It's been a long time.

[IskatuMesk]

Pretty sure that isn't the same guy.

[mark_009_vn]

Aren't you the same person who released that campaign that mesk made fun of a while back? I think you said the same thing about chewing broken glass then as you did now.

That was like a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time ago

[NigelTittysh]

india's been around for a dong time, mark.

[Ardis]

Aren't you the same person who released that campaign that mesk made fun of a while back? I think you said the same thing about chewing broken glass then as you did now.

There are a thousand better ways you could have asked that question.

I never released a campaign. I released a work in progress of the mod itself back in 2010, but there was no campaign for it, just a handful of horribly imbalanced ships and ugly placeholder buildings because I was more worried about functionality and stability over balance at that point.

[NigelTittysh]

I'm from India, English is hard.

edit: found it

[Ardis]

I think I'm officially giving up on the mod for good this time. The list of reasons are fairly hard to overcome limitations of Starcraft or sprite based RTS's in general.

-Scaling. Some of the capital ships are supposed to be over a kilometer in length. The size difference between the capitals and fighters would leave the fighters too small to actually see or at least too small to discern any difference between one fighter and the next. Also, planets are going to be tough to handle...
-Space is not a 2D plane.

Starcraft specific:
-Limited sprite count. Because Starcraft mods work by replacing existing content, I have a limited number of slots for sprite files, thus setting a hard limit on the unit diversity. I have a limited number of units, but I can easily gut unused and hero units if needed.
-Limited color palette. If I could get Blender to render in 256 color mode, then this wouldn't be an issue as I could see the result before having to add it into the mod to see it, then adjust the original and repeat.
-Crashing. I have found certain things to be VERY temperamental about modding, engine overlays among them. If you change it in any way the game doesn't like, the game will crash until you reverse the change.
-Hard coding. Some things in Starcraft can't be touched at all and your best options are to either leave that unit out entirely or find some workaround for it. Example being the Leviathan (built on the Siege Tank), I couldn't change the number of frames used in its transformation, so I had to redo the animation to match the frame count of its transformation and make the turret invisible because you can't remove that either!


I suppose the universe I've created for this mod will find another form to live on in one day. For now, it sits in a folder as a collection of text documents and a ton of Blender models.

I could look for a 3D space RTS to build it on, but there aren't really any out there that have what I'm looking for.
-From what I've been hearing from Mesk, Sins of a Solar Empire is a mess to mod. I bought the game years ago to try it out to see if it would be a good platform for my mod and found myself at odds with the game length.
-Star Wars: Empire at War has mod support out of the box and a hardpoint system so you can take out important stuff first, but I can't get the game to run on Windows 7 for some reason. Also, not too fond of the way the game handles capital ship health (your ship's health is solely determined by the number of hardpoints it has; turrets, engines, shields, hangars.) Also, land battles...

Building it as a space sim could be fun and a better way to experience the world, but finding one that has all of the features I want (landing in stations, etc.) will be tough. Making a space sim from scratch will be a bit too much work for me alone, but modding might be within the realm of my time and [general lack of] skills.

[IskatuMesk]

Haha. If I told you the scaling differences of the ships in ITAS or UF you might throw up. Hint - Some fighters are a kilometer.

Also, don't tell every movie ever made that space is a 2d plane. Their jimmies would go into maximum rustle.

Overlays assume comands from parents. So, things like engines need a way to exit out of the parent's animations. Also, the parent can't call animation counts the engine doesn't have.

Tanks really are a lovely bundle of hardcode.

There aren't any good space RTS'. If you hate hardcode, your options are basically Unreal 4 or bust.

[Ardis]

The "Space is not a 2d plane" thing was more of a joke. Could you imagine how much of a headache it would be trying to play an RTS where you're managing your fleet with the full three dimensional environment?

Fighters... kilometer... Trying to visualize that. Are these piloted by giants who sleep on beds the size of football fields?

The problem I had with overlays was that I was trying to create a new one for the larger ships and something about it didn't sit well with the mod. The game crashed whenever said unit attempted to move.

I found a free open source engine that could be used, but it has issues:
-I don't know the limitations of this engine.
-It has a UI that looks like Warcraft II because this RTS engine started out as a Warcraft II clone.
-Something on the forums suggests that higher quality sounds will crash it (and I'm a stickler for high quality audio.)

Then there's SpringRTS which I might look into another time.

Anyways, I think I'm going to try to find a different medium for this universe's introduction.

Either way, I was already going to download the free version of UDK to build the prototype for my other project. Finally getting around to doing that.

Might work on something for this universe on there in my spare time.

[IskatuMesk]

The fighters depend on the world, really. They may not even be piloted.

Attempting to move - the overlay may not have the header the parent asks for or may not be the right type or something. I forget the exact specifics, but BW is extremely picky about iscript stuff.

[mark_009_vn]

-Star Wars: Empire at War

I looked into Empire at War once, no use trying to mod it, for once it was a huge mess in terms of it's data hierarchy, files are just scattered all over the place linking to each other in the most retarded ways possible... If that doesn't deter you enough, there is no particle effect system, the game spawned explosions as 2D SPRITES regardless of Z-culling, so explosions from haft the map away, obscured by mountains or huge capital ships, are still visible...

It is a huge clusterfuck.

Starcraft is actually some of the more soft-coded RTSes around (that said alot), given all the reverse-engineering people did over the years. Game companies simply don't want people to mod their games, this is especially true for the RTS genre, and the ancient engines they still use is no help either...

If it weren't for certain things and space being impossible to implement, I would recommend C&C: Generals as the last safe haven in RTS mods, it's relatively easy to mod, there are certain gimmicks in the game that offered a fair degree of modding flexibility (bike-logic for once), and data-structure not being made by retards. That to be said, there are some crippling hard-coded issues...

Unreal is probably your best bet... unfortunately.

[Ardis]

Unless I can find a good open source RTS to build on. Going to look into SpringRTS again this weekend, but I am starting to think I should just not make this an RTS at all.

[mark_009_vn]

Unless I can find a good open source RTS to build on. Going to look into SpringRTS again this weekend, but I am starting to think I should just not make this an RTS at all.

Well... It's all depends on how much effort you are willing to devote to the project... Nothing is really impossible, even when dealing with the likes of Starcraft. For instance, some guy spent countless hours reverse engineering and mapping all the hard-coded functions in the Starcraft exe, and as a result we have BWAPI plus all that plug-in once thought impossible... All boils down to how much you are willing to endure and how far you wanted to take with it...

[wibod]

-Star Wars: Empire at War

I looked into Empire at War once, no use trying to mod it, for once it was a huge mess in terms of it's data hierarchy, files are just scattered all over the place linking to each other in the most retarded ways possible... If that doesn't deter you enough, there is no particle effect system, the game spawned explosions as 2D SPRITES regardless of Z-culling, so explosions from haft the map away, obscured by mountains or huge capital ships, are still visible...

It is a huge clusterfuck.

Starcraft is actually some of the more soft-coded RTSes around (that said alot), given all the reverse-engineering people did over the years. Game companies simply don't want people to mod their games, this is especially true for the RTS genre, and the ancient engines they still use is no help either...

If it weren't for certain things and space being impossible to implement, I would recommend C&C: Generals as the last safe haven in RTS mods, it's relatively easy to mod, there are certain gimmicks in the game that offered a fair degree of modding flexibility (bike-logic for once), and data-structure not being made by retards. That to be said, there are some crippling hard-coded issues...

Unreal is probably your best bet... unfortunately.

You realize that Empire at War is incredibly easy to mod right? The engine has issues, but moddability isn't one of them since adding and subtracting units is just sticking shit into text files since everything is in LUA.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/thrawns-revenge

They've stuck new game modes, factions, an entirely new era system, planets and maps and close to 100 units. The next release is also putting in some sort of diplomacy system as well. Go be retarded elsewhere.

[mark_009_vn]

everything is in LUA

From my understanding, the LUA functions in EoW are there mostly to support "mapping" and AI related stuff (adding, removing units, play cinematic, move units through per-defined paths, etc... )... No, not everything is LUA, for once don't think there are any LUA functions related to units, but I can be wrong because I haven't dick around with the game enough... (edit: never-mind, there are some, limited, but there are, FoC sports some slightly more useful functions, but never touched it so I can't really comment on it...)

As much as I would have liked it otherwise, of all the games I modded that have it implemented, the developers only ported a handful of C++ functions into LUA, modders just keep running into hard-coded limitations after limitations because, technically, 90% of the game is still hard-coded...

Those things you showed me looked impressive, but it's probably no more than "these are what we managed to achieved working around the game's limitations"... this is definitely true for any mods for any game in that there are things you just cannot do, the way some games are created dictates that implementing something would be easier than others...

Go be retarded elsewhere.

I know, Its my status quo and all.

haha

Just to correct myself, I do realized I shouldn't have said Generals, of all things, to be the last safe haven of modding, because it just escaped my mind at the time how much limitations I had with it... No, I took that statement back, there are ABSOLUTELY no RTS game engines really worth modding if you don't want to live with hard-coded limitations...

C&C 3 and RA 3 had me considering for a split second, before I realized you cannot interact with GUI elements using LUA codes, so just to set an example, something as simple like Starcraft style mana bar would be really hard to implement, impossible, or require ridiculous hack-jobs...

[wibod]

everything is in LUA

From my understanding, the LUA functions in EoW are there mostly to support "mapping" and AI related stuff (adding, removing units, play cinematic, move units through per-defined paths, etc... )... No, not everything is LUA, for once don't think there are any LUA functions related to units, but I can be wrong because I haven't dick around with the game enough...

As much as I would have liked it otherwise, of all the games I modded that have it implemented, the developers only ported a handful of C++ functions into LUA, modders just keep running into hard-coded limitations after limitations because, technically, 90% of the game is still hard-coded...

Those things you showed me looked impressive, but it's probably no more than "these are what we managed to achieved working around the game's limitations"... this is definitely true for any mods for any game in that there are things you just cannot do, the way some games are created dictates that implementing something would be easier than others...

Go be retarded elsewhere.

I know, Its my status quo and all.

haha

Just to correct myself, I do realized I shouldn't have said Generals, of all things, to be the last safe haven of modding, because it just escaped my mind at the time how much limitations I had with it... No, I took that statement back, there are ABSOLUTELY no RTS game engines really worth modding if you don't want to live with hard-coded limitations...

C&C 3 and RA 3 had me considering for a split second, before I realized you cannot interact with GUI elements using LUA codes, so just to set an example, something as simple like Starcraft style mana bar would be really hard to implement, impossible, or require ridiculous hack-jobs...

You should probably stop posting since you obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

http://www.moddb.com/games/star-wars-em ... corruption

Also the two biggest limitations of the Alamo engine for a long time have been lag and a bug involving projectile spawning and despawning rendering long galactic conquest games broken. The latter bug has been fixed as modders made a tool to do that and a bunch of dev teams have been finding some fixes to the lag issue within the games particle system. Further than that at least one dev team apparently has a 'curved' map that has units moving between planes as they go through the map near the planet.