Modding Help Organic, living ship. 90% done. Needs implementing and testing.

So, ever since this games inception I've had an idea for a custom, organic space ship design. I started working on this before they introduced ship tiers. So I did tiers. Worked on it off and on in my spare time. It was a labor of OCD.

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Tier 5

Tier 6

Tier 7

Tier 8

It's a preliminary step I have to creating a custom race to go with. A human with a symbiotic relationship to this organic ship. The design was chosen specifically to be one-of-a-kind. A ship and it's captain, with no need to justify why they're the only ones of their kind. So I wouldn't feel compelled to create symbiotic villages or whatever.

I've already begun work on the customization options for that, but only art nothing else. Special blocks, armors, weapons, furniture... etc. Right now I'd like to just get this implemented as a ship mod to test how it feels to learn the process and tools.

The ships design was made with a few things in mind. A centrally located teleporter, positioned slight higher so you can simply fall towards most locations in the ship. All early game ships have layouts that can be traversed with single jumps. Although the ship is shaped in a very inefficient way, (no simple cube rooms here) there's lots of opportunities to use platforms to divide the space up in creative ways. Also, some rooms tend to expand incrementally. Leaving the player with awkward opportunities to reposition their furniture. There's a few places where previously solid floors become a room expansion in the next ship Tier. However, anytime this happens, the floor tends to look more flesh-y, and less bone-y. Rarely does a flesh floor stay in the some place in the next Tier. There's a few places in Tier 8, outside of that. If you see a fleshy floor, consider it temporary.

I also have a few questions.
-Is it possible to do transparency? Specifically I've done these great big rainbow oil-slick looking windows. I'd really like them to be functionally transparent. It seems like some of the glass in the default ships has transparency.
-Would I be able to animate the rainbow windows in a color cycle?
-Is it possible to place fluid as a part of a ship upgrade? Like filling the new section of a ship with a liquid of some type, forcing the player to drain it out when they open it up.
-Is it possible to create a ship element that is always in the foreground? Specifically, covers the player as though they're behind it?

I also have a few pre-emptive answers to questions you might have.
-The black outline that separates the interior from the exterior. This is most visible in the window rooms. This outline won't be present in the final version, it's just a helpful guide for me while I worked. I left it there just to give a precise demonstration of where the interior is on those rounded bits.
-I will do a default background wall that covers up the interior in most places. But that's for later.
-I don't have a SAIL design yet, especially since my old design for the tech-statation (wow it's not even the tech station anymore is it?) is based on the original version. The one that had the swirling circles.

 

I love this. It reminds me of the Flood from the Halo series. If they had deep space travel ships, this is what it would be, a living, growing ship. Its awesome. I can't answer any of your questions for you except that I would think you could place fluid in your ship upgrades, should technically be able to place any object.

An idea I have for your S.A.I.L. design would be instead of a computer A.I. that you interact with, it be with the ship itself, as it is a living creature.

 

You kinda answered your own question.

Nope, ships can't be animated. Objects can, though.

Very likely yes.

Ship part? No. Object? Yes.

Also, you'll need to separate the sprites in your images to make things easier to mod in. And you should probably not use photobucket. Imgur is a far better choice.

 

So I'm working on implementing this ship.

I have a custom race. (at the moment it's all human assets, copied over) I've got that working, in that I can select them, customize them. Once I go to start the game...
If I try and play the starting mission, it hangs up for a long time. Then gives me an error message and kicks me back to the start menu.
If I skip the starting mission, it immediately gives me the same error message and kicks me back to the start menu.

Error message "You were disconnected from the server for the following reason: Client ship world has errored."

I'm trying to figure this out. If it was an error with my ship T0blocks.png, blockKey.config, or T0.structure file I could understand the latter error. But the start mission, why would that be effected. So it's gotta be a broader error. I have no idea what I'm missing. I've tried to copy and edit existing race mods, maybe I mucked something up. I'm really lost.

 

Is this mod still being developed? It looks super cool.