Modding on a budget

Ok first of all modding can be done entirely free, myself & the rest of the Distant Stars team have spent £0.00 on modding. A free program to open .rar files or .7z files can be found by searching for: WinRAR or 7Zip, these can easily be found using Google or any search engine.

Aslong as the files you are modifying are already in TXT format (Sins files are either in TXT or BIN format you can convert them using some tools that can be found in this modding section of the forums) you can use Notepad, Wordpad or Notepad++ (another free program you can download online).

You can also edit and update models using XSI however that is much more complex, to edit textures you can use another free program called "GIMP" with the .dds file plugin. Hope this helps.

Yeah, unless you want all of the latest graphics tools, you shouldn't have to buy any software to mod. I rarely use anything more than notepad, 7zip and galaxy forge, though it all depends on what exactly you want to mod. Though just some advice, the ForgeTools reference data is out of date if you were planning on using that.

you can also use my moddint utilities which includes a txt-bin gui for the convertdata's a MOD updater,map updater, manifest maker and my galaxy mainifest manager for entrenchment 1.01, but will work for all entrenchment versions downloadable from this thread's OP at the bottom.

harpo

You mean Im doing this for free.....

sorry small joke

It is very easy to mod this game, I am a complete amatuer and I have pulled off some neat stuff. The guys above me are masters of this game and have done some stellar stuff. Listen to them and you will get the game almost to the way you want it.

If you want to do modelling and you just do not "get" XSI, you can also try using Blender3D (also open source = free), export the finished Blender model as a .obj file, and then follow the XSI modding supplement in the ForgeTools documentation.

Wow, so much good stuff (and so fast).  Thanks for all the help guys!

You can also get trial versions instead of going the torrent route.

Trial versions are no good for modding, because rarely will you be finished within 30 days.

There are free alternatives which can provide professional-grade results out there.

3D work: Blender - it is quite powerful for a free package, just check out the stuff people can make with it!

Texturing: GIMP - as mentioned, never used it myself but people say its pretty much on par with Photoshop

Sound: Audacity - free and unless you want to do some heavy-duty sound modifications, good enough

And there you have it - all you need to do some solid quality modding with a 0$ budget

Arrr matey!! b a pirate!!!

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derenek, are you TRYING to upset the moderators like you upset two modding threads?

if so keep this attitude up and you will be banned by the modderators.

harpo

wow u guys r real serious. i'm just about having fun playing a game

well the point is about politeness, if you had asked permission to slightly change and use the mods in a public-like way the chances are we would have ok'd it. But you just went and did it. The same for posting the whole pirate bay thread, when it comes to pirating of games and such most here dont like it, especially because the devs for this game are going out of their way to have as little DRM as possible.

we dont mind having fun, but please be a polite and considerate of others

ouch, totally serious. you guys always this unfriendly to other modders?

technically you don't really need gimp to do it, if you maya, it has a in-program texture editor...

we usually are quite friendly to people who ask for help or for permission and treat video games as a property to buy and not as something you are entitled to.

ummm...r u implying I stole this game? I have actually purchased copies of Sins and the expansion. As well as unloaded for several other stardock products, so plz don't try and make it seem I don't support stardock/ironclad.

well you have implied otherwise several times. If you wish to support stardock/ironclad, dont be posting torrent sites even in a joking manner and ask for permission to use peoples mods in a public manner with the appropriate credit going to the right people.

Yeah, but I doubt it's got the functionality of a dedicated image editor. I'm talking about layers, compositing, etc.

Then there's stuff you can't do with any 2D image editor, like Z-Brush texturing and scuplting and so on.

To make decent textures you need a dedicated image editor. To make really good textures you need Z-Brush or a similar sculptor program. There's just no compare... yeah, you can bake a high poly version of your model onto a low poly one to get a detail normal map, but good luck modelling that highpoly version to the detail degree attainable by Z-Brush in just a fraction of time...

I guess, because most of the ships basically have like flat surface and the rendering time won't have be that long if you gimp but even then why use another software when you can do it all in one software...

Well, to obtain the level of detail I need for my models, I usually resort to sculpting a low-poly version of the model in Zbrush where I up the poly count to say 10 million polygons in total. I get the bump mapping and color textures from that, and also cavity textures which accentuate small cavities in the surface by adding shadows to them (something simmilar to an occlusion map rendered in a 3D package). If necessary I get the occlusion maps from the 3D package, in my case its XSI.

To mix all that up I need an image editor which can work with layers and composite them. I use Photoshop, but I hear Gimp can do pretty much the same thing, never tried it personally though. I also use Photoshop to add extra touches to my color texture, like replacing color coded areas with actual textures, cuting, pasting, erasing where needed and so on.

So I use three programs to get something like this:

I seriously doubt you can get that kind of look with a built-in image editor in Maya. I've been wrong before, of course. I thought Blender was crap until I saw what people can make with it. But as far as I know, the above combo is top-notch when you're going for detail+low poly modelling. And want to do it before you die of old age.