Throne of Armageddon

Darn, I was hoping to see you more or less finish this project. Regardless, from the sounds of it few of the main members of the Sins community have any inclination to leave anytime soon, so we'll likely still be here if you decide to come back and finish it off.

The SC2 beta is out? I had no idea. I'll still be here, looking forward what you have when you come back.

I'm not really "leaving", I'm just going to be very busy for a little while.

Youtube STILL hasn't fully processed the video. Man, that's slow.

If you want my advice - sit on this. Don't release it. Don't offer too many teasers.

If this "saga" is really your baby, then finish it - don't cheapen it with a video game mod. Talk to a publisher, get some other crap out so your name is around... try the sci-fi magazines and what not. Get recognized, and *then* present this to a publisher. Only use your dream-work here to try and achieve recognition if you have been unsucessful with the above.

Don't let someone rip you off.

I dont even know wtf this is about - but be careful with any creative project you've worked that long on and have hopes for. Consider getting your work copy righted... I think you can accomplish a ghetto-copyright (if you can't afford the real thing) by mailing yourself a package with the original copy in it or some such crap... I forget the details exactly... google around for it. Once copyrighted, consider hiring an editor to go over it before you approach publishers.

Good luck.

I don't plan to release it, it's a private project. I'm just showing off the work that everyone's help and such went into.

Never publishing or making the novel public, either. I have a very small private audience of readers and that's all I want. One of the reasons I have chosen this route is for the reason you mention exactly.

Progress will be very slowly resuming in about a week. Need to install windows 7 full, which I'll be doing tomorrow. For now I'll just be modeling ships because I've run out of Anahn and UD ships to add to the game.

So starcraft II was good then?

It's decent, but the skill requirements to make a mod in it will be far too high for someone of my limited mental capabilities.

My Starcraft 2 coverage can be seen from my youtube channel,

http://www.youtube.com/user/mancatcher

I will still be putting significant energy into my duties in covering SC2, but I'll be directing some energy towards getting models done for this project, as well as SFX. Right now I have the Zelconian Assassin-class about 20% complete. This is going to be one hell of a complicated ship.

Prognosis for this mod is looking grim. That 25k poly limit... is just another serious blow post weapon limit. Basically, Anahn ships are going to be crunched especially when I get into flagships and battleships.

Because it seems unlikely progress will resume any time soon, if ever, I released an internal video of the Great Knight when I first added it.  This thing skirts the very edges of Sins' limits.

I thought about spawning particle meshes and spawning half the model as a particle to bypass the limits but the thing is I'd be doing that for half the ships in the game. Not an acceptable workaround.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfhqwvWTP9A

Well that's very disappointing, it was looking so good. Hopefully if/when Sins 2 comes out, you'll be able to do everything you want.

This is somewhat related to the deceased project as I was going to fully voice act the entire thing. I'm just gonna copy pasta my post from other sites...

Basically I haven't done any voicing at all since The Great Destroyer back in late 2008/early 2009, and The Great Destroyer was the first voice I had done in almost a year in that period. Needless to say, I nearly totally abandoned voice acting.

But Oracle still wanted me to voice some minor roles so I decided to start practicing again.

This demo contains three samples - the first is a very generic Undead voice but using some basic dialogue. The second is a conceptual response set for the Tiamat from Armageddon Onslaught, about 25% of the responses. The third is a non-canon dialogue chunk from Xul`Amon, originating from my novel. As I lost all of my scifi deluxe presets from upgrading to windows 7 (they don't pass over with the other presets in the text files), I have been trying to rebuild that amazing preset I had before but have failed miserably. So this is kind of a placeholder.

As my anxiety attacks and brain damage become more and more severe, I stumble over speech much more. This is not production-level quality, it's scrap-level practice but I'm deciding to post it to get some feedback. I didn't really do much cleanup so there's a few pops and some clangs in the background.

This is the first time I've ever released voiced dialogue to the public outside of the Vile Eggression campaign.

The dialogue was thought up totally on the fly as usual.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwZfF3wEnew

Ah... I remember you were working on this type of mod back on the relic forum way back for HW2. Long time ago... interesting to say the least that you migrated over here. Awesome work I've seen so far

Yes. Just like the homeworld 2 mod this one has died to limitations of the engines. It seems like there will never be a 3d space game built for modders.

Correction: There will never be a 3d space game built to match certain indavidual's ambition.

Well... not unless you got a huge wallet... I know there are some 3D engines out there that would be wonderful to use... but... you also gotta have a real capible computer to be able to use it. Also take into account that when these games are planned... the engine they use is like already 4 or 5 years old and they don't plan ahead for anything that can be transfered over to a new and improved system if they decide later to do so... the only way to do so would be to have a huge company with lots of money and a huge team of experts to crank out such a thing

Aractain > No... it's that no one ever designs engines with modders in mind except for shooters (Unreal Tournament series). They aren't expandable. So long as developers snub modders, modders will be disappointed. Symmetry.

EternalRequiem> I have some of the most powerful hardware on the market... so performance doesn't really concern me that much.

I can understand why sins is so limited, but it doesn't make me any less disappointed when it is easier for a company to make an engine open-ended and expansible even if it's just for themselves to later return to it and add patches/expansions. But very few companies do this, because they either don't have the time to do things the right way or they just don't care.

Re: Blizzard having to softcode half of diablo 2's DLL files just to patch the game.

X3 Terran Conflict looked like it might have been an interesting game to try modding but like so many others there is no developer support and methods to get content in the game are long-winded and needlessly complicated.

Out of all of sins what I liked the most was the particle editor. It's a simple and limited tool but I made some really amazing stuff with it. Unfortunately that's where my praise ends for the game.

I feel Ironclad should make one more expansion that opens up the game completely to modders and that's it. Soft-coded AI, perhaps in lua or C like Starcraft 2, turrets, 64-bit, multi-core support, that's it. No new content, just a paradise for modders. But they probably want to move on to other projects now.

But, eh, whatever. The only thing that could accurately depict any of my universes is CGI. Modding is problem solving. Some problems in sins I just couldn't solve. Homeworld 2 was worse than this, but the poly limit is what really shut this down.

Not to mention that Sins pushes the limits of the engine as-is. Your mod would be just insane by comparison. Half the ships having 25K+ polys? You gotta make some sacrifices somewhere.

Yep... and I was making sacrifices. And I realizes that's asking a lot, and it won't happen. But a guy can dream, right?

I hope Ironclad has read these forums over their lifespan and jotted down a bunch of notes on how they can improve sins 2 for modders. It's far too late to do that kind of an overhaul on this game, but perhaps the future will hold more inviting platforms for ambitions such as I.

I bought sins/expansions exclusively to try modding it. I don't regret having done that. Because even though this mod died and the 25k poly limit stopped me from putting in my bigger ships, I still learned something. Every mod is a learning experience, no matter how grand or how small. Because of that 25k limit I learned a lot in edge form and optimization from picking the Knight clean of ngons and manual welding and such. That will be useful in the future when I make a 100k poly model and be able to safely cut it down to like 60k poly.

But some ships like the Leviathan you just can't cut that many polies out of without really degrading the quality, and I am not willing to sacrifice quality - especially when I don't know how to uv or texture.

I bid you all a fond farewell... and grant you one last WIP image.