All of the files that make up a custom ship design must be placed in a subdirectory of the Mods\Ships directory that bears the name of the ship design. For example, to create a new destroyer class of starships called the "Warrior", start by creating a directory named Mods\Ships\Warrior. All models, texture bitmaps, and other data files for the Warrior must be placed in this directory.

The properties for your ship design are defined in a text file called a "Ship Definition File". This file can be created with any text editor (e.g. notepad) and must have the same name as the ship design. For our Warrior example, the ship definition file would be Mods\Ships\Warrior\Warrior.def. The ship definition file contains all of the physical properties of the ship (mass, hull strength, turn rate, lift, drag, etc.) and also names the 3D mesh files that define what the ship looks like.

All physical objects in Starshatter are modeled using 3D mesh files created by the low-poly editor Magic, written especially for the game. Magic stores meshes in files with .mag extensions. You can use Magic to create ship designs from scratch, or you can import existing designs created in another 3D modeling tool (3DStudio, LightWave, Maya, Milkshape). Magic uses the popular Wavefront OBJ ASCII format for importing geometry from 3rd party modeling tools. You can download a free, unsupported copy of Magic 1.1 from the Downloads Page of the official website.

Texture maps for your ship design must be stored in PCX format. Textures must be square powers of two (e.g. 64x64 or 256x56) in size. You should store your textures in 24 bit RGB format. You can use Adobe Photoshop, JASC Paint Shop Pro, or any other bitmap graphics editor to create textures for your models.

name:         Orion
display_name: Orion
class:        carrier
beauty:       "beauty.pcx"
hud_icon:     "hud_icon.pcx"

map: {
   sprite: "map0.pcx",  //  9 oclock
   sprite: "map1.pcx",  // 10 oclock
   sprite: "map2.pcx",  // 12 oclock
   sprite: "map3.pcx",  //  2 oclock
   sprite: "map4.pcx",  //  3 oclock
   sprite: "map5.pcx",  //  4 oclock
   sprite: "map6.pcx",  //  6 oclock
   sprite: "map7.pcx"   //  8 oclock
}

// THREE LOD MESHES:

// big features
detail_0:   "low-detail.mag"
feature_0:  1000

// medium grain features
detail_1:   "medium-detail.mag"
feature_1:  100

// fine detail
detail_2:   "high-detail.mag"
feature_2:  10

// ONE STATIONARY AND TWO ROTATING SECTIONS, ONE LOD:

model:      "s2.mag"
model:      "s2mid.mag"
model:      "s2end.mag"

spin:       (0.0, 0.00, 0.0)
spin:       (0.0,-0.10, 0.0)
spin:       (0.0, 0.07, 0.0)

mass:       517e3
agility:    2
vlimit:     220
roll_rate:  7
integrity:  75e3
scale:      5
acs:        1.5

trans_x:    1e6
trans_y:    5e5
trans_z:    1e6

drag:       1e-7
roll_drag:  1.2
pitch_drag: 1.2
yaw_drag:   1.2

chase:      (0, -1800, 170)
bridge:     (0,   600, 100)