I spent some time poking around in photoshop today. Sadly I don’t use it often enough to be comfortable with it yet, but some progress is better than none.
The real issue is I’m not sure what kind of style I want to use for the workshop images. It’s a kind of branding and it’s somewhat important for long term recognition.
I’m thinking something with top and bottom banner ‘bars’ to really hem in the subject of the image and give plenty of room for text.
The unit name would be on the bottom like so and the faction and probably their flag/icon would be at the top. Something like that.
This is a pretty rough placeholder and I’ll get back to work on it over the weekend, but for now I thought it was a good idea to show some progress.
As an aside, the Cosmo Messer is a lot more nimble than I remembered. Its braking ability isn’t great, especially once it’s going over 30~40 or so, but it can reach those speeds very quickly, and low speed maneuvers are pretty effortless. Basically the ship’s got good responsiveness, and I haven’t flown anything that handles its own momentum at high speeds well. Not yet anyway.
One last little note: Something wonderful happened while I was testing the SEToolbox. There are some old blueprints like my Graf Zeppelin build from well over a year ago that I managed to import.
The older ship blueprints almost never load in game, so this was my last hope of saving any of them. Thankfully, it worked perfectly and didn’t mess up the save file. After having a look around I saved a new blueprint of it and now one of my old ships is officially revived, albeit with a lot of missing and loose parts. It has a lot of areas that need patching, but after I fix her up I’ll post some screenshots.
I’m going to try the same thing for the other ships if this works for them, too.
With a caveat. After doing some thinking, I’ve decided I’ll keep the original editing sessions format, but I’ll only go through a certain number of sessions per chapter. Likely one session for each scene in a chapter. Any edits made after that won’t be documented the same way, if it all.
Doing it this way should let me reach both of my goals without adding a bunch of clutter or getting bogged down. I haven’t touched Chapter 1 since the last editing session specifically because I thought I needed to make an editing session for every round of edits. Having a requirement like that has only slowed me down, so now, after the first round of edits, the sessions for that chapter are done.
With that, I’m not going to be making any more editing sessions for Chapter 1. The sessions that are already there are more than enough; the rest is just cleanup. The next editing sessions will be posted for Chapter 2 after the 1st draft’s done, then Chapter 3 immediately after that.
I’m pretty sure at this point that I’m going to need at least one more editing pass for Armor of the Unburdened, but I’m not sure if I should use the same format as the previous editing sessions. They’re informative and don’t take especially long to make, but I also feel like that format makes me slightly more prone to missing things that need a different kind of trimming down. I tend to focus too much on outright verbosity and mistakes rather than trying to word each and every line slightly better.
There’s also probably some time and distance coming into this as well. You’re not improving if you don’t look back and take issue with your work. At some point I have to call it quits on editing and move on, but until the story as a whole is finished, I think I get a free pass to go back and tweak things here and there.
I overshot with that afternoon nap, but I did figure out a couple of things for making the ‘throughline’ of Lydia’s Golden Treasury stronger. Chapter 3’s also going to need a few specific edits to fall more in line with a few things I noticed in Chapter 1, mainly, some very specific things that were said and some others things that weren’t said in that first chapter.
Trust me, it’s important, especially for Chapter 3.
For now I need to focus on getting Chapter 2 written up so I can get that gap I made plugged back up. I don’t know if I’ll have it finished by the end of this month, but I’ve definitely got enough time, so that’s what I’m aiming for.
Most of today was spent finishing up the Cosmo Messer’s interior layout and getting its specs written up for the workshop. Still on track to have that done this week.
As much as I hate to say it, I’m FORBIDDEN from making any design changes between now and release. Typos in the documentation and the like can be fixed, but any functional deficiencies in the current E model are going to be ‘known flaws’ or something to that effect.
As for what I was doing the rest of the time. Mainly just trying to stay alive. It’s still ridiculously hot and stuffy around my workspace and it’s only going to get worse until around September.
As for Lydia’s Golden Treasury, that’s still my focus for the rest of the week. Updates on that will come when they come.
