though I warn that it's not in a very usable state. Oh, it works--that's not the problem. The problem is that it doesn't have an interface yet; currently, to use it you'd import my code as a module in a Python interpreter and call the functions manually. This is fine for me, but I gather that real actual people tend to want some kind of UI. I'd planned to grow it into a proper script (with nice arguments, usage, --help, and everything) to be run from a proper shell, but since Windows users don't really have one I get that most people would probably want a GUI.
I'm usually allergic to writing GUI code, but I'll do it if anyone here wants to use this (I could probably use the refresher, and I've been meaning to work with Qt anyway). If anyone just wants what I've written, I'll be happy to hand it over with something permissive slapped on it--after a hurried clean-up, in a vain attempt to look like a better programmer than I am.
Also, I love that we've been using the same password for everything for something like fifteen years. I didn't even have to check the thread.
Only password I knew was for the old Lust forum, which it appears not to be.
I'd appreciate it if someone could PM it to me, if you'll tolerate a filthy cheater such as myself among you.
