Articles - Star Wars: New Order mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption

Main factions

Main factions are those ones which are (or will be) playable in skirmishes, sandbox-typed Galactic Conquests and scenarios. The main factions are classic: Empire and Rebellion, but depending on the timeline those factions are transformed into other ones which were in certain periods of time in Star Wars Expanded Universe. Our mod has 5 in-game eras at the moment, so, for example, Empire is reorganized at era 4 into Imperial Remnant and Rebellion - into New Republic.

Each faction (not only main ones, btw) can be also divided into smaller subfactions which could be not absolutely affilated with their dominant faction, but anyway they will replace it in certain scenarios.

Galactic Empire/Imperial Remnant

Subfactions:

• Isard's Government
• Thrawn Confederation
• Dark Empire
• Crimson Empire
• Maw Command

Alliance to Restore Republic/New Republic/Galactic Alliance

Subfactions:

• Jedi Order Remnant
• Clone Rebellion
• Hapes Consortium

Minor factions

The minor factions are playable, but can't be presented in era-transiting Galactic Conquests.

The first additional minor faction to come is 'Separatist Holdouts'. It is planned for version 0.6, so you will get an opportunity to clash battle droids with Imperial clones in 'Reconquest of the Rim' campaign or skirmishes. Their forces will be based on traditional CIS droids with a mix of pirate units, hutts and separatist troopers.

Separatist Holdouts

Subfactions:

• Dellso Uprising
• IG-88 Droid Army (possibly)

After the separatists side will be implemented into the mod, we will work on 'Warlords' side, a mix of imperial (and not only imperial) splinter factions, such as 'Zaarin Government', 'Zsinj Empire', etc. This side will be one of the main participants of Imperial Civil War campaigns. Each scenario will present different splinter sides, so the faction leaders and assortment of heroes will be varied in each scenario. The basic units of this side will be same as for Empire, but with some changes in roster.

Warlords

Subfactions: all non-mainstream imperial remnants and also some non-imperial factions (such as Duskhan League).

Those were all planned playable factions for today's status. After all of them will be added to the game, another sides may get possibilities to be presented.

Idle Factions

Some worlds at galaxy map will be garrisoned by an idle faction - 'Hostiles', non-playable side consisting of independent forces, pirates, slavers, etc. Another idle faction might have it's own AI to conquer another planets, this one will be 'Rogue Imperials' side which will be vastly presented in Imperial Civil War conflicts.

Rogue Imperials

Subfactions: all weak non-mainstream imperial remnants, lacking ability to gain enough power to fight with greater factions.

Hostiles

Subfactions: independent forces, pirates, slavers, etc.

WARNING: MENTIONED ABOVE INFORMATION CAN BE CHANGED IN FUTURE !

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Hello, everyone! In this article we will tell about all news after long silence. We had a long pause in our development process, so we will remind what we already done and what we plan to do in future.

Meshes...

Still working with ported content from DICEfronts. We had no time to finish all the models with animations we planned for the upcoming release, but we will complete this work in nearest future. For the release, we want to sort out with Imperial infantry first. Here are some screens showing our progress:

Some units are already tested in game. They are also WIP, but need less work on them rather than those which are showed above.

Concepts...

Other mods frequently use different content from other mods / games, so do we. And we also try to modify those content (especially, those of no use to us in it's original form) to better suit our needs. We have already done few WIP concepts which are shown below:

New Republic Trooper (Invasion comics) : kitbash of First Order Stormtrooper and Resistance Soldier.

Bria Tharen : retexture of Jyn Erso, needs some additional kitbash

Maps...

We have also resumed our work on new maps. So there you can see some:

Those are maps for Raxus Prime, Brigia, Derellium.

Hello, everyone. In this article we will tell you about the progress of last few months. It's sad to realize that we haven't reached everything what was planned at the beginning of this year. We decided to postpone the release at the beginning of next year, but all in all this doesn't means that we have nothing to please you :)

Still working with infantry

The problems with optimization and rigging took much more time as we thought. A question with optimization was solved rather quickly: using Frosty Editor was the answer, so it can easily manage level of details of each mesh from Battlefront (2015), where we take those models. What about rigging... progress there still goes, but very slowly. I hope with the help of Moddb community we will overcome all the issues we have faced and then everything will be all right!

Making maps

One of the important priorities for the next release is making new land & space maps for the new scenario, we will also change the vanilla maps to make them fit our new gameplay concepts and features. All the new maps are in 10x10 size, so each map will have a lot of space to provide an excellent warfare experience.

We have also made a tutorial about making maps, so if you're interested you can try yourself in mapping too :)

Tests

We are preparing a new test build and soon it will be available at our discord channel. If you want to participate and play testing - contact us there.

I have also decided to record one of the test skirmishes in space.
Sorry, but that was my first attempt to record some kind of "let's play", so the quality of the video turned to be poor, I hope the further records to be better in quality, huh.

A long time ago we created a Discord server for easier communication with our testers. As for now, we decided to open it for everyone who wants to join! :)
If you want to discuss something concerning mods, development or anything else on our channels - Welcome!

Discord.gg

Required tools

For making maps you need to download the Map Editor. You can get it on Petroglyph web-site, that is the link.
Then just install the tool into FOC root folder. Don't forget to download the patch for the editor, if you won't do this you will face many unpleasant problems (unpatched tool breaks mtd commandbar, as far as I know), so it is better to keep the editor updated.

I also recommend you to have Photoshop (or any other useful graphics editor) for making a height map - an image which can be loaded into the editor for generating landscapes. The first video will be about that, so if you're not interested in this moment you can skip that part.

After everything is done you will be in need of making a mini-map, for this purpose you have to go on Modtools.Petrolution.net again. There you can download a Map Preview Extractor which will create a mini-map for your map.

While extracting a mini-map for preview, resize it to 512x512 and convert to .dds format.

Height map

That is the first video for this tutorial, there I show how to make a simple height map in Photoshop.

The Editor

The second video is about the map editor, there you will see all steps to make a complete map.

I also suggest you to switch on the subtitles, because from time to time some useful hints will appear on the videos in subs.

Map Preview Extractor and finish steps

The final step is making a mini-map, as I mentioned before. Open your MPE tool and load your map in there, it will create a file which is needed to be placed in such root: ".../Data/Art/Textures".

Then just code your map in the game. Open the xml-file with coded-in planets (Planets.xml, for example). Choose a planet which your map was made for, find a line named as and just insert the name of your map (Your map should be placed in 'Maps' folder).

That is all! If you have found some mistakes in this article, please note us.