2 sets of what? (and how would I go about getting them?)

And how do you view the units in the mesh editor? Thats at ten times the normal size already!

I think that planets are working because I already covered this. I gave the models two sets of UV all the time, just in case, you know. I thought it might be use for bump maps. I just duplicate the ones from the color texture.

Whut

Bump. WHAT??????

2nd set of uv's is for the planet clouds. There are no bump maps on planets in Sins. We used spec maps to fake it instead. Gave better results. Also, it's a diff shader, so the planet DA map is different to.

to make it 10000 units, make a sphere that size in max or whatever software you are using and match your model to it.

Still dont get that lol



I get this. I was just using the scale thing in the mesh editor. TO 3DS MAX!

A UV is a coordinate system that tells each vertex where it sits on a texture map. Thus allowing us to paint textures. UV's are totally customizable. However, a vertex can only have one coordinate per UV projection. This means that if you were to have two different types of unwraps you need 2 different types on uv's. I'm under NDA, there were reasons for doing this on the planets. If you are using max I'm not sure you can export 2 sets of UV's successfully.

sweet...does this mean we could have B5 on our hands in near future

Hey Stress! I was a fan of your Homeworld stuff back in the day. It's great to see you back in action here. Out of curiosity, how does making a ship for Sins compare to HW in terms of polygon count, texture resolution, and the amount of work/time that goes into it?

Also, as much as I love TOS ships, I would really enjoy seeing a TNG-era mod as well. If you aren't planning on doing one, do you know of anyone who is?

Thanks see someone remembers my old stuff

As far as difficulty, The modeling is about the same. Importing is the hardest part, and we still dont have that right yet. Many mesh errors with code herders importer, but thats due to how my models are built, and not the fault of his tool. I will need the forge tools to import my models.

Sins uses 2048x2048 textures which is todays gaming standard. Compared to HW1's 256x256 res limit we can make extremely detailed textures for sins ships. Plus there is no hardcoded limit to texture memory in sins. It is limited only by your hardware.

Poly counts look like between 1k to 2k for frigates. 4k to 6k average for cap ships, and around 10k (some structures) being the highest. I still have yet to see a sins model in a modeling program so that is just a rough estimate.


A TNG mod is being planned. In fact i just may toss out the TOS idea temporarily, because of the coming new trek movie. If i switch over to JJ Abrams TOS ill have to rebuild EVERYTHING. TNG era will be much easier to mod. I was thinking of porting Sacrifice of Angels to Sins

Hey
Nice work on those models. I have to say I would love TNG mod more than a TOS mod though. What races you have in mind? Obviously the Federation... Klingon? Romulans? Borg?
I wish I could help out with modding but my skills are limited to web design. But definitely keep updating on this. Yours might be the first mod I download!

An SoA port would be fantastic! At least as a starting off point since Sins allows more than two sides, it'd be cool to see full Federation, Klingon, and Romulan sides rather than combining them into an alliance as you had to in Homeworld. Out of curiosity, does the "no hard limit" thing apply only to textures, or does that work for poly count as well? I mean, if you have a quad core and an 8800GTX, could you put 10K polygon frigates in there and get away with it?

I decided to scrap the TOS mod, and instead do the port over of Sacrifice of Angels.

You can use whatever poly counts you want, but know that if you have 200+ ships that are 10000+ polys on the map that your machine is going to beg for mercy, and double as a space heater. Higher poly counts dont make for a better model contrary to popular belief.

Same with textures.. Sure you can use a max resolution texture, but do you "really" need to? If a 1024 res texture gives about the same quality as a 2048 at double the framerate, Which texture do you think i will chose? Just because "You can" doesnt mean "You should"

Hey Stress. Aint seen you on in a while. You need to get onto MSN more often

Been a while since I played the SoA mod, but for Sins i'm hoping we'll go with a Dominion War theme, which likely means the following races:

- Federation
- Klingon
- Romulan
- Dominion

I've never been a big fan of the Borg, and in a gameplay setting the Borg will always automatically be overpowered over any other Star Trek "empire". Therefore the Dominion is a much better idea for an opponent, as they could have:

- Jem Hadar
- Cardassian
- Breen

I'd say that Cardassians would likely end up having their ships built out of the "Light" shipyards, whereas the Jem Hadar and Breen ships will be built out of the "Heavy" shipyards. Not sure if we can add a Medium sized shipyard as well to the game yet, but if that were the case the Breen would be built from there. And note: Just because the "Spoonheads" ships are built out of the Light shipyard, doesn't automatically mean that they'll be severely weakened compared to the Jem Hadar. In some ways, the Breen have more powerful tech than the Jem Hadar with their energy dampening weapons. Would be interesting to implement the Breen tech into Sins

Right ideas, but the methods on how/where units are built, and what ability's used will need to be worked on. Assuming that 3 playable factions is hardcoded, then it will be FRK (fed rommie klngon) vs DCB (dominion cardies, breen) with the 3rd faction ommited. I hope that you can make more playable factions. That will eliminate many problems.

Oh hell yes: SoA in SoaSE! I'm very much looking forward to this. Naturally I expect you to keep the textures and polygon counts within reason, I was just asking because I was curious to know about the longevity of the Sins engine. It seems that unlike Homeworld, Sins will be able to keep up with the times as better hardware becomes more prevalent. Exactly what I wanted to hear!

From the beta, I have a suggestion: make the Federation use culture as their only to take over enemy worlds. Orbital bombardment just isn't their style. But if they have a significant advantage in the culture area, it could balance out, and it would force their neighboring factions to take military action or be absorbed. Other factions could counter the Federation's culture with their own culture, which you could rename to "oppression," or in the case of the Klingons, maybe "honor." But those might be gimped to spread slowly from planet to planet, if at all. That way they'd have to build honor/oppression structures in boarder worlds in order to keep them under control.

Also, do you know if you'll be able to make the ships maneuver freely in a Trekish way? We know Blair has said that they've toyed around with it internally but decided against it for Sins, so the engine seems to be capable of it. I guess it's a matter of AI coding, which hopefully either someone on the forums can figure out or IC will share in the SDK.

As for the Borg, there's no sense in making them a playable faction - you'll just end up with a crappy side like the Armada games had, where there's a "Borg rectangle" and a "Borg dodecahedron" and a "Borg tactical cube" (oh wait, that was a crappy Voyager thing, because they made the Borg so easily bamboozled that a fleet of the same cube that wiped out 50 starships without slowing down at Wolf 359 can't catch a dinky Intrepid class scout ship and had to make a "super" Borg ship, as if they weren't "super" to begin with. But I digress). Instead, I think they'd make a fantastic replacement for pirate raids. Just make them less frequent, and instead of a dozen pirate ships, one Borg cube comes through and does a ton of damage.

Not to be out done by the trekkies (though I need to get normals and data maps working right)



Thanks to Enterprise-E for the SSD model and textures

I got a new thread going for the trek mod so no worries. Nice looking ships (yes i like star wars, and B5 as well).

What is wrong with your bump and datas? If you are getting an eerie glow using bump and datas u need to swap the names. in otherwords rename your bumps "da", and your da's "nm"

actually the problem is more about how max exports obj files IMO, the normals are always goofy, though they look correct in code herders preview, but I get weird lighting in game. It was simpler to omit data and normal maps. Data is actually in there, but blown out completely since I just converted my HW2 resources, but happen to be too highly saturated, normal maps tend to make everything glow bright pink...

Now if I export .x it looks perfect in the exporter, but then the wire frame preview and normals have their X axis flipped (which is really weird, but I am using pandaX which has proven to be wonky in the past)

I cant seem to export obj files from max with the textures, I have to re-add them to the mesh from code herders Mesh editor. I was lead to believe that the textures were included with the Mesh along with the UV mapping as one complete entity, though I might have got that completely wrong  :NOTSURE: Its got something to do with materials which I haven't figured out yet its almost as if you have to rebuild the material. In fact thats it isn't it the texture isn't in the obj at all its in the mtl.   

Anyway good work with the ISD EvilleJedi.

omg omg omg look bril

So, since we've got both Star Trek and Star Wars in this thread... how long until we get some Star Trek vs Star Wars action in Sins??? I mean, since there's no limit on the number of sides you can have in the game, it's practically inevitable. All it would take is hours and hours and hours of rebalancing work.

Oh no, not that obnoxious topic again You can do ST v SW i want no part of it

Ahead, warp factor 2 Mr. Sulu.

Also, i would prefer DS9 era ships cuz they is hot. =P

I won't actively pursue a ST vs SW mod, though the warlords models as always are freely available on my site.