New Skins

I am egrosphere, a new developer for Star Sonata. In this post, I will show some of the skins that I have been making that will use features from the new version of the skin system (which most likely will be on the live server soon), and will tell you what sort of ships need skins, so that you, the players, can help make them.

Here are 6 of the skins that I have been making that are either finished or almost finished:

Rainbow-imizer, the four irregular shaped parts on the top cycle through all RGB colours over 24 seconds.

Earthforce Police Zebra, with four animated roating red and blue lights.

Zebucart Mark 2, a skin for the various types of Zebucart (such as the normal Zebucart and Oversized Zebucart) that makes them look like the client 1 Zebucart.

Hephaestus Machine Frame

Prawn Frame

Earthforce Police Dreadnought, a skin in which the red and blue cylinders flash, alternating their colours. Similar skins have been made for all of the Earthforce capital ships except the Earthforce Frigate (which has no cylinders).

All of these skins are not final, and may change due to some problems that I found with them (for example, the Rainbow-imizer glow seems to have problems near bright suns, and the Prawn Frame skin might have to have its polygon amount reduced so that it runs easier on many computers). I also have been making some “phasing” subspace ship skins, that add a phasing bubble similar to many of the planets in subspace to the player-obtainable subspace ships, however a problem with how visages are displayed in the client caused the ships to be scaled down to very small sizes inside their phasing bubble, so I will have to wait until this problem is fixed before I can continue making them.

We still need more skins from you however, as many of the ships have no skins currently. I believe that skins are mostly needed for many lower-tech ships (ones that people whose level is under 900 would use as their main ship), and many of the Industrial Freighters, such as the Dark Transport. More specific ships that I believe should have skins aswell are the tech 21 Paxian ships, the Red Photon ships and the ships that players commonly use as slaves. Any kind of skin is welcome to be submitted to the forum post accompanying this blog post, from 3D models (it would be good to keep the model under 3500 triangles, or at least have a model that can be recduced to something around that number), texture replacements, glowmap replacements or a combination of them.

The new version of the skin system due be released soon, allows skins to use the entire visage system, allowing the whole ship to be replaced (for example, a Zebucart could in theory, have a skin that makes it look like a Juxtaposition wormhole, or a sun). This means that in your skin submissions any special effects on your skin that you would like, such as particles or flashing glows can be included, and if your skin is chosen to be in the game, I will try to incoroprate it into the skin. Also, a question that you players may be able to answer regarding skins, is that do you think that there is a need for skins for ships that a player of less than level 50 would use? Or are people upgrading ships too fast at that point for skins to matter to the player?

Also, I have confirmed that people who have their skins chosen to be in the game will also get a free copy of the skin.