Major Stress Major Stress

[MOD WIP] Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels 2 (updated 01/10/09)

[MOD WIP] Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels 2 (updated 01/10/09)

Featured (by a small mention) in the October edition of PC Gamer magazine

Candidate for Mod Database's 2008 Mod of the Year

This is the OLD "Work in Progress" thread for the Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels 2 mod.

The new WIP topic is here https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/342747

The "Release" topic can be found here https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/322473


The mod is intended to be a hommage, and tribute to the original Sacrifice of Angels mod for Homeworld. It will use many of the same models, and effects created for that mod by the Trekmods team. Like the original SoA mod SoA2 is set during the Dominion War era of Star Trek. Using both canon, and non-canon units to recreate those battles with Sins "empire building" mechanic added. Like in SoA you can fight battles in SoA2 using hundreds of starships. Sometimes thousands if your computer can handle it ;)

While the mod was not intended as a "Total Conversion". That is exactly what it is winding up being. There is much about the Sins engine, and mechanics that we still need to learn. There are some hard coded stumbling blocks we have to overcome.

The factions will be the Federation, Klingons, Romulan, and the Dominion (with Breen, and Cardassian ally units). The main factions seen in the Dominion War. With a "Surprise" as the Pirate faction.

Factions like the Borg "may" be added in the future. LokiGodofMischief is working on a very good 3rd party Borg add on for SoA 2. It is very possible his add on may be merged with SoA 2 at a much later time.

The current version of SoA 2 is  0.03b   "The Second Dominion War". Look for it here  https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/322473

0.03b only works with Sins versions 1.1, 1.11, and 1.12.

All previous versions of SoA 2 are obsolete, and will not be supported, or hosted anymore. All older version downloads will be removed.

We will NOT port SoA 2 over to Entrenchment until after Entrenchment is out of beta, and released. Along with proper forge tool updates.

I am working on the models mostly ALONE so it may take a while for any new ship model updates.

Darkshimmer is the Balancing guru, Code monkey, and Master at arms. We do have other contributers, and the best 3rd party work from the finest artists in the trek mod community to help make SoA 2 the best it can be.

Status of Demo 0.04  "The actors are in place" 

Will update when i have news.

General Changes:

Manshooters Volumetric Explosions mod will be included as of 0.03a

May include Sins Plus (planets), but ill need to see how much that mod needs changing to incorporate into SoA 2.

SoA 2 0.03 and above is now patch 1.1, and better compatable. Sins patches 1.11, and 1.12 only address balancing, and online exploits, and have no effect on the mod.

Ships will have some anti stike craft weaponry.

Ships are still being added and balanced accordingly.

More re-balancing so that one faction is not overpowered over the other.

The Federation:

Faction is complete. Only structures left

The Klingon Empire

Faction is complete. Only structures left.

The Romulan Star Empire:

Faction is complete. Only structures left

The Dominion:

Faction is complete. Still needs balancing work.

Pirates:

They were going to be the Borg, but that idea failed. So we are looking into Random multirace ship spawns.

Planetary Defenders

Basically "Ships of the week" like the Maquis, Sona, Ferrengi, Tammarian battle cruisers and the like.

Balancing:  Darkshimmer has the Federation, Romulan, and Klingon Empire, and Unified Dominion balanced.

Gameplay: We now have a working Cloaking Device! Check the ModDB page for the WIP video. Cloaking will not be fully implemented in the mod until version 0.04

Art: We are working on an LCARS style UI, adding proper icons, and pictures for all of the new units. The UI is going to take a while to do, because of all of the redundancy of the Sins UI. SoA 2 uses 2 sets of UI textures. Instead of the standard 4 textures for buttons, and 2 textures for icons. SoA 2 uses 8 textures for buttons, and 4 textures for icons which IMO is a major waste of resources, because sins loads all these textures at startup. Unfortunetly i dont see any other way to do it. What is kind of cool is that we dont have to use the same HUD for each faction. It is possible to have unique HUDs, but again the perfomance hit, because of the extra drain on resources could be big, and not worth it.

In Planning: (No promises, or guarentees, but we will try to add these if possible.)

Troop Transport effects.

Planetary invasion animations

Tractor beams. (need a code monkey for this)

Whatever else we can think of and are capable of doing.

Future Updates:

SoA 2 0.04 is now in planning, and will be focused primarily on Proper research trees, Ability's, and adding proper Structures. More than likely demo 0.04 will be the last demo. After that then the full mod should be ready.

SoA 2 0.05 will be the final spit, and polish of the mod. It will focus mainly on re-balancing if needed. Also final artwork changes will be made here. Which will include some ship model re-builds, and re-texturing.

The Full SoA 2 1.0 mod will be released "When it is Finished". We are doing this on our own free time. We aren't getting paid to do this. We have no set schedule. We have no time limit. I want this one to be good. So it wont go online until we feel it is ready.

*NOTE: Much about Sins as we are all now realizing is hardcoded. SoA 2 is going to be far from a perfect "trek" mod due to these hardcoded issues. However we will try to do the best we can with workarounds, and compromises to get it as close as possible. Like i said some things wont be perfect. Some things cannot be done at all. Enjoy the mod for what it is, and try not to be too "nit picky".

SoA2 will be hosted on Mod Database once it is ready http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-sacrifice-of-angels-2

This main header will be updated when i have news to post.





4,112,503 views 1,754 replies +2 Loading…
Reply #828 Top

My post = Fail.

 

:fox:  

Reply #829 Top

Quoting wishhavoc, reply 2
Grrrrr...Makes me angry that no one is creating a stargate mod   
End of wishhavoc's quote
What are you talking about we have a stargate mod under construction and it's a good one!

Reply #830 Top

Hi there

Been following this mod for quite a while now, as a trek fan im really impressed :)

Now when the demo came out i installed it, but the game crashed all the time as soon as i went into the ship construction menu, it doesnt matter which faction I take.

First I re-installed an repatched Soase, installed the mod again, its still not working >.<

Is it possible that this happens because I use the german version of Soase?

If needed, I can upload the Crash-dump files.

Thanks for your help and keep the good work up :)

Cheers

 

Edit: Sorry wrong thread, please delete this post

Reply #831 Top

I can help you with the ships in this mod I have a picture of nearly every Federation, Klingon, Romulan and Borg ship. (But I am not a modder myself I just got the pictures from Scouts to Battleships)

Reply #833 Top

Hey, just had a play as the Klingons against the Cardassians, Oh My God, it was amazing over a hundred ships in the end, around 70 K'Tinga ships, 20 Vorcha, 10 B'rel, I love the Klingon textures.

The Cardassian ships acted the way I thoght they would, they were quite fun to play against, the cardassian AI was able to sneak a sizable fleet into my empire, now that was a fight, my only complaint was the textures for the cardassian ships seemed quite plain compared to the Klingon textures.

I wish you luck in your endeavor, and I must admit for two seconds I was grumbling about there being no cloak until I started wooping those cardassians.

 

Great Lord D

Reply #834 Top

Soooo....there wouldn't happen to be a a demo for this mod floating around out there....would there?

I appologize for my laziness in not wanting to go through all 34 pages, but I've got homework for my History 101 class that's looking to be a major pain in my a$$, so I barely even have time to post.

Reply #837 Top

Since the admins didnt delete this thread i will continue to use it to post work in progress reports.

Today i am almost finished with the new HUD. Right now demo 0.01 is using someone elses hud as a placeholder. I tried to get a better LCARS feel to it. It took me a long time to get to this point, because i dont know where hud meshes start and end. So there was much trial and error. This will be the HUD for Demo 0.02 once the Sins 1.1 patch is out.

http://img60.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lcarstestbz8.jpg

Guess imageshack doesnt like direct linking anymore :/

 

Reply #838 Top

Very nice LCARS display!

How about if the crystals were blue for Dilithium... (lots of gfx files to change though)

the program PIXIA could be used to change the color balance of the asteroid meshes...

 

Reply #839 Top

that looks very pretty...can you make  a black background instead of transparancy for the place where information goes?  The background occasionally becomes hard to read without a backing.

Reply #840 Top

I thought of doing a semi-transparent background like in the monitor section. The main goal is to make this a non intrusive UI like demo 0.01's. Less is more in this case. I will try an experiment and see if it looks ok and doesnt interfere with the main view.

Hey devs, You think you used enough texture files for the UI? :p The Sins UI is a lesson on redundancy.

Reply #841 Top

Didn't you know the devs are the borg you have to destroy 80% of the UI before you can defeat it. :D

 

 

Reply #842 Top

Quoting Helioforge, reply 13
Very nice LCARS display!How about if the crystals were blue for Dilithium... (lots of gfx files to change though)the program PIXIA could be used to change the color balance of the asteroid meshes... 
End of Helioforge's quote

Never thought of that. :omg:

Reply #843 Top

Hey guys this mod is fantastic, Sins is one of my favourite RTS games and I've loved Star Trek since I was small hehe.  Even though it's just a demo I'm very impressed with the ships I love watching a wing of Galaxy Class Starships sweep in and nail all in front of them :D.  Can't wait till the full release.

Couple of questions though.

1.  What version of the Deep Space 9 theme is that on te main menu it's awesome I need to find it.

 

2. I love the textures on the elite cap ships but the normal ships seem a bit bright in comparison any chance they could be darkened up a bit? would look better.

Anyway great mod keep up the good work.

Reply #844 Top

Disable the "Ship Mesh Highlight Filter" in Options\Effects. That will get rid of the glowwy ship problem.

Reply #845 Top

The K'vort is in. This is the cruiser sized version of the BoP. However this is not an upscaled BoP model. It is a new model based on the BoP design. This model was made by Charvell for our FTB mod.

Reply #847 Top

MY POWER IS UNMATCHED!!

The Negh Var is in game.

Reply #849 Top

looks good although it needs a bit more texturing

Reply #850 Top

The Klingon lineup looks pretty cool. I come from playing Birth of the Federation so I am pleased to see the K'vort is a powerful vessel, and not merely a slightly bigger bird of prey.

Do you have any plans to flesh out the Cardassian and Romulan ship line up? There might not be a great deal of variety in canon but there are obviously plenty of 'expanded' universe ships. It just strikes me as strange that none of the other races have numerical parity with the Federation. I would expect the major alpha quadrant powers (Fed, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian) to possess more or less equal numbers.

Once again I'll mention my personal favourite template for consideration Birth of the Federation, as it didn't just have an equivalent ship for each race (like the atrocious Star Trek Armada), they all had a unique feel to them, but they had rough parity when it came to numbers and roles filled.

 

By the way, when Entrenchment comes out will you be adding starbases for each race?

 

p.s. I'm assuming the weird black shading thing is some ongoing graphical bug/issue? Other than that I simply love the visuals.