[DEVBLOG#185] Vanilla Textures Expanded: Save our ship (Patreon)

Hello folks and welcome to this unique, very colorful and vibrant development blog.

Many people asked me if I will ever make my own mod, similar to Save Our Ship. You know, exploring space, different planets, building a space ship etc.

What a lot of people don't know, is that making such a mod would take years of work, tens of thousands of dollars and it would also be a punch in the gut to the wonderful people of Radian Helix Media, who made SoS2. I find SoS2 to be amazing (despite a few flaws here and there). So no, I won't be doing my own spaceship mod.

People have however also asked me to retexture Save Our Ship. I was skeptical at first: such a project would consume hundreds of hours of my time. I'm not going to lie, it was too big of a commitment for me. Sometimes when I pick up a big project I get burnt out due to the sheer amount of work that's ahead of me.

And then I watched Captain Bucko's crazy adventures (Youtube series by Mr Samuel Streamer, a person who I refer to as my friend). He eventually ended up in space, and that's when I realized that some SoS2 textures REALLY stick out from vanilla guidelines.

Yes, before you say anything: I never played with SoS2 for that very reason.

So...

I contacted the SoS2 team and I asked if I could make a Vanilla Textures Expanded module aimed at retexturing 100% of the mod (yes, we're not skipping any textures, no matter if they already 'look vanilla' or not). Guess what they said...

So I sat down and I started retexturing. It's a lot of work, and there will be a lot of patches to make sure the textures are in correct sizes, look crips and work well. So far I've done maybe 40% of the texture work required.

Laser cannons for example will use the same color pallette and style as our salvaged laser weapons in Vanilla Weapons Expanded - Lasers. The associated color remains as red.

Things get more complicated with plasma cannons. The only plasma in vanilla RimWorld is Orange - look up the Royalty Plasma Sword! So to keep the plasma weaponry in the same style, the cannons were retextured to look like Mechanoid Meltguns. The projectiles will be retextured to look the part too. The associated color will also be patched to be orange instead of green (by that I mean for example the little green arrow on the 'distance meter to the enemy ship', it will be made orange instead).

Kinetic weapons... well, they are a perfect match for our Vanilla Weapons Expanded - Coilguns. As such, however, it doesn't really work that the associated color is blue - and we will be patching it to be yellow instead. I know, it's a bit complex, but you will get used to it.

The AC guns, which are the very close range Brrrrrrrr guns, will be redesigned to look like Charge point defense guns, similar to Vanilla Furniture Expanded - Security Charge railgun, which already has it mentioned in a description that they are commonly used on spacecraft. Of course, yellow associated color no longer works, so we will be changing that to green!

The Autoeject pod looks more like a cryptosleep casket, but with 'drop pod' elements (since it turns into a drop pod), the Avatar casket received a complete redesign and so did the hologram repeater.

The Cloak device and the Shield generator look fairly similar but more 'vanilla', whilst the life support loses the green, cartoony plants and the weird perspectives and turns into a proper oxygen generator instead. The reason for that is because there is no point in showing 'green plants' as such an amount of plants wouldn't generate enough oxygen anyway. Might as well keep it more ambiguous and secret.

Heatsinks lost a bit of their detail and jagged edges as there is often hundreds of them on a ship, and seeing so many thin lines drives people crazy.

Capacitor now looks like a vanilla ancient capacitor, Hull foam dispenser got some unique shapes and structures, and salvage bay looks a bit more three-dimensional with actual human-sized computers this time!

The Spinals follow the same concept as already explained above with cannons - Plasma being turned orange for example. They were A LOT of work, trust me. One spinal essentially took an entire day, as you need to remember they are rotatable, so require three graphics each! 

Bridges are dropping the blue angled monitors in favor of being more 'spacer tech' instead of high sci-fi. They should look much better now surrounded by Comms Consoles etc.

Shuttles received a complete redesign and are now rotatable, with proper perspective on the graphics depending which side they are facing. The Personal shuttle now looks like a chunkier drop pod. The Landing pad also isn't as noisy anymore and shares similarities with vanilla landing beacons.

That's all for this devblog. As you can see there is a color palette and art style I'm going with for that retexture - inspired by the ship pieces in vanilla game. I hope you will enjoy this retexture as it's one of the more ambitious!

These are all the textures done up to today! I will return when I have some more to show!