Rise of the Black Sun - Rise of the Crime Lords's origin news

It was a warm summer evening in ancient Greece...wait, that sounds wrong, oh yes, I got it now. It was actually a hot summer day in Croatia. It's 2008 and I'm in my 9th grade (In Croatia that's first year of highschool). I'm searching for my EAW and FOC DVDs when I remember I've loaned FOC to a friend that's out of town for the next month.

I install EAW but I feel something's missing, I want to play with some underworldly faction, I want to have a fleet of pirate frigates, they were my favorite ships...

Well, it seems I have to take matters into my own hands, just like with dozen other games, if I want to play a game I really like I have to mod it myself...no matter, I'm up to the challenge and I know it's gonna be fun!

So, first analyze the game...hmm, all some weird databases, it seems I need to find an extractor. My good ol' filefront might hold it, along with other tools. I take the extractor, ALO editor, dds plugin for photoshop.

And I begin, edit factions.xml, make variation of the units that are buildable, research for Black Sun heroes, edit a GC to add Falleen, it's only logical to have the homeplanet of Black Sun's leader, the mighty Prince Xizor.

But EAW is giving me trouble, you can't select the Black Sun easily, UE problem, also, the game is crashing when playing against them and they build more than 2 ground structures, wtf is that?

Meanwhile my friend returned and gave me back my FOC, after some careful planning I decide to switch the mod to FOC, just a few modifications needed. FOC solved the UI problem for me. I have some discussions on how to solve the ground base problem and just as it seemed impossible I find ground structure levels xml, other modders dismiss my solution as that file is an "remnant of the old ground system the game had". I try it out, and guess what - IT WORKS...that's right, I was the first one on filefront forums to solve that crash with additional factions - hooray for the 15yo kid.

Another thing is important - the name. I have few ideas, the community also provided some so I ran a poll to decide - Rise of the Crime Lords wins with 43.48%

At the same time Warb_null and zThreerOhx are providing me with fantastic models that are taking the mod to the next level.

The promised deadline is approaching, and at the last moment I make an important decision, I'm gonna add the Hutts,. Why? Believe it or not, it was because I liked their hero shadowblob.

Another two weeks pass, I do the same thing for the Hutts as I did for the Black Sun and only one thing is left...I have to check the singleplayer campaign. My promise was that the mod won't interfere with normal gameplay, just expand upon it. A few fixes here and there and it's done.

V1.0 Rise of the Crime Lords, 100.1 MB, up on filefront.