Fleet Selection Tutorial:

GalaxyHack allows substantial customisation of your fleet. You choose what sort of units you want to add to your fleet, and you write your own AI scripts to assign to those units.

You can enter the fleet editor by selecting it from the game's main menu.

The fleet editor's main popup menu:

Edit Group: Edit one of the groups within your fleet. From here you can also edit the unit that makes up the group. Unit data is stored seperately to fleet data, so editing a unit will affect all groups that use that unit.

Add new group(s): Add one or more new groups to your fleet.

Delete group: Delete a group from your fleet. Deleting a capital ship will remove all the small ships within that capital ship as well.

Starting positions: The view will change to show the current starting positions of all your groups. By clicking and holding down the left mouse button you can drag your groups into different starting positions. Choose your groups' starting positions on the assumption that your fleet will start off at the top left of the battle space. If your fleet starts off on the right then the x coordinate of your groups' starting positions will automatically be inverted, and if your fleet starts off at the bottom then the y coordinate of your groups' starting positions will automatically be inverted.

Options: General options.

Save and exit: Return to the main menu. Your fleet will be automatically saved when you quit the fleet editor.

Using the fleet editor

The fleet editor, like the rest of the game, is based around windows and menus:

• Right clicking in a blank space brings up a base popup menu (the contents of which are dependent on the stage of the game)


• Left clicking on an option in a menu selects it


• Right clicking on any sort of window sometimes brings up a popup menu with options associated with that particular window. For instance, when a battle is running you can right click on one of the sides in the base popup menu, or alternatively on the list of groups in a side, to bring up a box containing information about that side.


• Clicking anywhere outside of a popup menu closes that popup window


• Holding down the left mouse button on a window drags it to a new position


• Left clicking on the cross at the top right of a window closes it.


• Holding down the left mouse button on a slider bar changes the corresponding setting

Customising the look of your fleet

You may, if you so wish, draw custom artwork for some or all of your ships, though this is certainly not compulsory. Artwork should be placed in your fleet's "unitpictures" directory, which is automatically created when you use the fleet editor to create a new fleet. Note that if you use pictures that come with the game you do not need to add them to your fleet's "unitpictures" directory, because pictures in the base "standardpictures" directory are always available to all fleets.

If you do wish to draw your own artwork, please take note of the following guidelines:

• Images must be pngs, and must have a ".png" file extension. Bit depth shouldn't matter.


• Black (0 red, 0 green, 0 blue) will be transparent. The game doesn't currently support alpha channel transparency.


• You should provide 4 different versions of each picture you do, with a certain part of the ship being in a different colour in each picture. In the same way all Nod units in Command and Conquer have a bit of red on them, for instance. These identifying colours should be based on the following. Variations due to shading are certainly allowed, but please don't stray too far or your artwork will look out of place when combined with other peoples':
  
  
  • 160 red, 0 green, 0 blue (red)
  • 60 red, 150 green, 40 blue (green)
  • 40 red, 60 green, 150 blue (blue)
  • 220 red, 200 green, 120 blue (sandy yellow)


• All pictures should be facing to the right.


• Ships should be viewed side on, not top down.


• Often ships will fly across the top of each other. Therefore you may want to put a one pixel wide border of very dark grey (55 red, 55 green, 55 blue) around your unit so that if it flies over the top of another unit that is the same color the two won't merge into one. Depending on how much shading your picture has this may not be neccessary - try overlaying a copy of your picture on itself and see if the two pictures merge into one.


• The game runs in 16 bit mode, so the colors in a normal 24 bit picture must be converted when it is loaded by the game. This means colours may not look totally identical in game when compared to what they look like in a paint program (though differences should only be very minor).


• The three types of capital ship all have an identical width to height ratio. Therefore you should create capital ship images with dimensions equal to those of a heavy capital ship (768 * 168). The game can then scale your images to create medium capital ships (512 * 112) and light capital ships (328 * 72).


• Frigate dimensions: 84 * 44


• Small ship dimensions: 8 * 8