Tallaaron76

Join Date 06/2009

Looking for a fresh view point before pushing forward

Hello folks,

I am new to modding with Sins and I wanted to throw out some ideas to see what you all might think of to get a general poll if you will. Some of my reasons for doing this is to save time, and to find out what others in the modding community might find interest in. Several teachers have told me throughout my college degree on game design that I should take polls or get a feeling for what others might feel would be interesting. This is an attempt at that. I am going to break this down to something simple, as the races names will not be stated or completed till after any designs are finalized.

Junk Race:

The idea behind this race would be a parasitic race that uses the wrecks that are found in deep space to be used as their combat vessels. What I mean by this is that several ships have been destroyed during these wars, so the race has salvaged, patched and thrown these hulks or wrecks back into service. This would mean using broken and beaten (and highly modified to show long term combat damage) vessels of all the races trying to cover several areas. An example of this would be using the wreck of a Tech Capital ship that has several chunks out of it, and several patches armor pieces wielded on to it in odd angles as one option, while they might have other racial ships as two of the five. The remaining capital ships would be built from ships that had been smashed into and merged into one. So this race in my eyes would be a floating junk pile of random ships that are clearly damaged and unique in that manner. This is not a race that uses shields, but actually armor and HP values to make up the balance.

Biological Race:

I wish to be clear... This is not the Zerg or the Nid's (aka Tyranids). I am aware that those two races are widely known throughout the gaming field and gamers in general. I was looking to mix things up and take a different spin on things. Yes, there will be biological ships and some armor plating but also a lot of skin showing. My intention is to make this absorb planets and create films over them instead of the standard planet colonization effects we see in game (if that is possible). One idea that was thrown out is a seed/pod system that would give you a small chance of colonizing a planet for a highly reduced cost, or sending in groups of the pods at normal cost of a colony ship to get a perfect colonization.

I wish to be clear, this is mostly just throwing out very early ideas here to see what might stick with people as a whole. Because this is my first mod for Sin's I plan on only introducing one race. Getting outside ideas will also push us in possibly new directions that only one or two points of view is capable of. So please let me know what your thoughts are on this.

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GoaFan77

Join Date 10/2008

+629

Well first of all, what are your goals for this project? Is this a hobby because you like Sins and have the skills or more of some practice for your career? If the latter, are you looking at it more from an artistic or game mechanic stand point.

Really you could make either work. Both have the potential for unique game play and design style.

There actually isn't a lot of biological races I know of in Sins mods, Manshooter's unreleased mod has a lot of organic looking ships and the Star Wars mod has the Yuuzhan Vong, but that's it. The only thing with these is the lack of animations can make them look less authentic than the more standard and static metallic ships, and for their stuff you'll need to be very good with particle effects (you could do that with planet colonization with good particle use), as most of the Vanilla stuff probably couldn't be reused.

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GoaFan77,

Thank you for such hard hitting questions. I should have answered them but that just goes to show that college no matter what age, melts your brain.

Let's start with goals... If I run with the bio race, and lets face it... It is a personal favorite. I am going to start slow and build it up. So here is my list...

- Import a model (most likely a star base to start out)

- Make sure the normal maps/textures import correctly

- add particle effects

- Use particle effects to bring life to a standard model. (I think I would use a trick close to the gun turrets that was presented in a different post. Using this same said trick could provide the option to move and look a tad more fleshy.)

Then move from there...

If I am going to work on the parasitic race, it will follow the same basic steps. I am looking at this for both the fun and the technical stand point. Once I get these basic steps down, then I will be completing a full creation bible with the idea to add a fourth and possibly a fifth race at the greatest possible use.

Right now I am looking at this as a hobby but in my eyes that does not change the process either way. It is important to get practice and what better use then some quality time with my modeling, texturing and programming sides? I do have a backup programmer working with me so I will not be handling all of that. But once things get working and the process is doing pat, I do plan on making this a full mod that adds a full race with full research, and all the extras that go with that. During the beta process, this would be partial finishing the balancing required and finishing up any minor things that needed to be fixed. Some basic designs on the colony process for either race is already being tested from a particle stand point, but nothing even worth importing.

So in the end, this is for fun, but why not add it to the portfolio just because right?

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GoaFan77

Join Date 10/2008

+629

Quoting Tallaaron76,

reply 2

Thank you for such hard hitting questions. I should have answered them but that just goes to show that college no matter what age, melts your brain.

I'm still going through that period, no need to remind me. My modding is going to be at a serious slow down until mid may.

Quoting Tallaaron76,

reply 2

You can most certainly do this, though from what little about particle effects I know this can be a pain. It has been done in things like the Babylon 5 mod to create moving parts, but even small changes to the model (such as resizing) can force you to redo the particle to get it to fit again, and if too many particles are on screen the game will stop rendering them to save memory (though this limit is customizeable).

Quoting Tallaaron76,

reply 2

Right now I am looking at this as a hobby but in my eyes that does not change the process either way.

The main reason I asked is that from a modeling standpoint organic races are the hardest to do. I'm definitely stronger on the programming side, and I don't have the money for the good 3D programs that could make such tasks manageable, so the best I can do is take existing models and get them into Sins and low poly texturing. Even small organic looking models get high poly counts quick, and having to UV that polygon by polygon in what free programs I can get my hands on is not a fun job. But if you have a gaming certification you probably have some of the specialty programs to make that a lot easier.

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Bio-Starbase test

Yes, I am aware of a poly increase when using a biological view point. I currently run things like the photoshop package, 3DS Max/Maya, Mud box, ect. There is also a lot you can do with normal maps, and that means you take a low poly creation and add a high poly look to it. This might be one of those options when I do that since this is already sitting at an impressive 6k before any fluff is added.

Now if I am just using particle effects to make things like this look more realistic... That means when the particles have to be cut down, we are dealing with so many ships at that point that you would miss the smaller effects that I am talking about. Particles would be a good thing to use to make sections of the skin bulge or a bleeding effect instead of the common smoke from the hull. If I use particles to bulge sections of the skin, that also means resizing should not be as much of an issue until I get things all worked out and that is also why I plan importing before moving to particles. Get the size and shape right, and you can do a lot.

FYI: This is a low rez render just to get a visual feel for it. I am tempted to switch up the color setup for the teams. Maybe make the team color a primary with some gells on the base so it changes things up. But this is just a fanciful thought.

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