Hrm. Particle effects are probably the most easily viewable thing in sins. You can show both Bailknight's mod and mine if you like.

There are a few good particle modders out there, most notably Bailknight, (but he has not been around for some time, as far as I know) who change the sins experience and overload people's computers with flashy awesomeness dispersed throughout the game. Even I use a couple of Bailknight's effects in my mod as fillers or starting points.

My mod, Totaleffects, focuses on changing every effect in sins. I am only behind by about 20, and I have added several other effects in order to have players see certain ability effects.

PARTICLE FORGE

It is quite easy to use and learn, though it does have many limitations. Such as: the difficulty of being able to control huge numbers of exact emitter locations, or incorrectly displaying textures that have an alternate linker type.

CREAM/VIM

Basically Notepad on steroids. I like to use it for precise particle effect editing.

Anything else?

Biggest hard ship is the hard code limits and the lack of modding support from the devs. Even the sticky posts are very out of date.

The reference files are out of date. harpo and myself took it upon ourselves to help the community here creating up-to-date reference files.

Working for 2 straight days trying to find a work around for something thats hard coded in, sometimes possible, most times not. Best one I figured out was getting the player selection screen to show 6 races. Three days on that one and almost gave up a few times but now its in a bunch of mods. http://soase.weebly.com/add-race-pics.html

I created that weebly because it was so hard to find good posts in this forum so whan I did find one I made a web page for it. I would say half are from helpful modders and half I wrote. If there is no credit at the bottom it was me. No moderator in the forum means searching for adding a planet will bring up 100 posts with useless info.

http://soase.weebly.com/modding-tools.html

http://soase.weebly.com/modeling-tools.html

Lots of free tools if you know where to look.

Good mods to focus on. I've had a lot of fun with both online in the past.

My story...

I was quite simply in awe of what other people have done making and modding games and always wanted a taste of it. I started reading the forums specifically about how to mod Sins around August of 2009. I picked up Softimage XSI shortly after that and started playing around with manipulating primitives into something that resembeled a ship and low and behold after many months of trial and error I had some stuff that actually resembeled what I wanted. I created the thread Show off your Sin's model for amateurs like me to display to others the fruits of that effort.

After I decided I knew enough of the technical aspects of modding Sins I set out to create my races for Sins. While some like to mock the mods that add new content to the base game I can tell you the amount of work required to create my mod was significant both in time and energy. For starters I wanted to create something fairly unique so I began brainstorming on what interests me which narrowed it down supernatural things like Vampires, Zombies, Angels, etc. This eventually turned into the Plague and Nephilim races in my mod which serve as the back theme for the flavor text, looks and abilities. I spent a lot of time researching anything relating to the supernatural compiling different ideas and looks trying to come up with things to help support the backstory.

I worked on the core elements of the mod without much concern on the models for about 6-8 months which resulted in fairly flushed out races from unit names, abilities, concept art to use, etc. I finally posted my intent on this forum with some of the models I had completed as a start for my races around July of 2010. I'm glad I did as two modellers agreed to help with models for the two races. Combined with the models I had done I was able to create a fairly complete mod adding two new races with custom research trees, models, textures, buttons, icons, voice overs (still wip on plague)...

I'm especially grateful for the model assistance as Sins of the Fallen would have probably never been released if it was just using the same assets already in the game. I'm pretty happy with the end result for a first mod ever, but it's a lot of work for one person to do even with the model assistance.

What I've learned about modding is accept help when you can get it. People all have real lives and interests and tend to flow in and out.

In general...

Like myfist I saw a gap in useful tools and knowledge transfer for Sins modding and set out to create an Entity Validation tool that could validate an entire project for easily missed things like typos, or miss-spellings, etc. Well, this morphed well beyond my initial intentions as I quickly identified it could be ported to Eclipse as an Entity and Project Editor. I use this tool all the time for my modding and feel sorry for anyone that doesn't use or can't figure out how. To the latter folks I converted my Sins Validation Rules from xml to a readable wiki format so anyone could have access the sins structures.

Another gap I saw is how to add new races into Sins. To this end I created a template mod that can be used to add up to 3 new races. I'm currently using these files as the base to create my Transhuman races.

My original gool was to learn enough that I could help others and to that end I think I have.

My 2 cents:

Having just come from messing around with the Phoenix Rising mod for Star Wars: Empire at War, Sins modding was a blessing in usability and a curse in versatility. Large parts of the data in EaW didn't even work or was cryptic at best, while Sins' structure is easy to understand and work with. On the other hand, many of the things you can do in EaW just aren't possible in Sins, or take long or counter-intuitive work around.

Examples:

In EaW, nobody really knows how the combat auto-resolve works. Even the developers are no longer sure. It's the same with determining which ships can make bombing runs; nobody knows what controls it. There's lots of data in the files on a 'political' game mechanic that has no effect in-game. It also turns out there's a bug in that any non-turreted weapon fires with perfect accuracy no matter what the accuracy value is set to, despite that the developers used this for all of the fighters in the game and was never patched.  In Sins, virtually everything is intuitively labeled and everything but graphics and sound is easy to change with a text editor; excluding graphics and sound, a fairly extensive mod involving hundreds of files can be implemented in a couple hours.

However, in the Phoenix Rising mod (Which depicts ships as near as possible to the Star Wars canon) a Star Destroyer carries half a dozen different types of weapons with hundreds of firing points each individually with an individual firing arc and aim. In Sins, a ship can have only up to three weapon types, firing arcs are predefined into forward, back, and sides and the graphics are there just for show as accuracy just modifies the amount of damage.

I actually made a thread requesting a number of versatility enhancements centered largely around what couldn't be done compared to EaW.

I'll see if I can Nacey to put up a post for you for the DS crew. He is the main mod master of Distant Stars.

As for myself, Sins is the first time I every truly got into modding. Did mostly bug testing for DS early on then moved on to the pirates as they were weak in Entrenchment due to the starbases then got over done in Diplomacy. Started with Notepad then moved on to Notepad++ after hearing of it. The biggest annoyance to me is the hardcoded AI. Especially with the pirates as I truly wanted to change around how they operated. Used a work around of implementing Insurgency and improved with ZombieRus5's help but it still doesn't quite feel right. I also used Gimp to mess with the effects for the pirates. Any of the fancy models you see are from others that helped me with my project (SuperZERO0 and ZombieRus5). Having a good modding community to me is the biggest help as we are often willing to help and/or point others in the right direction.

Later on I plan on introducing a flagship mod concept into Distant Stars similar to ZombieRus5's only with my own tweaks and directions.

Well all of the bugs I've encountered so far are as a result of hardcode and so they can't be fixed. My bug "fixing" process for other games varies. Diablo 2 for example it took me months to fix very vague map-related bugs. Sins is simple enough that, unless it's something coming from XSI or convertXSI, any weirdness I encounter can usually be immediately identified and fixed. The one thing that gave me a bit of grief was the AI not using abilities not immediately available (even when they were supposedly available). A result of hardcode, again. So, I couldn't fix it, I had to just bring everything back to the first level anyways.

It's quite depressing to see developers making games so dependent on hardcode in the post-90's, but games are becoming less mod friendly these days, not more.

Hmm. I'm afraid I haven't done hardly anything with abilities yet, so I'm not sure how something like that would work. They will definitely have to scale very differently than current abilities do right now to be competitive while not being overly powerful at early levels.

In my dev logs I'll talk a bit about my testing process though it isn't terrifically special. In sins I test stuff by running games with 9 computers on Viscious and let them beat each other up. My tech trees are limited only to functional stuff for the most part, so inevitably my new stuff appears. That's typically how I balance things as well. My testing processes in RTS games heavily involve computer AI. One of the reasons I put so much effort into getting the computers to work the best they possibly can. Mods cannot survive without computer AI working well imo.

None of that stuff is really new, though. Age of Wonders 2 has a full-blown editor and native mod support built into it as well, and that's a turn-based game from 2001. By now most of that stuff is considered standard for games that have any mod support.

It was the selling point for me, certainly. I would never have bought sins if it didn't support mods. My experience with Homeworld 2, much less its community, was less than stellar. Hardpointing these huge ships in their third party editor was something of a biblical-scale nightmare. That and the game's performance was utterly atrocious on ATI cards. I could not get any of the mods or vanilla game to perform well on a X2 6000/HD2900/4 gigs of ram while anyone with half my specs on an nvidia card could make the game fly.

At least in sins I've narrowed most of the performance in the game to mines and fighters so far. Removing mines and massively reducing fighters has made the game quite enjoyable in big games. I'm not sure how close I am to the 2gb ram limit but I can vaporize all of the vanilla assets when possible. That should reduce it considerably.

I am hoping to get episode 1 of my dev log out in a week or two. Work has slowed down as of late and I need to pick it back up and flip on the record button as I do so.

Someone made a mesh resize tool that's quite easy to use. It takes me less than an hour to resize things, and that's mostly just figuring out the scale (twice as big, 1/4 etc.) I'm sure someone at SOGE knows of it, though sadly not a lot of new modders do.

Oh my, Kitkun, that's sure to make the CnC3 modders all different kinds of frustrated 

CF105, that's certainly helpful information. I was once signed up for beta testing with SOGE, but i cahnged computers and forgot all of my login info, so i can't play it anymore  .

The only thing i seem to be missing here as far as great information (although i'll take all of the modding stories i can get, the more the better!) is that i just need a little bit on the IC Dev involvement with the mod devs. Such as: communication between the modders and the devs about the roadblocks and what was taken into consideration for changing, as well as any specific things the devs have added in to games because of ideas that the modders had.

If anyone can tell me any of those things, i'd be just about finished to write up this paper. I really do appreciate everybody's help with this, i'm flattered by the helpful Sins community. Keep doing what you do best, because you all do some really excellent work.

The devs have also used/or will be using some of the things that us modders have done like the TSOP project that fixes a lot of memory issues.