So I finally received permission from most of the artists to use their artworks, including the one who created over 200 ship designs. Phew! It looks like I won't have to depend on my non-existent Blender skills anymore for the continuation of the plugin.
Special thanks to UnusualSuspex and calamitySi for allowing me to use their Deviantart designs, along with Ansel Hsiao (Fractalsponge) for allowing his images to be used for non-commercial purposes.
(I'm still waiting for 2 artists, but this only applies to about 10 ships, so I should be good for now)
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Now that permission issues are almost completely behind me, I can now get to work on balancing the already existing ships and outfits. I've put together a spreadsheet that I'm currently using to compare the ships, and I've almost completely standardised outfits (so having outfits such as "Fighter Ion Cannon (Red)" rather than having "NK-1 Ion Cannon" and " SW-4 Ion Cannon", which are identical).
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Another milestone that I have made is deciding upon the era that the galaxy will take place in: the Galactic Civil War (between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance). I have decided to keep ship designs from the Resistance vs First Order conflict and even all of the designs from the Old Republic just in case, but they shouldn't be a major focus. Just for fun, I have even included a "Separatist Holdouts" faction that can be found in the Lola Sayu system (top right corner of the map), that will still contain CIS era ships.
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Version v0.4-alpha is dedicated towards the creation of a fully functioning galaxy map, so the plan is to add in the major systems and their respective planets first, and then slowly add in other minor canon or legends systems. It turns out that the map that I've been using was rather simplified and missed essential systems such as Kashyyyk, so I've already altered my map.txt file to include systems such as these.
To complement these changes in the map, I have altered the colours of the various factions to better reflect their colour schemes, including the alteration of the "Galactic Empire" into an 'Imperial White' colour.
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Although I originally enlarged the planet sprites to several times the normal size of the Vanilla ones, I decided to scale them back down to a more respectable size, mostly to decrease the file size of the plugin. Despite the spread of ships being more compact, and the systems themselves being more crowded in nature, at least it's more consistent with Vanilla Endless Sky.
(Notice the smaller size of Coruscant above ^)
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And that's about it!
Anyway, thanks for reading,
– Ember369
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P.S Though I have started to give outfits sprites as well.
