Introducing myself, and a few questions.

from Sins Forums

Hi there everybody.

I just thought I drop in and check this place out, as I'm thinking about beginning to mod for Sins.  It seems to be a very mod-friendly game.  I've been modding Star Trek: Bridge Commander for some years now, and my ships can be found ported to most other ST games, but I picked up Sins last week and I'm totally addicted.  There seems to be tons of potential in this game.  I have a few questions, if any of you have some insights that might be helpful.

 

I apologize if any of these have been answered repeatedly before, but sometimes people have different views on this sort of stuff.

 

1. What are the general poly limitations for the models in Sins?  How many are spent on Cap ships vs. fighters, for example?

2. What resolution of textures are considered optimal?

3. What is the scripting language for Hardpoints?

4. Other than the one stickyed, are there any tutorials on the net the I should really see?

5. Is filefront the primary distribution site for mods for Sins, or somewhere else?

 

Thanks a lot.

 

Here's a link to my Bridge Commander work if you wanna have a look.

http://bridgecommander.filefront.com/developer/DJ_Curtis;10813

 

DJ

modding
1,084 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Sorry nobody has replied here, they're probably answering questions like "how do i mod ships" that come up every five minutes.

#1 and #2: I don't know about any hard limitations but the Kol Battleship is around 2-3000 iirc. The engine handles high poly very well. We currently have a ship that's about 4-5k running around with a 2048x2048 diffuse/normal/bump and even in playtests with 30+ of them the game runs fine.

#3: What a coincidence, as I've been trying to get some working for two days now. Instead of the obvious, simple way of simply creating a dummy in 3DS, then pointing the weapon in the entity file to that name, the game actually runs through your dummies and arbitrarily assigns them to weapon banks, often hilariously failing and shooting out of the origin of the model. Weapons are named Weapon-0 through Weapon-whatever, Exhaust is named Exhaust, Ability points are named Ability, Hangars are named Hangar. More than one point can be created under the same name to spawn duplicate effects.

#4: Yes. I have a few I'll probably release soon, but you should look at http://janvanderweg.com/SOASE/index.html at least. The mesh import/export tool now is sort of a piece of shit and crashes, but I'd gladly host the old 1.1 version if you use 3DS and need it. Entity file stuff is not really something you can learn through a tutorial, you just have to do it.

#5. I guess so, it's not that large but neither is the modding community.

Sins is not really that mod friendly - the buff system is extremely powerful but nothing else really is. If you enjoy the modernity of the engine along with its base gameplay, it's not a bad place to start a mod, but prepare to run into hundreds of hard-coded limits and a lot of frustration.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

Well modding community is growing substantially!

Come on compared to few months ago..I see so much more activity now +_+

Galactic Civilizations III