Project: BattleStar Galactica - Sins of Alethia (SoA)

a BSG mod just seems natural. there are lots of ways to play it for Sins. you could start in our solar system, they found earth and are building up for war, or they found another area where they can build up and fight back. it would have to be heavy on caps, fighters and bombers not so much on frigates and cruisers. that is something i would like to see anyway, 2 capital ships at each end of the well with hordes of fighters inbetween.

Excellent idea.

I guess the primary question is how far way from the story line do you want to go?

I agree with Nekraushaar that a game following the 1-day war and the subsequent trek to Earth would be a Caps/fighter battelfield. So, WOULD that storyline be challenge enough to keep entertaining the hack/slicers?

Do you work close to story line and keep the two in mortal combat forever?

The technology will be "limited" since the current storyline is jump/evade and attack when able. There has always been a gnawing problem with BSG storyline (in my mind) in that the Cylons are establishing planets and bases along the way using and building unlimited resources while a "rag-tag fleet" sucessfully disappear in the nebulea and attack another day. I guess effective and unique artifacts found along the way and a limited amount of tech discoveries learned along the way that are integrated within the entire fleet is one way to build techs.

But then again you could always loosely follow the curent story and look back to the original series.

The original series had the White Forces discovered by Apollo assisting the colonialists AND had occasional sightings of original colonialists that were left behind by Earth's clan on distant terrian planets. So, there is more to the story than just hide and seek.

This is an interesting project!

We are still doing preliminary research as well as working out the fundamental story idea. So I cant comment on anything specific since we have not decided anything story wise. There are many way we can with this in my opinion. At this point we are not set on any one path, except one that remains as true to known lore as possible.

On the creative side, our current focus is on creation of a viable background setting and story that will function well within Sin's game engine. On the 3D side of the house our modeler iscurrently relearning skills once thought lost from lack of usage. We are still short on the 2d aspect as well as coding but I can do the work if needed it is just that time is a major factor for me.

If any of you guys are interested in getting involved please come to the project forums and let us know. We are more them willing to work with a diverse group to really make this project into something special.

Awesome, Spartan! I was on the fence for a long time whether I wanted to throw in for BSG or Star Trek, but Star Trek won in the end. It's already interesting working out how to do stuff with mods that aren't explained at all. You get to break the game in all sorts of ways not realizing how!

Good luck with the project, I'm definitely going to be looking forward to it, and it looks to be in good hands. I'll help if/when/how I can

Thanks! We appreciate your support. Yeah I must say with MS, EJ & BBT running the the ST, SW & B5 mods respectively, the stuff that is going to come out of this community is going to set new standards for similar projects. It is also the reason I chose not to get active in those projects. The talent pool for them is truly top natch so they dont need another planning and management person like me.

Anyway, I really like to help the dark horse and well BSG is it given how many figured it would not work for Sins at all.

BTW: You do know you can be on two mod teams if your interests are such and time management skills are good. We are not demanding exclusivity or NDA contracts from team members.

I know It's really a time issue more than anything else. I'd love to do both, but working full time only gives me a few hours an evening, so I don't think I'll be able to keep up with doing two mods justice.

We shall see how it ends up once the work on ST ramps up full-time, I may be able to devote time to help out BSG with more than moral support

Well, I'm not much of a project guy as I just like to tinker on my own little toys, I'm all about the research into accomplishing it. I agree here with Annatar, it's not just breaking the game, it's making it do more. So if you need help with just figuring out stuff, I'm an unafiliated general purpose code monkey.

I got a few things Haha.

Sounds cool. You don't necessarily have to have a story. I'd be fine with spawning a bunch of Cylon Basestars and shooting at Colonial Battlestars!

i think new series were well done, filming, special effects, etc...but BSG is just not doing it for me somehow (odd way to put it :/ lol )

By the way, I think BSG can fit sins. You just have to find story and that has to be before "exodus" to earth. Cylon revolt or something like that...good luck guys, hope it all fares well...

I would love to see a BSG mod. I love BSG.
How a BSG mod should be is simple to me. Battles in the mod should look like battles in the show. Not like sins with BSG models.

Sins would be great for BSG, however quite a few things would have to be reworked:
-Balancing of the game.
BSG is less about RPS, more about tactics. Sins is already good in this in that there isn't much rock paper scissors excluding lrms, carriers, and flak.
-Z Axis. BSG uses it, sins doesn't. Fleets need to automatically use the z axis when attacking, and ai opponants need to too. Ships, cap or fighters, both should be attacking each other from above and below and there should be "top, bottom, left, right, forward, back" damage on the ships, not just "left, right, forward, back" as they are currently in sins.
-Fleet AI. Need to get rid of that focus firing on fighters and make them work in small groups of 2 or 3.
-Strafing of everything. Fights should fly backwards, turn around 180 degrees, strafe around. Cap ships should as well!

More importantly, there is a big thing of why other mods have failed at BSG:
-All they did is replace the meshes and weapons. When you do this, you have a boring as shit mod because BSG only had a few cap ships and a few fighters.
Homeworld is a good game. Homeworld with 2 battlecruisers and 1 fighter type on one side, and 1 battlecruiser and 1 fighter type on another side with just missiles and bullets is not a good game.

Alot of people will say there isn't enough variaty in BSG's ships, but there is. What people are missing is they don't need to focus on content of ships, but content on the types of tactics people can use. The abilities and leveling that sins have is pretty perfect for this.
Raptor with a strike team boarding a base star and setting up a nuke there.
Nuke missiles that fighter screens shoot down.
Scrambling fighters at the last minute so that they'll have more fuel to fight.
Managing your energy for FTL drives.
ECM'ing to knock out the AI aiming of the battlestars guns.
Those are the things BSG mods have missed which make it a good show, and without them you don't have a good game.

Just have the story either based on after they find earth, and have made a bigger fleet, or before the start of razor when there where more battlestars. But just having 3 battlestars to choose from, and 3 fighters on one side, the base stars, old raiders, new raiders on another side is really enough(though more wouldn't hurt if they fit).. There just needs to be a lot of depth to those 6 ships in how they perform and what you can do with them.

Vipers are nothing like sins fighters.. Vipers can shoot down missiles, they engage in dog fights, they have cannons for attacking caps. They're much more multi purpose, but also less replacable. They don't poop out from antimatter.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this, and maybe offering a few pieces of concept art here and there if they're wanted. Ever since I got into BSG I wanted a strategy game that focused on the first Cylon war, with hundreds of Colonial ships vs. hundreds of Cylon ships.

While I doubt you're going to be limiting this to the first Cylon War I am hopeful that a whatever you decide to do at some point I'll get to send my Colonial fleet out to smash some frakkin' toasters.

Working on a few mods in my day has taught me how mod teams feel about unsolicited suggestions but I can't help myself:

Perhaps consider an "Elseworlds" or "What If" scenario in which the Cylons never got the military defense codes from Baltar, or what if what they got didn't work? What would the second Cylon War have looked like if it were a fair fight?

Something to chew on anyway...

I'm okay at modeling and scripting myself.
Here is an unfinished model I was working on: (missign tons of details on wha'ts there, missing the main hull.. just has armor plating, main engines, engine housing armor, tanks)

Unfinished face model. I used adama for reference as it so happens. For the nose and how his skin is.

There's actually a suprising amount of ships on the colonial side. The known battlestars have more than enough variety in abilities alone. And visually there's a even bigger amount to pick from. But as long as the engine allows it the mod will be more than just vanilla sins with new models and names.

And innociv, you being ''ok'' at modeling is a huge understatement , that face is really impressive.

Eh i never finished it.
I'm satisfied with how accurately i did the anatomy, but it's missing a ton of detail, and i made the rim of the ears to thin. But it was just a 3 hour practice thing i did. It's missing the fine wrinkle details, pores, and other stuff making the texture of the skin which would take at least another 3 hours.

I don't know amazing detail about BSG's universe. =] I know there is more battlestars.
But the thing is battlestars are mostly similar, and those are cap ships.
See sins has flak, command cruisers, lrms, all these those things. While BSG just had the biggest and littlest of ships.

But hey, that's cool. As long as the engine is flexible if this mod was made to embrace the small amount of units and instead of be limited by it. (As in, like I said, give the units depth instead of them behaving just likes sins but only having vipers that shoot bullets and basestars that spam out missiles.)

I don't see it working if the engine can't be modded to make ships behave like homeworld's though. Like if you tell a unit to move just a few hundred feet to the left it should strafe to the left, not do a U turn. That part is like really really important IMO.

It'd be cool if your battlestars and base stars are all unique, as in you can only have 1 of them unlike in sins. So you could only build/reinforce 1 galactica, 1 pegasus, so on.

We've managed to find a fair amount of medium sized ships as well so it shouldn't turn out like a big capital vs capital ship spam fest with some fighters flying in between .

But I do agree that Homeworld combat has some very nice features. My only major dissapointment with sins combat is that ships seem to completely ignore the direction they're facing and can fire at any angle.

eyah i saw on your forum.. Iwas wondering where those ships where from.

If I was making it i would focus on making the mod more like the series though, not trying to fit the series to sins.

Trying to find a bunch of ships who's roles will replace those of ships already in sins doesn't seem like the right idea to me.

What makes BSG cool is 2 massive caps against each other, or 1 caps against 1, or 2 against 3, with swarms of manuverable fighters, in an epic battle trying to gain the upper hand and sometimes pull off some miracle to come up on top. It's very different from sins, but sins has a lot of stuff in it that's very useful for a bsg mod too that you wouldn't get in modding another game without a lot of work.

Erm, no. Open up the capital ship files sometime, you'll find that they're set up to have various weapons in front, sides, back. They can shoot anywhere because they have weapons positioned to reach everywhere

This sounds like an awesome idea and I hope you succeed in it.

Also, there are people who thought BattleStar Galactica wouldn't work in Sins? I mean, it certainly wouldn't work in GalCiv2, since there you DIE when you run out of planets, but I can definitely see it working in Sins.

Anyone who does not believe me should consult this elegant and finely crafted link:

WWW Link

Interesting Idea. Will it be possible to play these factions alongside the standard Factions?

@Annatar - fair enough. I understand I almost always do Sins stuff when I should be sleeping and it has affected my work no doubt.

@Bink - Great we need a code monkey for sure. Currently I'm stand in paper code monkey but a real gorilla would be nice. Please come over to the forums and sign up so we can get you on the team.

@Swphreak - Yeah that is true. Personally speaking I would like us to orient things around a story like a single player campaign. I'm not sure on the feasibility on that yet nor has the team really discussed it yet.

@innociv - yes those are all valid issues. However as you know many of them we simply cant address right now since we don’t have the full tool set yet. Also thanks for your contributions in the projects threads. Your efforts are truly valued. Regarding your images.. Are you a doing this stuff for a living? If not you should be. I'm so jealous. All I have ever really want to be is an artist but like all pipe dreams the wind hears it best.

@Thomas - If you an artist we desperately need you. Please consider joining the team. Also with regards to unsolicited suggestions, I don’t operate that way. The project is a community effort and all community input that is constructive and reasonable in nature is always welcome. It is you guys that I need to keep me "honest" and focused on the mission at hand.

@Slash - No doubt it is like you "forgetting everything about modeling".

@Arilias - thanks for the feedback. Please feel free to get involved if you are inclined.

@Zolop - we have even considered such a thing since we have not worked out how to fully implement the BSG universe in Sins yet. If people want only ships, then that action should be seen as mini mod work which is not our orientation. This is a major project so our focus will be in accordance.

i would say the best bet is to base it off the first cylon war. in that case both sides were equal (i think) and it was a stalemate

@oleandummer - We are considering such a thing but the big problem with that is that they shared the same planets. Additionally we want some play distinction between the factions using as much of the game engine as possible.

Well I'm a graphics artist for a living, and I do freelance work of all kinds of art on the side.
Which is nice but sadly makes me too busy for my real passion of wanting to make games

I'm actually more interested in trying to make AI code for vipers to make them move and act like in the show and intercept nukes and stuff over modeling..
The low poly+high poly bump for models wouldn't take me long to do for a dozen ships. All I need is a few weekends of a row of free time which doesn't come much

Nice, BSG suits the Sins engine well. Options could be based off of either the first war, or a "What if Baltar didn't..." type deal. Imagining a Cylon strike where the Colonials aren't defenseless, and could fight back!

...strange as it sounds, my biggest hope of any BSG story is eventually reaching Earth Space, only it is not just Earth, there's an entire Terran Federation of some kind...that turns the Cylon into goo.

While I suck at modeling, Hearts of Iron taught me a few things about screwing with codes, and getting strange results. Always important to get the damage ratios correct!