Let's start with the screenies, because who doesn't love a screenshot or two:
The station upgrade went pretty well.
Also in this pack is a new planet texture (with city lights) for Veisin (G6). Although in hindsight, given Veisin is a TL2 agricultural world, I might have put too many lights on it! Let me know.
The ship upgrades were not quite as successful I think. Most of them probably land in the "ok" bucket now, and at least don't look like they're from another game when put alongside Griff's core models. (The really observant among you might even recognise the original Griff models I
1. The Gunship model had some missing textures on some faces (so they just showed as black when displayed in game), and some faces stretched the texture in really unhelpful ways, making the job of successfully applying a new texture to it way too hard. In the end I gave up on the Gunship model, and switched to using the Raider model instead. The Gunship design was based on the Raider anyway (in lore as well as code), so it wasn't a complete fail, and the Raider model and textures were much easier to work with. So, the Gunship is essentially the Raider with a slightly different texture and a bunch of plasma turrets, so it should be clear which is which.
2. When it comes to the Trader, however, the news wasn't as good. The way the model works with the texture makes it almost impossible to work with. It's duplicated on both sides of the ship, so it's hard to apply unique features, and it's also stretched in a bunch of places, which again makes it almost impossible to work with. In the end I gave up - I've given it a spruce up, but it really doesn't have the same quality as the other ships. I've left it in the package, but I've turned off all the roles so it won't spawn anywhere. I'll leave it for some future person to fix this one up.
General notes: There were a bunch of custom AI's in the original package, some of which didn't appear to be used, or called other AI's that weren't part of this pack, and weren't in the standard Oolite install. And the station AI has some bugs in it that essentially prevent the player from being tagged as an offender, even if you're sitting right outside and shooting the station. So, rather than try to bug fix these AI's, I've switched them all to use standard Oolite AI's. I've left all the AI's in the package, so if someone wants to dig around in the code and (say) fix the station AI, please feel free. I'd be happy to re-release this with the custom AI later.
I've limited the places where the ships will spawn. You will only see them in G6, and the player-flyable ships can only be purchased at the Oodulldoff station in Veisin. With the station, it won't show up on your space compass initially. You'll have to dock with the station first, and accept the docking conditions, after which the station will include a beacon to help you navigate to it. I've also moved the station from it's original position, moving it to be more out of the way, so hopefully there will be a sense of discovery when you find it.
Anyway, enough with the preamble: here's the download link: Draven_2.0.oxz (approx 35mb)
There will probably be some updates to sort out various teething issues (there will almost certainly be a missing semi-colon somewhere that will upset Mac computers), but once all that is sorted I'll add it to the manager.
Comments (as always) are welcome.
