Subset Games Forum

I know a lot of people are asking for a shipbuilder but it's going to be quite a ways down the road given how much the developers already have on their plate. So I made my own! This is basically a ship paperdoll you can use to assemble your own room designs without having to do any heavy modding. All you need in order to use it is an image editor capable of copy pasting with transparency. Basically anything, I used Paint to make this.

Here are the ships, notice the grid of green dots? This matches the exact same grid used by the ships in game to plot out the rooms. You don't need to stick to it but it makes things easier. The Red Tail is a little different because it has a room running down the spine of the ship instead of a dividing wall like the Kestrel does.




And here are the rooms. To make a ship just copy and paste the room you want to place down. Make sure you set your program to paste the white background as transparent. Line up the dots on the room so that they match the dots on the grid. Once you have placed all of the rooms you can add doors the exact same way. You'll notice that I added a lot of shapes that don't exist in the game. Particularly rooms with an odd number of tiles. I thought it would be interesting to have them because it becomes possible for crew standing in a room to not see the entire space. This would stop boarders from all ganging up on the same target. Or make a medbay that can fit 5 people instead of 3.

Once the doors are in it's time to mark rooms. I included the room icons so you can denote which room is which. I made a couple extra just for fun.



Here is the Kestrel I made. In retrospect putting the Oxygen system so far away from the medbay was probably a bad idea! Have fun.

So is there a way to put any of this in game? Still, pretty good idea.

Fun Idea to play around with but with the way the rooms are set up in the gamefiles oddshaped rooms are impossible

Do you not have to edit some weird file by unpacking the data.dat and use loads of X Y Z co-ordinates to move the rooms

Nice design, but I'd rather place the bridge somewhere near the front and central. Will you get the layouts for the other ships (The Torus, etc.)

madattak9 wrote:So is there a way to put any of this in game? Still, pretty good idea.

Not directly no. But you can make a design using "stock" parts and mod that it into the game.

Natalie wrote:Fun Idea to play around with but with the way the rooms are set up in the gamefiles oddshaped rooms are impossible

Bummer, FTL needs more Tetris! It would certainly make way for some neat ship designs.

louistodd wrote:Do you not have to edit some weird file by unpacking the data.dat and use loads of X Y Z co-ordinates to move the rooms

XML? Yeah all that stuff just flies right over my head. Hopefully we will get a shipbuilder in the game at some point. It would probably look a lot like this.

Raglflagl wrote:Nice design, but I'd rather place the bridge somewhere near the front and central. Will you get the layouts for the other ships (The Torus, etc.)

Sure if people want me to I can draw up the other floor maps. I'd love to see what designs you guys can come up with.

Here is a Red Tail design I made. Not the most practical configuration I gotta say, but I went into it with the objective of having zero 4x4 spaces and to show off those cyan stripes as much as I could. I think it turned out pretty well.

I'm writing something like this in GML that automatically generates the necessary .txt, .xml, and blueprint block code. I've hit a snag due to how pixel offsetting seems to work. My understanding was that both the image offset (in, say, kestral.txt) and the grid x/y offset which controls where your rooms are placed would have the same origin. However, it seems where you place the your topmost and leftmost room affects how your image is offset. Very frustrating.

Anyway, if anyone can point me to resources on this topic I could get this program out faster. Right now, all it is good for is generating the code for rooms (but not doors) and most of the blueprint xml block.

Who would EVER need a med-bay that big, anyway? Hehe.

Zaffre wrote:Who would EVER need a med-bay that big, anyway? Hehe.

You can never have a big enough med bay!

Tried another Red-Tail design. This time I attempted to maximize the usage of available space. When you have access to advanced room shapes it can be surprising how much area of a ship you can cover. The ship is designed to be a nightmare for boarders. Think I succeeded?

Tamren wrote: Hopefully we will get a shipbuilder in the game at some point. It would probably look a lot like this.

As I recall Justin and Matthew tried to make a shipbuilder, found it wasn't any fun, and decided against it.

It was too likely to make a build that couldn't finish the game and I think they figured everyone would soon use an optimal build that was shared on the internet. There would ever only be one build (assuming some kind of point allocation system) so what would be the point of the builder?