IskatuMesk IskatuMesk

What can you do in Sins?

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What can you do in Sins?

from Sins Forums

Hi. I'm a veteran Starcraft modder of 9 years looking to retire. However, I had in the past entertained the thought of attempting to mod sins. Several rumors put me off though; arbitrary limits on how many capital ships you can have, the strange "lag" between weapons hitting and actually doing damage ingame, no animated turrets, and some 3 weapon limit on ships.

 

I'd like to inquire on what exactly Entrenchment did for modding.

 

Since it would be too much and too vague to ask a question like, "What can you do?" I'll instead ask a set of questions and hopefully someone can give me some answers on them.

 

What is the limit on ship sizes? Can you create ships larger than planets?

Likewise, can you make the no-jump boundary of planets much larger, to have larger battlefields?

Is it now possible to have more than 3 weapons on a ship? I realize they can be linked to multiple hardpoints, but can you have more than 3 individual weapon types?

I have 3ds max 2009 and maya 8. How difficult would it be for me to add in ships and configure hardpoints? Does Sins use a helper-based hardpoint generator like in Supreme Commander or do I need to use a third party application?

Can models be made to load multiple base texture files? If I have a ship that calls multiple textures for its skin, can it still be used ingame? (Not including normals and stuff like that)

How is the AI structured? AI is very important to me as a modder but I find that most games use platoon and dynamically-generated AI construction routines which I find to be clunky and take a lot of control out of the developer. I prefer Starcraft's/warcraft's build order based system.

Is there a limit on how many ships a race can have?

 

If I wanted to add a ship like this,

 

And give every major spire a beam weapon on top of two forward weapons, a main weapon, and several secondaries, while giving the ship a very shiny appearance + and intense glow, as if to make it appear like energy, could it be done?

 

I'd like to assess the potential of the game engine before I make my complete purchase. I would like to create a large-scale action and micro oriented conversion based on one of my original universes. I have given up on titles like Homeworld 2 because of poor developer support and gamebreaking issues with the engines.

 

Do you think it would be worth it to try?

 

I appreciate any and all comments.

 

modding
14,196 views 31 replies
Reply #26 from Sins Forums Top

I can't UVW so I can't really say how painful they would be to map. It looks ridiculously confusing from what I saw, though.

 

As I said, most of my ships are sub-10k. Many of them are around ~5k-6k. Quads, that is. I did have to triangulate them for Homeworld 2 but even large amounts of very high poly ships did not impact performance, at least not nearly as much as having a handful of turrets.

Reply #27 from Sins Forums Top

Its not confusing once you figure out the basis, but from what I can see on the models, the high amount of angular geometry means that you would spend a lot of time UV mapping small surfaces, and would pretty much be limited to planar projections for it. Especially if you later anted to add a lot more detail using something like Z-Brush, because you can't take shortcuts such as overlapping UV's or what I like to call "trash surfaces", where you apply the projections on small, hardly visible surfaces, then bunch them all together and cover them with a flat color of choice.

But the poly count sound ok for Sins and again, the models are very nice. :) Sins engine is very robust when handling large amounts of objects on screen.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #28 from Sins Forums Top

Anyone mind answering those questions about the weapon specs and stuff on the previous page? :D

 

I have XSI now, so once I get everything up and running I'll try to throw in the Artemes or something. Schizophrenia is really killing my motivation to do anything right now so it's hard to get started. :\

Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top

Alright, DamagePerBank figures out the direction of hardpoints and the weapon to which they are assigned from the orientation and name of the Dummy (in Max atleast) object on the model, the number of the hardpoints pointing in that direction is solely for visuals, 1 dummy facing left will do the same damage as 4 dummies facing left

PreBuffCooldownTime is the reload of the actual damaging factor of the weapon, so set at 10 the damage will be applied every 10 seconds, this is also distinct from the visuals your weapon could never stop firing but it will only apply damage every 10 seconds

Burstcount and delay are for the visuals, a burst count of one on a missile will fire (visually) one missile, a burstcount of two = two missiles, but the damage will remain the same, note that it is instances of the particle assigned, so for autocannons the weaponeffect is a "burst" of 3 bullets so a burstcount of two would fire 6. the delay simply states the time between volleys

 EDIT

oh and there is a line in Gameplay.constants called ConsiderBeingDamaged time, which i take to be the interval of time between which the engine updates damage  

Reply #30 from Sins Forums Top

I see. So the engine has some kind of unusual client/server setup, a bit like diablo 2. Syncing those could be hilariously difficult.

 

Quite odd that the damage doesn't come from the individual weapons either.

 

Thanks for the answers, gives me a bit more to think about when I go to design weaponry.

Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top

I did have to triangulate them for Homeworld 2 but even large amounts of very high poly ships did not impact performance, at least not nearly as much as having a handful of turrets.
End of quote

That is because of something called mesh instancing where the ship numbers scale better, the trick with turrets is to have the GPU do some of the calculations as the hardware is better optimised for tasks like vector addition. Anyhow Sins doesn't have proper turrets yet it uses dummy points on the mesh for weapon emitters.