Stargate Invasion - Dev Change Log 2 news

Stargate Invasion - Dev Change Log 2

Intro

Beware, the Goa’uld are on their way! We’ve started adding and fixing the Goa'uld ships. In this changelog you can also find out about some of the technical texturing work that has been going on since the last changelog.

GitHub Repository

SGI is available as a GitHub repository. These files are public and can be downloaded or synced freely, even without a GitHub account. Our experience with GitHub has been very positive so far.

In general, please refrain from attempting to push changes to the server. Instead, contact us on Discord to let us know what you have in mind.

Link: GitHub Repository

Link: Instructions for installing / syncing the mod via GitHub

Current Faction Release Order & Roles

The order may change but we'll keep this section updated if it does.

Playable:

1. Tau'ri (Enabled)
2. Asuran (Enabled)
3. Goa'uld (Disabled - integration has started)
4. Wraith (Disabled -release date to be determined)
5. Asgard (Disabled -release date to be determined)

Not Playable:

• Travellers
• Multiple possible roles - Events, Neutral Planet Fleets, Outlaw Sectors Fleets
• Currently under development - 5 ship designs so far including original Traveller ship from the show as a high detail model.

• SG1 Replicators
• Pirate Faction
• Concurrent development with other factions starting sometime next year.
• Ori
• Planned for Events mainly but an entire faction could be designed and built eventually.
• Release date to be determined.

Spotlight Videos

For anyone that wishes to post spotlight videos featuring SGI:

• Please mention that this is a developer build and that not everything is as we intend it to be.
• Since this is an incomplete mod, don't treat the spotlight video as a review. Presenting the work is fine but comments about what should have been included are obviously not since we may already have plans that we haven't stated. Once we are ready, we will let you all know that reviewing is in order.
• Before making the video, download and install the mod again from our GitHub repository so that you are featuring the latest version (or fetch the latest updates if you are using the GitHub Desktop app).

Thanks for sticking to the above! Now for our change-log:

Goa’uld Faction

Goa’uld ships and structures added to SGI:

• Meltak Siege Capital:
• Design and model created by Epytron_Omega
• Model: UVs for Textures and Lighting -> ready to be textured
• Shield Mesh.
• Temporary textures.
• Weapon Points and other Hardpoints added.
• Entity: altered to fit the weapons setup, shield mesh linked and minimum zoom distance adjusted.

• Cheops Colony Capital (Ra Mothership):
• Optimized model - lowered polygon count.
• Fixed shading issues - hard edges were set.
• Fixed lighting issues - created unique secondary UV map specifically for the lighting/tangents.
• Hardpoints were redone, minimum zoom distance was adjusted.
• New shield mesh.

Before:

After:

• Maat Heavy Cruiser:
• Design created by Dave975 & DKealt for the Stargate Ship Pack (Star Trek: Bridge Commander) and provided to us by Stargate Pegasus Chronicles.
• Geometry cleanup and major rebuild - lowered poly count while at the same time increasing overall quality, especially for the curved section to prevent shading issues in game.
• UVs for Textures and Lighting -> ready to be textured
• Textured by Ace_Fighter
• Shield mesh.
• Weapon Points and other Hardpoints added

• Hokkesh Cruiser Carrier
• SGI 1.8 model
• Fixed texture connections (was black before)
• Temporary textures
• Death Glider Fighter
• Model: complete rebuild and UVs for Textures and Lighting -> ready to be textured
• Temporary textures
• Capital Ship Factory
• Model: UVs for Textures and Lighting -> ready to be textured
• Temporary textures, adjusted minimum zoom distance

Strings

- Numerous strings have been added for the Goa'uld along with some missing strings for other races.

Balancing

For Asuran & Human Factions:

-

For Asuran Faction:

-

For Human Factions:

• Human Asgard beam range for the weapons platform was increased from 5000 to 6500.

Various Fixes

• Added/Connected Goa'uld Hyperspace Travel Particle, ChargeUp & Exit particles.
• Goa’uld Fighter/Bomber Squad Link fix.
• Zoom distances adjusted for Goa’uld Jantak, Hatak & Asuran Ogen
• Placeholder textures for Asuran Starbases.
• Asuran Starbase shield mitigation issue was fixed.

Clean up

• Mod size was reduced by over 500MB and thousands of files that were unnecessary.

UI / Skin

- Goa'uld Skin

Abilities & Research

New/Modified Abilities (Tau’ri/Human Faction)

• Orbital Asgard Core Overload
• Now the same as the Capital version which increases energy weapon firing rate.
• AG3 beam
• The ability was buffed by reducing cooldown time.
• Tartarus Canon
• LV3 canon now requires a LV8 titan
• Fixed LV2 limit issue, it can now reach LV3
• Goa'uld Research - In development

We welcome suggestions for possible Artifacts or research based on Artifacts both for currently available and potential new ones. These Artifacts should have considerable quasi game changing benefits for at least one, or possibly two faction. Post your ideas in the comments section of this progress report and we will see if they can be incorporated into the new Exploration research sections.

FX

• Goa’uld shield color from SGI 1.8

Texturing & Modeling

See Goa’uld section above

Workflow & Pipeline (Technical!)

Since the last changelog, much has been done to find a solution to the issue of texturing massive amounts of ships from different factions quickly and with minimal team resources. While this section is very technical and definitely not for the faint hearted, I felt that it important to explain what is happening when there are no posts to be seen;).

In order to get a mix of flexibility, texture complexity and speed I decided to extend and generalize the Substance Painter Asuran material filter we already had for use with any faction. That decision has lead down the rabbit hole and ended up involving the creation of a system within a system. Some of you might be aware that Substance Painter is now capable of using painted height details by means of Anchor Points. While this works, I felt it would be better for us to be able to use height information without having to tag each height layer in every procedural generator used.

To achieve a live workflow in Painter so that any painted stroke in a height layer is immediately used by all generators above to add damages or other procedural details, I made a system of filters in Substance Designer to be used in Painter.

Multiple issues presented themselves along the way, for instance the available node for ColorID to mask in Substance was unable to recognize soft painted strokes no matter which setting I tried. That led to the creation of a custom ColorID to mask using basic mathematics and logic to lock down our ColorID colors into a flat mask. This custom ColorID to mask is now capable of recognizing any painted stroke, even if the alpha for the brush was very soft and because it was created from rudimentary mathematics nodes, it’s also 5 or more times faster than using the Designer ColorID to mask.

The next issue popped up when trying to add the ability for us to blend materials against a base material. Providing those options was causing major slowing down to the system so the solution ended up being to rebuild the blend functionality from the same basic mathematics nodes, using the blending formulas provided by the World Wide Web Consortium. The result was once again 5 or more times faster. Here’s an image of the Soft Light blending mode as inside this custom blend:

The main point of the above, and why speed is so important, is that we can layer multiple damage or grunge layers on top of each other and modify/fine tune each easily. All the while seeing the final look of the whole where any details painted are affected immediately by the procedural grunge/damage/variation layers. The faster the system, the more of these we can place and the higher the texture complexity can get before the whole thing grinds to a halt.

You can see some tests of the system in the videos below:

New SGI Texturing Tools Part 1 - Mod DB

SGI Texturing Tools Part 2 - Materials Layering - Mod DB

Currently, the grunge and damage is handled by the Mask Builder node from Substance Designer which, while offering heaps of options, is also one of the heaviest nodes and is the main cause of slowdown in the system. It’s about 4 times slower by itself compared to all the other custom filters put together. My plan is to eventually have a library of different grunge, damage and texture variation nodes available to us and many of these will probably be made entirely inside the Substance Designer pixel processor through use of basic math, assuming this is possible. That should make the system fast enough for realistic texturing on a grand scale that will work not only for Sins of a Solar Empire but also for any game SGI might move to in the future.

Here is one of the latest results where the ColorID masks are being affected by another Mask Builder filter between the ColorID to Mask Filter and the Material Blending Filter:

And with a few changes to the Material Blend Filter options: