"Rise of the Shadows" Mod Update: July 18, 2011 news

Hello everyone,

Well, since the last mod news update I have made a lot of progress in finishing up the first version of the mod:

Right now, all the xml coding is complete for the first version of the mod. Unfortunately, I can't get weapons on the Skyhook to be implemented still, but it remains a good defensive platform that can carry a lot of escort fighters and bombers to the space battles.The only real thing that I plan to do between now and when it's released is go over the text files for the units to make sure they are relevant to the plot of the mod. So far I have only went through data text files in terms of the planets and the units I added that were new in comparison to the original Absolute Corruption mod. So for the units that I am going to keep that were from the Absolute Corruption mod, I'm going to edit the data text files and make sure they don't feel too much out of place from the background plot theme of the mod.

With that said, in terms of units, I have done some revamping for both the ones I added and the ones that were from the original Absolute Corruption mod. Due to several earlier requests, I made sure that the Imperials will get more units in the mod that you would not most likely not see in the vanilla version of the galactic campaigns. The buildable Imperial units and heroes include: Imperial bodyguards, Admiral Daala, Juggernaut vehicle (like the one from the Clone Wars), Imperial and Victory class type II star destroyers, the Executor Super Star Destroyer, Eclipse Super Star Destroyer, and Lancer class frigates.

I have also made sure that the Rebels and the Consortium would be able to have some buildable pirate type of units that they can recruit if they have a cantina in one of the worlds that normally allows for it. The Rebels and the Consortium in this instance can both recruit pirate fighters, IPV corvettes, bounty hunters, and smugglers. On top of that I made sure since the Consortium is the more black market prone faction to be able to recruit other units from the cantina that Rebels and definitely not the Imperials will be able to recruit such as sand skiffs, land speeders that kind of look like swoop vehicles, swamp speeders, and some type of mercenary AT terrain vehicle. Also the Rebels will be able to build certain kinds of space vessels on certain worlds known to be aligned with them if they have control over those worlds such as N1 starcraft from Naboo, Bothan cruisers from Bothawui, and Corellian capital ships from Corellia. *Note for all these unit changes, this mod is intended to be used for the various galactic conquest campaigns, and I don't know if skirmish mode will work for the mod. Most likely not because I'm not having luck in figuring out how to make the skirmish mode work on my computer, but if you guys are into the galactic conquest campaigns then don't worry. The mod works well for the single player galactic conquests campaigns, since it was intended to. I would also imagine that if two people were playing the mod, it would work well in the multiplayer campaigns also.

Oh yeah, I also changed the faction banner colors for the Consortium from yellow to orange. Some of you might wonder why, but frankly I don't like the color yellow and I thought orange would be a cool color to assign to the Consortium faction.

Other than that, not much else is new and I plan to try to get through the last of the data text files this week. After that, all that really remains is for me to make another intro video for the mod, make readme files (credits, installation, and a relatively short manual telling you what's new with this mod and what and where are the new units located to be trained), and to manually save all the files under a new folder in order to duplicate it (this takes about two days). Right now, I would say the mod is on track to be released either by the end of July or the first week of August. I am debating about finding a few people to beta test it for bugs since I just encountered two today while gametesting the last of my xml changes that took some troubleshooting to fix. If I do this and find people to beta test it, it will probably delay the release of the mod by about two weeks, but I need feddback comments for people to tell me if they think this would be worth it. Personally, I would say yes because I don't want to release the mod as soon as I'm done without have a small group of people to gametest the mod with me to see if there are any potential bugs that need to be fixed. But please let me know what any of you guys think about this?

Best regards,

Darth_Rex