[MOD] Distant Worlds Universe Refreshed 1.0 -- 1,400+ portraits, 1,400+ new ships, planets, facilities and more

[salemonz]

I noticed I was missing a race help file so I threw one together. Not my best work and it's adapted to what I've got going on here. The text is easily changeable (I use notepad++) if you don't like the origin story.

Oh hey, friend! Thank you very much for that one! I'll put it into the mix

[jayman]

I'm glad this game is still being modded after all these years.

I was checking the forum and decided to give this one a go after not playing DW for about two years. It's like a whole new game now, and i like the gravity-well thing. Ok, so it's a pain when trying to get ships to go anywhere quickly, but it also stops the pirates escaping when they see superior numbers of defenders!

Is it ok that I modifed my own game to add in ships from the various ST mods? I like playing with the Enterprise-D as a capital ship!

[Retreat1970]

You can modify the game how you want.

[MesoTroniK]

Please do not use my assets.

[toopok4k3]

Hello,

Don't use my assets either, please.

[salemonz]

Please do not use my assets.

I'll remove them and post the update when it's done.

[thedragn]

I reached out to as many mod authors as I could find throughout the Starsector community. Got a lot of yes and no responses as to permission to use their assets in DWUR. Many authors were unreachable…to be fair, some Starsector factions are years old. Many authors I’m sure have moved on to other things. I also am an idiot and messed up my messages on the Starsector Forums…so I might have messaged some authors 5x and others 0x.

Huh, that's weird, most of these authors seem to have gotten no messages from you whatsoever, including me, toopok, mshadowy, mesotronik, gwyvern, and selkie (whose art you used but did not list). Are you sure you actually messaged any of these people? If the forums were giving you problems, you're in the starsector community discord and could have asked there, since all those authors are active there as well. Also, just as a note about permissions- not getting a response from someone doesn't mean their stuff is free to use. You need an affirmative response to do that. "No response" means "no".

Anyway, remove my assets from this.

[salemonz]

Anyway, remove my assets from this.

Will do. I'll post here when it's done.

[salemonz]

toopok, mshadowy, mesotronik, gwyvern, and selkie

I'll take theirs off as well. You're right...should have used Discord to follow up. And no response should mean no.

[salemonz]

Released v0.9.6 of DWUR. Updated original post.

-- Removed some shipsets, some based on direct requests by artists, some out of an abundance of caution. I bungled my requests from the Starsector community, using an "let me know if you want to opt out" stance instead of an "opt in" one. Didn't think to use Discord to follow-up properly after no responses. Was an jerk move by me, looking back, and I'm sorry.

[salemonz]

Re-doing the engines and ship lights has hit a snag.

I tried to delete the old blue lines and yellow dots via a batch process with my photo-editing software. I'm unsure how, but there are some 'phantom pixels' in the image that create fake lights and super-slim engine exhaust.

It's something that doesn't make sense...opening the .pngs in browsers, Paint and/or the editing software doesn't show the pixels, but in game, there they are. I dunno.

So I'm just rolling with the original placements at the moment.

[Alvek]

Game search for thruster locations by looking for FF0000FF (ARGB) pixel in ship image. Color point are FFFFFF00 (ARGB). Outline FF000000 (ARGB).
Thruster and color point locations search limited to 20.
I hope this helps.

[salemonz]

Game search for thruster locations by looking for FF0000FF (ARGB) pixel in ship image. Color point are FFFFFF00 (ARGB). Outline FF000000 (ARGB).
Thruster and color point locations search limited to 20.
I hope this helps.

I'll take another look, thank you!

I was using Affinity Photo (alternative to Photoshop). I was trying to do a "replace color" thing by converting the blue and yellow to black or outright delete the pixels. For the batch job, I needed to create a sample color I could pull from consistently in each image. I created reference pixels in the upper left corner. However, my "sample pixels" stay in the image somehow even after deleting them (little light and tiny engine exhaust in the corner of the image). Will try again soon

[Alvek]

Is there any AI art engine that draw ships images?

[salemonz]

Is there any AI art engine that draw ships images?

I've looked into a few. And they're getting better, but not top-down and not consistently, no.

With a lot of fidgeting with prompts, I would get something like this:

Prompt: "Create a 2D top-down aerial view of a futuristic science fiction spaceship with a cruiser hull size. The ship should have sleek and aerodynamic lines, and be equipped with advanced propulsion systems and energy shields. The background should be completely white and empty, allowing the ship to stand out. The final image will be used as a video game art asset, so make sure to include details that will enhance its visual appeal and make it an engaging element of the game's universe. --v 5"

salemonz_Create_a_2D_top-down_aerial_view_of_a_futuristic_scien_8f117197-d460-4814-84dc-7b427c6c90f1.png (3.14 MiB) Viewed 1236 times

^^^ prompt language is corny. Midjourney likes a lot of hyperbolic descriptors...at least it did with v4 and v5.x.

Even so, you're still wrestling with it constantly...and if you're trying to build a cohesive ship set, it's all the more frustrating. You end up tossing 30-40 images for 1 or 2 workable ships...and they still would need some additional photo editing for cockpits/weapons ports etc. Midjourney is arguably the "best" at it, but they don't allow for things like weapons...so there's no weapon ports or missile launchers...those would need to be edited in as well.

Portraits were largely the same...but was do-able after a long time. I spent most of my time coming up with the prompts that would tease out some consistency...having to use turns of phrase and word tricks to get the aliens to look somewhat like one another.

Here's the prompt I used for Arm diplomats: "Generate a highly detailed portrait of an alien diplomat, a bipedal humanoid species with glowing purple eyes who always wear full tribal face coverings and tribal clothing inspired by the Akhu Tribe of Kengtung Myanmar. Shot with a Sony Alpha a7 III camera and natural light against a blank gray background. --v 4"

salemonz_Generate_a_highly_detailed_portrait_of_an_alien_diplom_e967942a-db83-4047-b070-8547c404a0f4.png (1.34 MiB) Viewed 1231 times

I went for a variety of Earth cultural clothing inspirations to try and give each of the 40+ species some individuality. Same went for animal inspirations. Some are more obvious than others.

Blender has a space-ship creator plugin that does really good procedural spaceship generation...but then you'd have to texture/paint it...would still take some hours for a single ship :p

I haven't outright looked at the AI space in a couple of months, so there might be some advances I'm not aware of. Midjourney did great things for portraits when they went from v4 to v5.x. But most of their stuff is centered around portraiture.

[Alvek]

I like look of (1,0) ship in atlas.
I know that author of web novel I am reading use AI to generate the sketches of art and then photoshop them. He is training AI to make better images. Same thing probably possible for ship assets, not sure if it will be better than blender script.

With the next version of EM unlocking shipset family limit, I wanted to suggest you to make pirates only shipsets, to be more unique. And to consider making some pirates shipsets without a theme, as some sort of slapdash design that pirates came up with (Starsector had some pirates designs with such idea long ago, not sure how it is now).

[Retreat1970]

Off topic: I would suggest changing Uranium to a needed pre warp resource in the resource.txt

I have seen too many early AI's stall since early reactors need Uranium and the AI doesn't see it as important.

[salemonz]

Off topic: I would suggest changing Uranium to a needed pre warp resource in the resource.txt

I have seen too many early AI's stall since early reactors need Uranium and the AI doesn't see it as important.

Good idea. I will look at that for an update.

[salemonz]

Off topic: I would suggest changing Uranium to a needed pre warp resource in the resource.txt

I have seen too many early AI's stall since early reactors need Uranium and the AI doesn't see it as important.

I went ahead and just did that...flipped the Uranium flag to "Y" for 'needed.'

Stealth update hotfix to 0.9.6!

Users can re-download the whole package at the top of the post or download the .txt attachment. Then overwrite the resources.txt file in your DWUR customization folder.

[mikewenzel]

Any chance for a mirror link (different host) to the main mod? I've tried different browsers, adblocks off etc, but mediafire won't actually initiate a download for me. Thanks!