New Ship Meshes
As always, I like to try and include at least a couple new art assets with every release. It hasn't been that long since r0.96b went out but there are still a few goodies this time around too.
Goa'uld Osiris Class Carrier
This mesh comes courtesy of an old friend, Epytron Omega (former lead of Stargate Invasion). He did a fine job of coming up with a flagship Ha'tak-style carrier/battleship. I actually had this textured in-time for the last release but I hadn't gotten around to doing the rigging for Sins yet.
Ori Fighter
Another mesh courtesy of The Pegasus Chronicles. I did a little clean-up and gave it a fresh new texture set and here it is ready to go. Unfortunately, Sins does not support particle effects on strikecraft so the glowing ball at the rear could not be implemented like the other Ori ships so far. I still think it looks pretty good even without it though.
Wraith Scout
This is a fairly minor asset but Wolf_2.0's original texture for The Pegasus Chronicles for it left a little to be desired. So it's got a fresh coat of paint... er hide actually now and looks a little more cohesive overall.
Other Art Stuff
Icons and UI
Custom UI icons and pictures have been completed for all the new assets, as well as things like the Goa'uld strikecraft that had not been updated yet. This should cover all custom assets in the mod so far.
Texture Revisions
For this update, a pass was done on pretty much every texture for every custom asset in the mod. This was done to refine the mechanics of the textures and improve overall visual quality in-game. As you may or may not know, most of the texture work for the mod is done natively in PBR. Sins of a Solar Empire uses an older, legacy style shader though. That means that the textures are not directly transferable and have to go though a conversion process. As I've gone on, I've learned a few ways to get better end results from that conversion, and so those techniques have now been applied across all the assets.
The difference and level of improvement will vary from texture to texture and generally will be relatively subtle in most cases. Generally speaking, there is a little more information baked into the details, mostly involving normals and their interaction with the diffuse color map.
Improved details visible in greebling and in the dorsal circular insets.
Although in a few cases, more dramatic improvements were made. Such as with the Wraith Superhive:
Improved color tone and balance as well as diffuse details.
Sizing Revisions
Several ship meshes had their size altered for this patch. Big ship models was something that was occasionally complained about by players, and while I generally size things according to "canon" the Stargate universe is not noted for being upfront or even consistent about those figures. What I have done is review the numbers on several of the larger ships, drawing upon the best information I can find (including some stats that are now coming directly from the studio models) and make some adjustments based on that.
This affected mainly the Ancients and Wraith fleets; both of whom saw several ships change in size. The Hive and Superhive both got a little smaller (they're still huge though). The Wraith battlecruiser and Destroyer got a bit smaller, and the Wraith Cruiser dropped down to a proper 600m. The Aurora and battlecruiser (Excalibur class) dropped down to around the 1 km length. Following suit with the Aurora, the Ancient capital ships and Adamas class all scaled down in relation.
Whether or not this resolves or even helps some formation and other size related issues remains to be seen. Let me know! There are still some very large meshes in play and those things are at what I consider to be their proper sizes, so short of a complete mod-wide scale factor application this is likely to be things stand for the foreseeable future.
Balancing
As part of this update I took a fairly in-depth look at all the numbers in the game. Virtually every ship's stats were broken down and run through various mathematical analysis to compare it with other ships and see how things line up. While there wasn't much drastically out of spec, if you read the change log, you will see that quite a few tweaks and adjustments were made.
That doesn't mean that every light frigate is going to be perfectly matched against other race's light frigates (if they even have one). It does mean that I have look at the relative supply use, costs and combat stats and calculated what I think are reasonable and fair balance. Also remember that there is some asymmetrical balance going on between the races, so some may have statistical advantages in some areas to compensate for other disadvantages.
Removal from Beta
You may have noticed that this release no longer has the "b" appended to the end of the version number. That is because I have decided to remove the beta status from the mod.
Does this mean that the mod is finished?
No. Not by any means. However, it has long been my belief that mods are ever really "finished". Most projects always have something that could use improvement or replacing, and that never really ends. I started developing Stargate Races for vanilla Sins around 10 years ago, knowing full well that I may never have a complete set of art assets and things like that. My concern has always been trying to get the game play and the way the various races play to feel right (or at least, how I have decided to do them in this mod). As such, earlier versions of the mod for Entrenchment and Diplomacy had dropped the beta tagged eventually as well.
When I finally got around to updating Stargate Races for Rebellion, there were new game play mechanics (such as Titans) that had to be sorted out. On top of it, I made some balancing changes during the transition as well. So putting things back into a "beta" status made sense. I think it's been long enough and there have been enough iterations since the initial Rebellion release that I feel confident that the game play is relatively close to where I want it. Does that mean that there will be no further changes or balancing? Not at all. I'm not claiming perfection by dropping beta, just that I believe things are in a decent and quite playable place.
Stargate Invasion Relationship & Other Projects
Stargate Races has pretty much been a solo project for the last 10 years. There have been a few helpful submissions at one point or another but it has more or less just been me developing the mod all along. While that isn't changing, I have recently been asked to and have joined the Stargate Invasion mod team.
I will be helping progress their mod along and working to create new assets, etc for their project. That doesn't mean that I'm abandoning this mod at all though!
My focus may be split a bit more but it is my hope that the work can benefit both mods in the end. This will hopefully lead to a wider and more fluid exchange of ship and art assets between the two mods.
Also on a somewhat related note, I should mention that I have been doing some work recently to help out the Sins of a Galactic Empire and Star Wars: Interregnum mods. Hopefully you will see some of that in future updates of both projects!
But maybe a pair of sneak peaks:
Mon Calamari MC90
Corellian CR92a
Feedback
Feel free to share your thoughts concerning all of the above. I don't or can't always respond, but I do read everything that gets posted. As there have been quite a few balance adjustments this update, I am interested in hearing what you think about them. Are they improvements? Or did I mess something up by changing it? Let me know.
