[RELEASE] Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser

[Shipbuilder]

The GalTech Industries Corporation proudly announces the release of their second ship off their production lines - The Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser.

Note - This OXP requires BigShips OXP produced by Thargoid and Eric Walch to also be installed (A copy is included in this OXP for convenience).



Download it here:
https://www.box.com/s/545bdb5a4e543049e61f

[Duggan]

A lovely ship, shame its NPC , I'd have liked one day (In the fantasy side of my brain) to have been the Captain of the Enterprise NCC 1701-A

[Shipbuilder]

Duggan - Thanks always good to get positive feedback (Or negative feedback if constructive!!)

I do have a smaller dockable, (player), version that I have been using for my own amusement and for play testing. I have not released it simply because the ship is intended to be a capital ship and thought that perhaps it would look at little out of scale, may unbalance the game due to its speed and energy levels and I have no idea what sort of asking price it would have !

That said if there is some interest in a player version from the forum I would be happy to tweak the smaller version I have and release it either as a separate OXP with a different name or within a revised version of this OXP (After all the beauty of Oolite is that you can tailor the game to your own personal preferences by installing only the OXP you want).

Duggan - In the meantime PM me if you would like an unofficial release of the player version (Also let me know if you would only want it in game as a player ship or if you would also like it to appear as a NPC ship).

[armadillozenith]

The GalTech Industries Corporation proudly announces the release of their second ship off their production lines - The Constitution Class Heavy Cruiser.

That... is almost unbelievable!
Superb.

Funnily enough I was just thinking yesterday that some shuttlecraft/pods/Delta flier would look neat. Those would be more in player size and price range, maybe?

(Megabonus if they could dock with your capital ship!)

[Amaranth]

Wow, beautiful. Awesome job

[Wildeblood]

<string>This is a Ferderation Starship. I command you to surrender</string>

[Shipbuilder]

Thanks guys glad you like it.

<string>This is a Ferderation Starship. I command you to surrender</string>

Good spot Wildeblood - I'll correct the typo and reissue a updated version later today.

[Wildeblood]

On a more serious note, I thought the texture file looked a bit suspect. The "NCC 1701" text looked fuzzy, as though the texture had been created at a lower resolution and scaled up, rather than created large and scaled down for final release...?

[Smivs]

Picking up on Wildeblood's comment, and having now downloaded and studied the OXP, some observations.
Firstly you should not have to make the diffuse_map that big! A 2048x2048px image should give you all the detail you need, but as Wildeblood suggested you might want to make the 'master' bigger to get the fidelity of detail, and then reduce it. Currently your image file is physically huge, but with very poor definition.
Oolite's own in-built textures are 512x512px but they are fairly basic, so 1024x1024px or 2048x2048px are good sizes and these won't over-tax computers with limited graphics abilities.
Big files are un-desirable for many reasons. They obviously take longer to download, and for those with a weak connection or a tight download limit they may not be worth downloading at all.
Keep the image relatively as small as you reasonably can (consider 2048x2048px the maximum for normal use), and make sure the file is as small as possible. For instance you can remove the alpha channel which is often redundant (I don't think yours uses it for anything) which will reduce your file from 7.6MB to 6.7MB. This is still huge, but the saving of nearly 1MB is worthwhile.
There is no need to add highlighting and shading to the image as Oolite will add shade etc depending on the position of the sun, and again all this (un-necessary) detail is making the file bigger than it needs to be and may cause the ship to look strange in-game. Imagine the sunlight falling on one of the shaded sides. This will leave the game trying to light the shadows and shade the brighter parts!
Also, it is not normally considered good practice to 'burn-in' lighting detail such as you have done with the spotlighting. It won't look natural, and of course once there it is very hard to remove or alter. This is best handled by an emission_map, which will give a natural look to spotlighting. I have discussed this here on the screenshots thread.
Another little trick I use is to make the 'background' (ie the un-used parts of the image file) black as plain black is very un-demanding and consists of virtually no 'data', and therefore keeps the image file size as low as possible.

[Shipbuilder]

Smivs – I appreciate your feedback, I am still very much in the learning process, so any suggestions to improve are always welcome.
I will look in to your suggestions and definitely look to incorporate them within future OXPs (and perhaps a later revised release of this oxp at some stage).

[Smivs]

Ha, yes it's certainlty an organic process, is learning this stuff. I look back at some of my early work and wince! And don't worry about re-releases as you learn more and improve things...it just gives the community a better product.
Why do you think my shipset is on version 4.something now? Each 'main version' release had a fundamental improvement over the previous one, caused by my learning something new or new features becoming available within the game.
You've done a blinding job on the model, and the details will catch up as you learn more.

[BuggyBY]

Funnily enough I was just thinking yesterday that some shuttlecraft/pods/Delta flier would look neat. Those would be more in player size and price range, maybe?

(Megabonus if they could dock with your capital ship!)

I had been wondering myself what kind of Oolite stats a Star Trek shuttlecraft would have. Most likely 0TC in cargo, but what about speed etc?

[Shipbuilder]

I had been wondering myself what kind of Oolite stats a Star Trek shuttlecraft would have. Most likely 0TC in cargo, but what about speed etc?

I'm not too sure though in my view you may have very limited cargo capacity say 1T, low speed of something in the region of 0.10 to 0.15, no witchspace capability, missiles of lasers but be equipped with a ECM system.

[Shipbuilder]

Maik - Would you mind puting this oxp on the Wiki ?

[Rese249er]

Now I have Captains James T. Kirk, Han Solo, and Malcolm Reynolds in my Ooniverse. Things just went sideways.