RELEASED Avali (Triage) 1.11.0

Odd, it's not letting me post updates.

Edit: It's not actively preventing, it's just... I hit send, it LOOKS like it went through, but then I go in and check and nope.

 

This is, hopefully, what this thing will look like when it's done. hopefully.

 

I dunno if you're looking for feedback and I'm no artist, but it looks a bit blocky in that it's essentially a rectangle, particularly with that flat part at the back. What if you made the engines bigger to break up the outline?

 

i might do that actually. and maybe make them a bit less boxy. maybe give them a rounder shape and give them a few more bits so that they dont look so boring.

 

Beings yer using the Aerogel blade design with the ship, maybe some decorative blades on the top ridge as well? Sure, not quite as useful per-se for a military ship, but thematics of the creaft could help. Unless doing so would make the hitbox wonky, I'm not sure how Starbound does those, and if they take the whole sprite...

 

i'm honestly still not sure how starbound does the hit box either. i think you can set the collision poly in the vehicle file but i haven't actually looked into that.

 

Those VTOL engines are both too small, and look like someone just cut out cardboard and painted it to look convincing (AKA, it's oddly flat compared to the front).

The grey underside should probably be cleaved off, to be a rough diagonal from the bottom front to the upper back, while still looking like it's capable of carrying something.

 

Yeah, i've since made the engines a bit bigger, shaded them so that they dont look like shoddily painted cardboard cutouts, and made the alignment on them better. as for the dark grey bit at the bottom, unfortunately it has to be that bulky in order to fit the passengers. i tried cutting some of it away, but then the guy in the rear most passenger seat has his tail(assuming he's an avali, and has a tail) sticking out through the ship. if i could figure out a way to make the passengers sit backwards, like i had originally planned, then i could definitely make that look better.

 

Here's the ship with the redone thrusters. this is an ingame shot too, so the door is missing.still thinking about how i'm going to do that. also i'm still tinkering with the engines and getting them to rotate to the right angles as you fly.


Well, i got the engine pods to rotate correctly, now i'm just working on the door. and thinking i might add a searchlight of some kind.

 

If you want searchlights, my suggestion is making them static connections to the dropship's rear. Possibly one under the passenger cab pointed forward, and one on the tailbase backwards.

 

i was looking into making one that sat behind the gun and followed the same aim axis, but i couldnt get it to work. the game doesnt seem to like having light sources that rotate. either that or i have no idea what i'm doing and it just crashed because of that. i think i'll just skip the headlights and tell people to light up their landing pads.

 

What a shame. Hopefully whenever Chucklefish releases new, fancier vehicles that aren't just hoverbikes they'll make those possible.

 

actually maybe i will add headlights of some kind. just fixed ones attached to the hull though. also maybe landing gear. it looks silly to have your ship balancing on a point that's very close to the nose when it's landed.

 

But you can wave a flashlight around all day and the game is okay with it.

Though it does seem odd to have a dropship with a spotlight but no cockpit canopy, unless the light is just for shining in people's eyes.

You mean like this?

 

It was probably me doing something wrong then. also you make a good point. i was thinking they would be there so that the people being dropped off could see where they were going, but they probably all have flashlights, so duck it. no headlights. and yes, it is quite a lot like that, only without the wings.

 

I was mostly being silly. Floodlights don't make sense for Avali, but we the players are humans. We do need light, so if you think floodlights or headlights would be a good thing to have, throw them in. It's hardly the first aspect of the Avali that is designed with us in mind--they weep tears when upset, which is largely unique to humans and thought to be a visual social gesture. It doesn't make any sense from an evolutionary standpoint, but makes it easier for us to work with them.

 

yeah, but headlights are also proving to be rather difficult to get working. plus i can just put a lot of lights in my landing zone.

on another note, i can probably use the stuff i've learned from this to make an airplane.

 

it's still not letting me post a resource update. Hang on, I've got this.

UPDATE
Download link: https://github.com/Fevix/Avali/archive/2.4.1.zip

There. That works.

 

Watch, in a few days this thread'll be spammed by every single time I've tried to get the update to try to go through.

 

"They said the update would be arriving soon. We watched the landing zone for hours, but nothing showed up. After a few hours, we began to worry. Did the update lose its way? Was there an accident? We had no way of knowing. All we could do was watch, wait, and pray that it would come soon. Then, on the morning of the fourth day after it should have arrived, it appeared on the horizon. Then another appeared. And another. They kept coming into view, one after another, until they darkened the sky. There were so many of them. As they approached, they began to collide with one another, fighting for who would reach the landing zone first. The struggle in the skies was violent, with update crashing into update, their mutual destruction assured. Many were injured in the rain of twisted metal and flaming wreckage. Those among us who sought shelter quickly got away relatively unscathed. Others had been injured, with wounds ranging from light scratches to broken limbs. The bound humans, who we were keeping next to the landing zone in a crudely constructed cardboard shelter, as we had no idea what to do with them, well... Their fate is, for the moment, unknown. I thought I saw someone running towards the box, but I never saw what happened. The wreckage started crashing down, fiery and thick in that moment. After that, I hid in the nearest tent with my pack, and so many others, the nanocanvas structure protecting us all as the able bodied among us went about tending to the wounded. After what felt like ages, when the cacophony stopped, we peeked outside. The ground had been baptized in burning wreckage, and the landing zone was all but buried. The cardboard shelter containing the humans was nowhere to be seen. A lone, surviving update had weathered the storm, and was sitting perched atop a mountain of it's fallen brethren. We stepped out of our hiding places, slowly picking our way across the fields of smoldering steel, to see what the update had brought for us this time. It was, disappointingly, not a lot. A few chips to install in our nanolooms, enabling them to make normal cloth and a few bits of clothing that didn't fit very well, and some rifles that, if anything, seemed worse than the ones we already had. It was hardly worth all the work it would take to clean this mess up." --Excerpt from personal log of Nezi, one of the workers in charge of unloading updates.