You can already start working on adding a new race. If by the "rest of the Forge tools" you refer to an editor which handily removes any need to tackle the various .entity, .mesh, .ogg etc. files, I am not sure they will ever appear. I wouldn't count on such things if I were you.

The good news is, creating a whole new race is perfectly possible right now, you just have to roll up your sleeves and dig in the source files.

The best thing to do (and you need to do it anyway) is to download the modding package, you can find it here:
WWW Link

Read up on the pdf help file, it has a few starter pointers as to how things are changed and such.

After that, check out files PlayerPhase.entity (Vasari), PlayerPsi.entity (Advent) and PlayerTech.entity (TEC) to see how they are done. Basically, if you want to just change how things are called, you will also need to edit the english.str which is located in your installation directory in the \string folder. You can also open and edit that with Notepad.

Modifying a race can get fairly complex, because there are multiple files involved, depending on the task at hand. For example, if you want to change the name of the Vasari race to "Badass Muthas" you only need to find the IDS_PLAYERRACENAME_PHASE entry in the english.str and change "Vasari" to "Badass Muthas". Voila.

But, if you want to change research topic descriptions, or the names of various ships and modules, you will have to identify files which govern those items and then find ID string designations there, after which you find those in english.str and edit them.

For example, changing the name of the Vasari missile battery would go as follows:

In the PlayerPhase.entity file you can find the following line:

entityDefName "PLANETMODULE_PHASEORBITALMISSILEDEFENSE"

which means you have to open the PLANETMODULE_PHASEORBITALMISSILEDEFENSE.entity file next, where you will find the following two lines:

NameStringID "IDS_PLANETMODULE_PHASEORBITALMISSILEDEFENSE_NAME"
DescriptionStringID "IDS_PLANETMODULE_PHASEORBITALMISSILEDEFENSE_DESCRIPTION"

The first is the name of the Module, the second the description which appears on the build menu infocard. Opening the english.str, find those two values and change their values in order to have something else appear.

This is how you alter descriptions and names. Altering various capabilities (for example making the missile battery fire twice as fast) requires editing of appropriate values in appropriate files. Adding new models and textures is even more complex than that, but for starters I suggest you simply familiarize yourself with the way the system works - its intuitive really, not that hard to figure out.

Good luck!

What is this Iron Forge you mention. Never tried any of there space games before. On a side not however I have heard of this great company know as Ironclad that makes this wonderful game known as Sins of a Solar Empire.

IronClad you mean

Ironclad. One word.

Give him a break... and answer his question, or move on.

I was also under the impression that more tools were on the way to simplify this process and allow a lot more 'easy' modding to be done.

Thats good to hear Bink. Just popped in on that link that sh00ter posted, looks like they plan to release a 'finished' version, but no solid ETA as of yet.

Good to hear that Bink. Looking forward to it. And Mansh00ter, I've been looking into the .entity files already. Seems a bit confusing. Hopefully, the tools thats going to be release soon will have all the info that needs to be changed. Or if a wiki can be set up that will point us to specific files that need to be changes for creating a new race.

Here's hoping that happens sooner than later.

Busy looking at all the entity files to figure out all the possible argument types for buffs/abilities Hoping IC will have time to release a complete listing, that would be awesome.