No one has had any trouble with modding yet, though they haven't given us the official tools.

That said, nice... broken links (edit is under "tools" and the OP can be edited as often as you wish).

We don't have a problem with modding but you may want to wait for the final textures. There is still a lot of color balancing, normalization, details, etc in progress as well as changes to the shaders.

cool skins dude, what did you edit them with?

You have to use the direct link url. The ones you posted are pointing to a php script even if they look like an image link.

That being said, very cool textures.

I think the Vasari textures make the ships much more believable and using the softer colours basically works.

i guess he used photoshop

But nice screenshots, especially the one with the carriers

Thanks. Photoshop is what I am most familiar with but I used GIMP for these skins. With the TECH Crusier carriers I started to mess with the textures a bit but the others I just adjusted the coloring. It takes just a few minutes to change the colors so maybe I will still do that but hold off on any major texture changes until after release.

Still can't decide though whether to make the Vasari ships have a red or purple tint. I like the red but it either turns out too dark or way too light.

That does not necessarily have to do with the textures, in each ship entity file there is an entry that regulates how the ship is affected by lighting:

minShadow x
maxShadow y

x and y ranging from 0 to 1, the higher the number the brighter the texture can be.
If you increse the minshadow value ships will come out much brighter even when in full darkness, maxshadow influences the light from lightsources and such areas.

For my mod for example i wanted a grittier look on all ships and structures, with the effects more standing out, so i changed the values for all ships to min = 0 and max = 0.4 which gives a very nice overall look.

Here some sample images:
min and max 0

min and max 0.5

min and max 1


In the original beta the values interestingly vary wildly from ship to ship and especially very high min values sometimes overbrighten your ships when you zoom out.
These are some things i tried to fix and improve by adjusting the values in my mod and if you mod the textures you have to take these things into account aswell.

True but I got around that by changing the team colors .

Yeah that was exactly the problem I encountered with the Vasari Missle Capital ship. The main body of the model is very reflective on the top half but not so much on other areas making it seem washed out at times with 'weaker' colors.

I settled on green for the vasari and steel blue for TEC.

Nice stuff. I hope you plan on doing a tutorial for this one day to save others hours of frustration and stake your claim to fame within the community as the "body guy".