Articles - Sins of Kuromorimine mod for Sins of a Solar Empire II

"I spent the past couple months struggling with Blender (my MacBook kept overheating on it lol) and finally managed to make some renders to bring into Sins, only to realize they had a serious defect."

The defect, namely being, faces, or to be more exact, the sheer amount of faces. The Sins 1 engine could only handle 50,000 triangles at the very best, and the design of the ships meant that they were well past the limit (and I spent three months trying to figure out why didn't they boot into the game! LOL!)

Quite literally every ship rendered for SoK has literally 60k triangles or higher, and I just can't figure out how to decrease the poly count without completely wiping them off the map (AGAIN) and starting back from scratch...and to boot...

Which brings me to my next point: with the snail-pace rate of development that this mod is going through, we might as well say that it'll be out by the time Sins 2 is out, which means the mod's Rebellion (and buggy asfck) version would be obsolete well before it even gets released...so yeah, you can all guess where this is headed.

We're making this for Sins 2.

There's actually a few things going for us: that most assets already present are actually doctored to work with the S2 engine, and thus be rendered with seperate turrets from the hull, as well as the fact that many of the turrets were designed before the ships themselves were made, which kinda streamlines the process significantly. Which is going to bring me to my next point: For the short-term plan, I'll make all ships that are going to appear in the final release (within the decade, hopefully), and look at the coding structure when it's out (and hopefully have a dev mode to play around with). So....

let's just hope I get a second log entry out by the end of the next year, folks, because it's just chaos both in the team and where I am right now

In the last article I mentioned rendering the ships with Remastered shaders (? IIRC), and how Kuztenov was still struggling with the GameInfo (he was largely hampered by a notoriously unreliable computer and ungodly amounts of schoolwork, give him a break), and in the said article I said something about light cruisers with Remastered shaders (? again IIRC). So ya guess what? Here they aare!

*PS: Before you go, here's a link to the SoK Discord server: Discord.gg*

Beijing-class light cruiser (hull symbol: CL)

Edelweiss-class light cruiser (hull symbol: CL)

Athens-class light cruiser (hull symbol: CL)

Live-combat test (added ~19 HRS after posting this, forgot that MODDB has a 5-picture requirement for articles, lol)

Live-combat test, again

Out of the three, the Beijing and the Edelweiss are fairly straightforward: the former is a light, escort cruiser meant to provide fleets with a base of firepower while the other ships deal with the enemy, and the latter is an offensive frigate wolfpack leader that sacrifices some armor for mobility. The Athens-class however is a completely diffrent story entirely, the ship is for all intents and purposes a 'man-portable electronic warfare platform'. In fact, few would be the ship that could see through the dense jamming field the Athens-class generates on a daily basis, and even less would be prepared for the ship's exprimental point-defense lasers being utilized as an ad hoc directional jammer, blinding sensors over a wide arc and rendering enemy ships unable to find their targets, let alone engage them, while simutaneously painting the targets for friendly ships with far greater accuracy.

I'm pretty sure battleships would be next in line, and I'll try to make them done faster than the timescale on this one. Time flies, dosen't it?

I took a few months off from modding the game to learn how to make proper textures using the new Remastered shader system, and I will say, the time was worth it!

Now, I'll enlighten you on everything else that happened: In effect, a combination of Covid-19.exe, family things happening (hey, the old sailor's adage had it this way: If everything's going to plan, then nothing will go to plan), busing myself on learning the ropes of XSI (surprisingly, XSI proved extremely effective for what I was doing), Blender, for texture baking, among others. I also spent a fair bit of time learning how to do Remastered shaders properly, trying (and failing) at doing the -il maps for a fair bit of time. All in all, it took a fair bit of time for me to properly do the Remastered textures, but by far, in my opinion, it was worth it. And then the mod I was jury-rigging as a temporary codebase bugged out and messed around with the Remastered shaders, as well, so I ended up having to throw that one out and leave the project lead to deal with crafting up a new codebase.

Speaking of the project lead, Admiral Kuztenov (which is his Discord nametag, which is a helluva lot easier to type than Any-Condition-2313, which was his Reddit username), also got smacked with his own fair share of troubles. Vaccines, quarantine, power outages (and to make things worse, his laptop was infamous for overheating woes), literally. In his own words:

A computer that loves to overheat, helicopter parents, vaccines, and piles of schoolwork, yeah, not the best of situations for modding, I bet. And power outages love to happen as well.

Ayup.

The GameInfo was fun, though, mind you. I just had a massive headache trying to fit it into my now-hectic scedule which by this point has a random event like the Random Events in the base Sins game popping in and wrecking the whole thing over every five minutes and a half. But hey, it was fun.

Anyways, rant over. \/ (>_<)

Tokyo-class heavy cruiser (hull symbol: CA)

Murasame-class cruiser (hull symbol: CA)

Suzuya-class light cruiser (hull symbol: CL)

CNS Maya engages the Raganov-class titan TDV Ayako

CNS Chōkai fighting off pirate raiders

Sooo...Next up: Light cruisers. With Remastered shaders this time.

PS: Here's da Discord (^_^) Discord.gg

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE 2

You guys might've seen the official announcement for Sins 2 on PCGamer. For those who haven't, I've put a link below:

Pcgamer.com

Anyways, my point is, with the new Sins 2 upcoming, I've decided to completely re-evaluate the mod itself.

The first news to deal with, is, rotating turrets.

Image provided by Stardock.

First off the bat: The current meshes will be given a complete overhaul. You remember the ships in the Colonial proof-of-concept right? Those will now come with legit spinning turrets. The whole lore behind SoK's Colonial faction has mostly revolved around naval tactics resembling the First World War and the Second, with battleships and cruisers slugging it out in a drawn-out line-of-battle. Most of the combat tests involving the old ships simply had them firing in a head-on battle, with most of the guns firing on a sideways angle that looked kinda...unrealistic. With the new turreted ships update, ships would be finally able to do battle the way we envisioned it (for the Colonials at least): Line-of-Battle, Jutland style.

Imagine this, but in a battleline instead of facing you head-on. Image not made by me. Found on Google.

The same would also apply to the UNSC and Republic/CIS factions as well. Fleets would stand in a battleline (or for the UNSC, remain at a head-on battle pose) and slug it out. You would start needing to pay more attention to the battles unfolding than ever (or at least, the way I plan it to). Crossing-the-T? Game. Flanking attacks, Die Neue These style? Also game. CIWS turrets actually tracking and intercepting enemy aircraft and missiles? Also game.

There's piles of other things to discuss, but those are the bare bones, at least.

Now, the question remains: How much will it affect SoK's devenlopment? The answer is: it depends.

The current short-term plan is crafting all the meshes needed for the mod while simutaneously running the codes needed to jury-rig them into the game. This includes ship stats, research, pacts, and the like. So how will plans change?

If the mod is ready before early acess, then devenlopment will continiue as planned, and will be released for Rebellion with a version rigged for Sins 2 as soon as it comes out. If all the meshes are prepared by the time Sins 2 is released, then I'll try to get at it's internal scructure. If the meshes are compatible with the new Sins engine, then I'll rig them all into the game (with the required changes, of course). If they're not, then we'll rig up another set for the new Sins engine.

This pretty much concludes it for the moment. I'll try to get updates regularly once a month, but things tend to go south their own way. Anyways.

Here's a link to the Discord: Discord.gg

Also: I coudn't find any picture I could use for this article so I fished out the nearest pic of a ship I was trying to rig into the game lol

The past few months can be summed up in just one word: pain. Granted, I (we) were prepared for some issues and the like, but for the duration of the past few months literally nothing ever went to scedule. It was a total nightmare trying to hard-code the fleet into the game, let alone the research.

Untill I found the tutorials, that is. After Scepton managed to sneak a few capital ships into the game and I managed to 'EMP-burn' the names into the string, finally, at least things started going to plan. By far.

After a series of setbacks and catastrophic failures, we decided to completely re-evaluate everything and start from a completely diffrent approach altogether. Most of the olden methods included rope-a-dopeing the ships into the game first, and doing everything else from there, but instead, Scepton proposed another method: He would tackle the ships himself, while I went about my merry day on the GameInfo.

Easier said then done, though. The GameInfo was a damn maze of codes that I barely could understand. In a nutshell, it was literally a giant blender of words. But once I got the hang of it (once I calmed down, I realized it was almost Funky Trees simplified bruh), things started rolling.

That's my end. On Scepton's end, I'll put his words in:

Running a jury-rigged variant of SoK ended up too time-intensive, and I looked to another solution. Which was what I eventually did.

Rather than rigging up the mod from scratch, I simply laid it onto the bones of another mod already in existence. I chose Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Sea of the Stars mostly because it ran on the Dev.exe with the least errors to pop-up, had the least amount of .entity files, and was game for testing. So I basically hijacked it. Replacing the meshes used for the game were trivial, but the main hard part--by far--was rigging.

It took me weeks fighting the Softimage Mod Tool to actually get it to work. Textures, meshpoints, freeze models, and edges...Trust me, to this day I still have no idea where is the freeze button located. I run the ships on XSI 7.5, the tutorials are rigged for XSI 6.0. At least, I have GUL's and ZombieRus5's tutorials to actually get somewhere, but it still took forever to actually make any progress. Untill I got the hang of it, that is. Once I brought the first three ships in, it went as a breeze.

Anyways, rant over. \/

Kongo-class battleship (hull symbol: BB)

Tosa-class battleship (hull symbol: BB)

Tokyo-class heavy cruiser (hull symbol: CA)

Kiev-class heavy carrier (hull symbol: CAV)

Kirov-class guided-missile battlecruiser (hull symbol: CGB)

Myoko-class battlecruiser (hull symbol: CB)

Nagato-class battleship (hull symbol: BB)

Akitsumaru-class assault ship (hull symbol: CVA)

Also, a postscript:

Although granted, this is coming from a devenloper on the mod team, so take this with a grain of salt.

Anyways though. See you next time. Goodbye!

LAST MINUTE EDIT: Here's a link to our Discord: Discord.gg