Ship Skins

It would be cool if ships could have skins. Player customizable please.

And before anyone says "levelgen" no. Please, I just want to stick a "Customize Ship" button on the menu.

Anyway, back to the skins. It could make Bitfighter cooler. Which would help in getting players and pleasing existing ones. A practical purpose.

At question is how ship skins would look? I think drawing a smiling shark on a ship is the first step to examining this.

[watusimoto]

My first skin would be a totally black ship, or perhaps one that made it look like my ship was centered off to the edge a little, just to make it harder to kill me!

[bobdaduck]

I DON'T EVEN KNOW

sharkskins.jpg

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1705

This idea has been gone over before and the answer is always a big fat no.

I'm vehemently opposed to ship shapes, but I don't know, skins aren't too crazy IMO. You'd have to consider making them be visible by just the client or by everyone; with the latter you'd run into potential cheating issues as wat described.

How hard would it be to compile the game using your own sprites?

I don't know if I'd be thrilled about a shark on my ship or something... but I do like the idea of artistic variations of the classic ship. Futuristic, industrial, spy ship, etc.

Sky_lark, extremely easy, I have done this many times
shipShapes.h I believe? It will only be on your client though :/

download/file.php?id=350&mode=view

One of the built in *secret* ship shapes

That is crazy. You need to enlighten me about how to do that as well as make those green alien thingies

Haha, those were modified bouncers, well you would need the dev tools and compile yourself, all the info you need is at http://bitfighter.org/wiki/index.php/GCI_Student_Bootstrap

[watusimoto]

Bitfighter is a complicated system, but raptor and kaen have done *a lot* to make it easy to build on multiple systems. It's not quite one-click, but it's about as close as it can be.

[Skybax]

Two clicks?

[kaen]

On windows from a stock machine I think it's three downloads, two installs, and seven clicks.

On a stock Debian install you put this into your terminal:

  Code:

wget -O- https://gist.github.com/kaen/6393623/raw | sh

On windows from a stock machine I think it's three downloads, two installs, and seven clicks.

That's way too much work, kaen. Can I just do it in two downloads, one install, and four clicks?

I just went through the hassle to get it on Windows. The only thing to remember is to download "Visual Studio for Desktop" and not "Visual Studio"

[Skybax]

I tried compiling it but something went wrong and I got stuck. I don't remember what it was. I think Mecurial wouldn't recognized that I had installed Python.

Skybax, it's normal You need to add Python to your path. Copy the Python directory path (Normally C:\Python27) and go to Control Panel\System and Security\System, then click on the Advanced system settings button. Then click on the Environment Variables, and find the Path variable in the System variables. Click on it, then click on Edit, and in the variable value, add a semi-colon (;) and paste the copied Python path (don't add a space ore anything). Ok, Apply etc out of the Windows, and you are all set to get Bitfighter!

[Skybax]

Ehhh... I did that, but Mercurial still hates me.

Ok then, you can get the code without mercurial anyway
https://bitfighter.googlecode.com/files/bitfighter-019.tar.gz

[Skybax]

Sooooo what do I do with that?

Also, when I open it up, WinRar says it's corrupt, but it still opens..

[watusimoto]

Since it appears you are using Windows (why else would you be uncompressing with WinRar?), you need to uncompress everything twice -- once to get it out of the gzip archive, once to extract it from the tar archive. Put it into a folder where you want to build.

For the next step you need to install cmake and have MS VisualStudio Desktop Express (or something like that, it keeps changing). VS is free.

Open a cmd window and navigate to the bitfighter build folder, type "cmake ..", and step away from your computer to a safe distance, ideally behind a protective blast shield.

From the iron forge of cmake will emerge a bitfighter VS "solution" (extension .sln, I think), which you can open with VisualStudio. (It may upgrade the solution, depending on which version of VS you have.)

Then you are ready to build. Select Build All from the menus, and away you go. (You can speed the process a little by selecting the "bitfighter" project in the left-most pane, do whatever you need to do to make it bold (Alt-P-A does the trick for me), and press F8 to start building.)

Good luck!

^^

[Skybax]

And how does this help me change the shipShape?

Well, when you are done all of this, check out the file shipShapes.h in Visual Studio. You can modify any shape, or in shipShapes.cpp, you can select one of the 4 shapes (by typing the one you want as the first one)

problem with this is where would the health gauge go now ?

Yeah, the ship shapes have to be well designed, but the other ship shapes already programmed in are good