TFL BigBANGtheory

More a case of being stuck with no obvious way forward, I simply do not know how to add some of these features into the game.

Negative regeneration rates, now there's thinking outside the box... Not tried it is the short answer.

Yeah I run Vista x64 with SoaSE no problems. Why are you running Vista x64 on 2GB RAM though? Kind of defeats the object if you see what I mean...

[quote]What about the other races? Would a mod with just the alien races be possible?[/quote] Its more that certain ships either fit within the contraints of the game engine or they do not. For example: EA Nova Dreadnought has 18+ large turrets of various design, no turret animation means you'll see beam and particle effects coming out at blatently wrong angles on potentially each and every turret. ISA Whitestar would be ok as it uses more of a beam emitter o

[quote]well how about a b1-5 stations as a planet or moon like danmans one just a thought of course there would be no weapons on it.[/quote] Not a very convincing B5 station without weapons, the ability to launch and recall fighters or enough external light sources? [quote]Don't know how possible any of it is. Don't know how balanced any of it is. Just some ideas I wished to share.[/quote] Not possible atm there is no way to script in events or control the AI so someth

A Whitestar fleet would work.... right up until it met an Omega-X battlegroup which wouldn't work atm. A Babylon5 station? Err no you would run out of flair points 1/4 of the way down the mesh, not to mention the fact you could potentially fly through the hull, and not attach any particle effects to the rotating sections. How would you space the ships out so that the jump points do not form on top of one another?

To balance various critisims over the past year I would like to throw out the possibility into the community that SoaSE has one of the best User Interfaces of any game ever... Agree or Disagree?

Yeah this is what I discovered when trying to mod the shaders too, you can change them sure but you can't change how the game engine uses them outside of the particle system -entity files and thats the real killer. I can see why IC and SD did it, they had a game to get out and limited resources it shouldn't be too hard to revisit for the expansion if its on their radar.

As long as you can live with a hemi-sphere fire arc you can do it, the problem you'll find is that on certain designs even this makes weapons fire through the hull and do some pretty strange things. To avoid this you have to place the weapon emitters at the extremities of the ship mesh. The other thing you can experiment with is weapons as abilities, for example a Kol Destroyer will line itself up perpendicular to the tangent of its target before firing the gauss gun. You can a

Some of the B5 ship models are too complex for the SoaSE game engine as is, we will have to see what subsequent patches or expansion delivers in terms of space combat and simulation... [link="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9ITqkSlI2U"]WWW Link[/link] [link="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIS5y1MrIko"]WWW Link[/link]

Big ships dont look right without proper animated turrets, trust me I've done one. When you design your ships keep this in mind and do youself a big favour and use weapons which will look ok emitting a beam or projecticle from a point rather than cannons.

Here is some load screen changes been playing with a while back.. [img]http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/164/b5loadscreenfo7.jpg[/img]

The original film is class, the 2008 TV-mini series remake is watchable but poor by comparison bar the obvious enhancement in special effects.

I think in fairness the game is today as modable as possible given the resources SD & IC can reasonably throw at the problem. We'll just have to wait our turn and if it doesn't come to fruition then I propose a mass snowball+Molson deathmatch British Columbia style. :p [I]you don't need to use large fonts btw we aren't visually impaired.[/I]

[quote]That would require a more open engine and basically an SDK for us, the ability to script and modify the engine itself - which it isn't designed for right now. I mean, it'd be great if eventually we gained some limited ability to script in new things, but it is a lot of work for them, too.[/quote] It is yes but that is basically what we are saying isn't it?

[quote]there's so much that could be done with seemingly trivial changes, whether they would have been made in the game's development or after release.[/quote] Again I have to agree with Carbon016 on this point, but I take encouragement from a willingness to listen my biggest concern is the delta between the various wishlists (which for the most part have genuine points), and 'where we are today'. :NOTSURE:

(O Sole Mio aka Walls Ice Cream advert) [I]Just one ship turret, give it to me, please change the game engine using a hardpoint or entity. The new-ly rendered scene.. with animated turrets, will be a modders dream.[/I] Just make it possible to attach a Gauss gun defence platform in object space to a mesh or I'll threaten you with more dire songs ;p

SoaSE lets you mod certain parts very easily, but other quite significant areas are seemingly hardcoded. I am going to keep the faith by taking the view that its still early days and the developers are otherwise engaged in more beneficial tasks. I also see where Carbon016 is coming from, and some straight answers would be most welcome.

[quote]TFL BigBANGtheory, are there multiple ability points or is it only Ability-0? Also, let's consider a ship from Star Trek, if I want to put phasers in various places would I name each point Weapon-0 since they're all the same type of weapon? For torpedo launchers, would I mark them all as Weapon-1? If I wanted quantum torpedoes to come out of only the lower dome, would they then be Weapon-2 and I could not add any other weapon types? That's the way I'm interpreting things. Also, I

Its [U]3 types[/U] of fixed weapons not 3 in total, you can have weapon abilities on top of that though like the Kol gauss gun and planet bombardment.

[quote]What can and cannot be done is clear. The question is whether or not silly things like hardcoded limits will _ever_ be changed.[/quote] Hardcoded limits are a problem, it would be nice to see the game engine read and set such things from an external file like so much else in the game. Weapon and Flair points would be top of my list grrrrr. What can and cannot be done is not clear, atleast not to me for example if I was to write a new Vertex shader what sort of things cou

Thanks for the offers, put simply (now that I am a bit more experienced with modding) because of the scale of the B5 universe and how long it takes to accomplish even relatively small steps I think we are going to have to adopt a more open policy with both the B5 and SoaSE community. I need to discuss it with some of the others first. What would be REALLY useful is someone who understands HLSL (High Level Shader Language), as I personally believe that the answer to some of the

Yes they do have to be specific names e.g. Weapon-0 Weapon-1 Weapon-2 (no point going higher than 3 weapons engine ignores them) Hanger Exhaust Ability-0 Flair-Flair_ Center Aura Be careful about the facing/tangent of the dummy points in some cases like weapons and exhaust the facing matters. I do not know the answer regarding soft vertices, my guess would be no but others may know more.

[quote]Why every people want bigger size?[/quote] More detail, less quantity different gameplay.

Highest poly mesh imported to date to my knowledge is 45,000 ;p really need to strip that sucka down a bit but I had 5 in game and no problems.