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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.