TFL BigBANGtheory

I believe Sierra owns the software gaming license for B5 and have sat on it doing nothing for the past 9 yrs. [e digicons]#:([/e]

Its unlikely to be summer 2011, think of the development costs they would have to recover no publisher is gonna front up that kind of cash in this econominc climate.

Personally I think this is great news, every indication suggests both IC and SD are happy with the franchise so it stands to reason post diplomacy updates and improvements to SoaSE will be significant if its unsuitable for a micro expansion.

Or make changes to ICO which allow players to make private flags against other players accounts (not player names) giving them the choice to enter into another game with such players. Steam and RelicOnline use Friends Lists which work well for a player that uses the system lots but its not so good for the casual gamer and it tends to promote rigged or bias teams where experienced friends naturally prefer to be on the same team.

I think a forum admin should prune non survey related answers.

1. Do you "own" your copy of sins? (don't be ashamed if you don't) yes 2. Do you own entrenchment? yes 3. Let say you were to divide you time between Vanilla and Entrenchment sins, what percentage of time do you play Vanilla or Entrenchment? 100% Entrenchment 4. Roughly how many hours a day do you play Sins (either)(count mutliplayer also)? less than 1hr per day, I used to play more but in all honesty the skirmish mode of gameplay gets kind of dull pretty soon. 5. If you p

Personally I would recommend you steer clear of the Omega for the time being, its just a very unfriendly ship design for SoaSE where as other B5 ships are fine. I know its an iconic ship and if you are intent on doing it now I will try to guide you with the hull animation if needed, I took a quick look at the Celestia model link and as long as you can convert it and reduce the polycount it will work. What you need to do is as already mentioned remove the central hu

I would personally reccomend the TEC Starbase or the Gauss Defense Platform with its secondary cannon (i.e. the gauss gun points one way while the meeson cannon can target other ships), or something completely new like a diplomatic station.

Wait for the details to be released, if you dont like it dont buy it same as any other game whats the big deal?

From Shacknews: Stardock has announced that the next expansion to its space strategy title Sins of a Solar Empire, dubbed "Diplomacy," will be released in early 2010. The expansion is set to "vastly increase the amount of diplomatic options available to players." Beta testing will begin this fall, with a release coming later on in the winter.

It depends how it is implemented, what you cannot expect IC to do is define turrets on all models (its just not worth the effort) what is far far more reasonable and very doable is implementing atleast one turret on atleast one model. On the subject of scale I have played HW2 high population cap matches with over 1000 units on screen back in 2003 with an AMD Duron 800MHz CPU and an Nvidia Geforce2 GPU which is also something to think ab

You do not need Max to create the effect, its the SoaSE particle system doing the animation not Max. You use a Null or dummy point to locate the effect that is correct, so in the case of the Pirate Base it will have a Null point from which the rotating skull object spawns or is emitted. Then it is down to the particle system as to how the object moves. If memory serves these types of effects are called Flair points, so you need to use XSI or Max (doesn't matter which) to creat

Given that no.3 is still considered a step too far for the Devs, I hope no.2 & 4 making it because from a graphical and presentation pov its the next best thing. What it will do though is either force the game AI to compensate with ship movements and or introduce micro play into battles which won't please some sections of the MP community. Either way kudos to both Tobiwan and Blair for taking time bridging the communications gap between modder and developer.

The actual animation is done outside of 3DSmax, but what you do need to do inside Max is get the dummy points positioned, faced and named correctly. Its quite straight forward when you know how, learning the machanics takes a while cos it involves a few parts coming together and a basic understanding of matrices. Load up the Pirate Base Skull Flair effect in particle forge and play around with it to understand how it works. The other interesting effect to concentrate o

Why don't you just support the ST and B5 mods? I know certainly in the case of B5 they would appreciate another set of hands and eyes...

I think this is a genuinely tricky stage for IC, Diplomacy has to largely center around gameplay expansion which by itself isn't really a strong enough selling point. I think they are going to combine it 'with something else' to give it the presentation/wow factor/talking point. My wild guess would be a campaign with no particular storyline other than diplomacy related objectives which acts as a nice bridge or trial to the 3rd mini expansion. Making guesses serves as

If no one is talking then its probably waiting on some kind of joint agreement between IC and SD. Personally I'd love to know how the sales stats from Entrenchment compared to SoaSE when you factor in development time.

You have a couple of options, either trace the hi-poly Sharlin to get the basic shape and redo the model or texture the hi-poly model and then just remove all the detail leaving the basic shell. You should be able to hit 15k tri-polys without too much trouble.

[quote]A lot of poeple aren't as happy as you are. This game is like 95% of the way there, and in truth I love the job stardock and ironclad did. That last 5% is little issues with occassional bugs, minidumps, disconnects, and imbalances in the game. Yes, all four exist. [/quote] It has to be said that Ironclad have been reasonably fortunate not to get picked up on this by the press, I think any sequel will have to face closer scrutiny.

Thats why there should be a facility to jump from specific point to specific point where the chokepoint is predictable, as opposed to well edge to well edge. Exactly like a jump/star gate concept... I am not sure that is possible atm.

[quote]As Diplomacy starts to get closer to beta, we're going to be making some changes to the Sins of a Solar Empire website so that players can participate with the development of it.[/quote] Is the royal frogness reffering to the journals section of https://www.elementalgame.com when he talks about the changes?

[quote]Thanks alot. I will PM you my address (again?). Please send me your models, as they surely are a great way to learn from you.[/quote] I look forward to seeing your working jumpgate first, dont worry about the poly count or textures that can be addressed later the tricky bit as I'm sure you've worked out by now is getting it to work like a proper jumpgate that is what I am interested in seeing.

I tend to favour medium poly counts on models around 20 - 30k, mainly because decent modern GPU's can cope with 1million+ polys in a scene all this crap about limiting the models to 5-7k is just a way of appeasing owners of older hardware and laptops. I played those types of games in 2003 its 2009 now so lets move on I say. The Battlecrab came from the X3 community, not the team doing the B5 mod for X3 though. They want to enjoy the fruits of their labours when its ready for release a

The Sharlin model you have does work in game you can see a brief clip of it (looking pretty damn good with a basic black skin) at the end of this video done way back on the beta version of SoaSE. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ITqkSlI2U What problems are you having?

Although ship cloaking on the face of it appears as a graphical feature, it does have the obvious gameplay mechanism of permitting a player to do some dirty dealing and spying highly relevant to this phase of the expansion plans. - You could spy on your allies to see if they are keeping to their agreements - You could sneak off to make private diplomacy agreements elsewhere - You could ambush your allies in an attempt to blame other factions and provoke a response