Comments - Hoho5000

Hello everyone. Just to let you all know, I have resumed work on this mod. I would have posted sooner, but I just got my PC fixed. Also, the hard drive that I had all the mod files on seems to have crashed. Thankfully, I have most of the files backed, so nothing was really lost.

I'll be posting pics as things get done, so keep your eyes peeled!

I'm working on particle effects, including explosions.

This mod is (unfortunately) nowhere near finished, and some of the ships and whatnot in the latest release are either missing, or not complete.

Fighters and bombers don't have shields because the game is hard coded not to allow shields on fighters. To combat this, and I realize it isn't quite the same, fighters and bomber do regenerate health.

Also, there are only a few abilities currently in game. The Charybdis will actually work in the final release.

Done. :)

You also would have been wrong. :)

I am so sorry for the lack of anything for the past few months. I was working on this before I moved, but due to compression errors, and getting settled in with a new job and apartment, Midnight Joker only got the files I was working on the other day.

Just so you know, no, this mod is not dead. If it was, I would have let you all know. I will continue to work on the project when I can, however, Midnight Joker is now the lead man.

Hello everyone. You may have noticed that I stopped updating this page about three weeks ago. Well, that's because I've been away from home. More specifically, at my uncle's house. He's been fighting cancer for a little over a year now. He was doing quite well until this past month when he declined quite a bit. Now he needs someone with him at all times. He can't be left alone, as he can't move on his own, or feed himself. His wife takes good care of him,but she needs help. They both need the family around. I am not currently employed or in school, so I am not missing anything important by being with them most of the week each week. The project has been put on hold (at least at my end) for the time being.

I'm moving from Washington (yes, the state) to Florida in early February, and once that happens, I will be working and have a significantly lower amount of time to put into this project than I have had these past few months. If I do have time to put together a release, you will have it by early February. If that doesn't happen, I have no idea when it will be released. I'll figure things out with MidnightJoker.

Sorry I don't have better news.

Actually, the Ravana can deal a huge amount of damage to it. The Ravana has most of its beam cannons facing forward (extreme damage potential), but the Colossus has its cannons spread out over the ship. One on one, the Ravana can take out the Colossus. That is of course, not factoring in fighters and bombers (or even completely accurate weapons stats). The weapons may need to be revised slightly due to the way Sins handles things.

I'll be out of town until Friday, and while I will have access to most of my files, I won't have access to any of my editing tools (XSI, Photoshop, Goldwave), so I won't be able to work on the project much until probably next Monday. I have some music performances that will take up much of the weekend. I'll try and post some more screenshots over the next few days, but don't expect much.

I've posted a couple more before I leave.

I actually already put the Ravana in-game.

All Terran warships are in-game! I've posted a couple of screens showing most of them. The interface is still a work in progress, but you can see some of the changes in the second screen.

No word on a beta yet. Like I said, there's a whole bunch of interface stuff to fix, the tech tree, plus all the other GTA ships that aren't in yet not to mention all the weapons that need to be fixed. There's still a lot to do before a release is plausible, but rest assured, I'm working as fast as I can.

I spent a lot of time today working on some interface stuff, the tech tree and figuring a lot of things out. Later today, after I wake up ;), I'll have all GTA warship models in-game (that's good news right?). After that, I'll either continue on with rest of the GTA models, or do some more interface stuff...

Facing one, It can take down an Orion in seconds :).

Done :). It's too bad there can't be texture animations on ships, because that's the only thing that's missing that would make it look even better.

Yeah, I'm focusing on the GTA because I'm trying to get at least one race completely done (well, the models at least).

Unfortunately, the turrets can't be animated in Sins. Even if you could make them point at their targets, there's no point to them rotating, because each hardpoint has a fixed field of fire in the direction it's pointing. I believe animated meshes are possible through particles (I might try that for the Faustus), but like I said, it wouldn't work for turrets.

Yes, the HTL models are being used, but not for fighters. However, the HTL maps are being used for fighters, so they don't look terrible.

Just FYI, I'm adding screens of models that are 100% good to go in-game. Most of the models are ready to get in game, but I'm going through them on a one on one basis to make sure that they're scaled right, the meshpoints are setup correctly for the particle effects and weapons, and the textures are set up for team colors and whatnot. That should give you a pretty good progress report model-wise. After all the models get in, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done.

Thanks. I would have had more up, but I went out of town for Thanksgiving and didn't have enough time before I left to put any more up.

Sure. There isn't much gameplay-wise yet, as I'm still trying to work out a bunch of bugs, texture issues, sounds, etc. A trailer won't really be possible until that happens, but I'm adding some more screens.

Yes, this project is still alive. We don't really have a time frame for release at the moment, but you can probably expect something before the end of this year.

This mod will be Entrenchment compatible, I just don't know when.

I'm not dead, I was just fully occupied with my senior year of high school, but yes, my personal project is dead. However, I'm joining forces with the FS2 Mod Project, who have done a lot while I was away, but right now, the project is a little dead.

Sorry for the delay. I'm having problems orienting the ships in XSI Mod Tool and getting them textured correctly. It seems to be a bit unstable too... I'm looking into the SCP models right now. I could use them for the capital ships. The only problem with the capital ships (not the fighters and not just the SCP models) is that they often have many textures. In UAW, I'm pretty sure you could only have one texture map per model, and in Sins, I know you can have more than one, but is there a limit? I really don't want to have to remap and reapply textures for every ship. Oh, and no, I do not have a website.

Yes, but it's not technically a beam, it's just a bunch of lasers that are fired very rapidly. When you put something like that on a big ship in space, let's just say it doesn't look good. Plus it gets difficult to add more than one, and the list goes on. Believe me, I've tried all the options for EAW. I guess it couldn't hurt to switch. I'll start trying to figure out XSI Mod Tool...

I might consider switching engines, but I like the Alamo engine. It would have been so much simpler to get this into SWEAW, but it doesn't support beams. I'm going to wait until the mod tools are released to see what can be done, if anything. Probably the most challenging problem would be the space issue. Assuming they left most of the code from SWEAW, it should work. If I can't get what I want in UAW, then I will choose a different engine. I will look into Sins of a Solar Empire. I've never played it before, so I'll have to try it out. It looks good though.

Sorry I haven't updated in a while, but I've been busy, and the mod tools still haven't been released yet. As soon as that happens, I hope to have some more results, but expect a lot of my progress to be made this summer.

Actually, Volition made Freespace 2 open source, and the game is distributed for free. You can check out the community at www.hard-light.net..

The shaders on the models in that picture are from FoC, yes. The UAW ones work on some of the model, but then on the rest of it, you see the generic texture. If you look closely, you can see dark and odd looking spots on the models in that picture. That's the generic texture. Aside from that, I didn't really spend much time on tweaking the shader settings as of yet. I just wanted to see if the old exporter would work. The models and textures are from the original Freespace 2 game made by Volition. They aren't the greatest for this game, but it's either those, or super high-poly ones, which wouldn't work well for what I'm planning to do. I could use those for the cap ships, but not for the fighters.