Final Frontier dev diary 1 news - Star Trek: Armada 3 mod for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Hello everyone Max Loef here,

Today i want to talk to you about what kind of new planets you can expect to see in TFF (The final frontier) and we go about making them.

Creating a planet for TFF is relativly easy, our good vorta Ambarenya has created a HUGE list of planets we're adding to the game. This list is based on star trek lore and canon. Taken from various sources and with references from allot of other sci-fi and real life data.

We use this spreadsheet to plan out what planets (and stars and other gravity wells) we are going to make and also allows for a grand overview of what has been done and what we still need to create.

With TFF we will be adding a whole bunch of new planet types, in CTA we created most new planet types with a piece of software called space engine. While this created a lot of nice planets it wasn't a very easy piece of software to use, in TFF we switched to a new program called Grand Designer. Grand Designer can be found on steam for a relatively low price and is an amazing piece of software.

Grand Designer on Steam

Now that you know of grand designed its time to show you what we can do with it. We start with creating the planet in the programm, we can make anything from a nice Class-M world to a huge giant. the program is very flexible and allows us to create pretty much anything we can think of. Here are some examples.

The next step in the process is to export the textures from the program, we export textures with specific properties to ensure the transition to the game is as smooth as possible.

1. Base ground color

2. Base Water Color

3. Ambient Occlusion

4. Curvature

Using those for textures we can start getting it ready for the game.

The base ground color defines the simple colors for the ground, so for a desert planet it would be a sand color and as you can see below on the far right here it adds the grass and polar caps. If you look right beside it you can see the water map, that combined with its own layer mask tells where the water will go and what color it will be. Next up the ambient occlusion and curvature maps add some depth to the texture, we would use a normal map if we could but unfortunately planets don't support those.

You can see in this image how all the maps combined create the basic plantery texture. This is the basis we will use to prep it for the game engine.

Now that we have our basic texture ready it time to get specific for Sins, sins planets are divided into 2 textures, a color map and a data map. The color map in RGB is basically the main thing you will see, however in its alpha channel you can find the specular or reflective map, this tells where the planet will be shiny by the sun. The Data texture in its RGB channels is simple the night time map, so for example on an M-class planet it would show you where the cities would go and on an A-class planet all the Lava lakes would be visible. On that texture the alpha channel tells it where it will bloom. Bloom is that extra glow for the game.

Now that we've done all this lets have a look at what it looks like in-game. With the example i showed you i was teasing the Class-M Arboreal world a heavily forested would that will greatly benefit any empires economy should any of you be able to capture one.