We need a Star Wars mod

Thing about Mods is they need someone to make them
If you feel there is a demand for a mod, whip out your old copy of notepad and get cracking!
______________________________________________________
I think I just had an evilgasm.....
The (now official?) Space Empires 4 Mod Launcher V2.26

This is probably way to ambitious to be my first modding attempt, but I am going to start experimenting with creating content for SE 5 and SE 4. Who knows, maybe ill be good at it. But im with you ont his one a starwars mod would be great.

I started working on one before the demo even came out. Now that I have the demo and a better idea of what the data files are capable of, as well as more refined mod concepts to take advantage of SE5's flexibility, well the amount of work involved has just expanded tenfold.

I had previously gathered a large number of Star Wars ship models, but I'm finding that even the "low poly" ones are still too much for SE5's engine, so I have to make entirely new ones. Modelling isn't too hard but I despise texturing.

On the component/technology front, I can't test the changes I've made in the demo so work has slowed there as well.

Also, I am taking a "ground up" approach to power balancing and scaling. In other words, I'm designing all of the ground combat technologies and concepts, balancing them with fighters, and then using the fighters as a common ground to properly scale the spacecraft.

My biggest goal (and gripe with most Star Wars games) is the accurate representation of the relative size and power of various units. An Imperial Star Destroyer is not 10x the size/capability of a Corellian corvette; it's more like 1000x. Likewise, an Executor Star Dreadnought is not 5 times the size/volume of an ISD, but probably 20-30 times. Trying to encompass such a huge range in capability, from 150m ships with 2 dual turbolasers up to 19,000m ships with 1000 weapons emplacements, is going to be a problem. The only game I've played that does so is the Warlords mod for Homeworld 2, which has been a major inspiration for me.

I think that it's great that people want to mod Star Wars. However, I think it would be even better if we could put together some sort of an "overarching structure" between the (inevitable) SW, ST, B5, and other mods, so that they can be easily glued together.

I think SE5 will do much better than SE4 with modeling different scales of ships.
For one thing, you can create custom vehicle hull types (albeit only units, not ships, it seems), so you could make only the largest ones (star destroyers, battleships, carriers, etc.) actual "ships" and make the rest "units"; using these custom units you can then limit component availability.
For another thing, SE5 uses 32-bit integers and floating point numbers, not 16-bit integers like SE4 used. This means that you are no longer limited to 65,535kT starships - you could theoretically have starships up into the gigatons, teratons, and beyond! 8O And you can even use scale mounts across all those sizes, since mounts now use floating point numbers for their percentages rather than integers. So you just make a 1TT (1 million kT) "hyperdrive reactor" or whatever and scale it down - it might be 100,000kT on a death star, 5,000kT on a cruiser, and 25kT on a Millennium Falcon sized gunship. (If 25kT is a bit big for a gunship reactor, I think you can even change the kT to tons or whatever )
Thirdly, there's the whole 3D thing. No longer must ships fit within a 36x36 square in combat - they can be as big or small as you like!

~~~
Mr. Flibble says...
Game over, boys!

ekolis wrote:

(If 25kT is a bit big for a gunship reactor, I think you can even change the kT to tons or whatever )

Can you elaborate on that?

It's not in settings.txt....

It's in mainstrings.txt value but a change to it would be across the board. No need to get hung up on it - it's just an arbitray unit for size...

-----

Space Empires Depot | Space Food Empires!