Space Empires V PBW game?

[Alan Bolte]

Well, I tried to convert a Fenris, but so far I think I've somehow only exported a turret...

[darthkommandant]

Sounds like Tuesday, since there's no guarantee that .emp files generated with BM 1.06 will work with 1.07. Try to get me the .emp file as soon as you get back, Kingside, so we can start on Tuesday.

For everyone else, I won't be using any of the .emp files or ship sets from PBW since I don't want to muck about getting files from two different sources. So once you patch up and get the new version of Balance Mod, and once you've made sure the .emp file works, then send me that and also the ship set you're using. Then I'll put the ship sets into a zip file and host it on my webspace so everyone else can see the custom ship sets, too.

Is there a link to this page yet or will the link be provided when all the empires are in? As for me a Tuesday start works best since I my last final is on Monday.

[Alan Bolte]

Well, that's a slight improvement.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Awesome, Freespace! Wouldn't mind seeing some of those ships traipsing about in SE V.

The link will be provided once all the ship sets are in and I zip them up and upload them.

[ColonialAdmiral]

If I'm using a stock shipset.....Do I still need to send you an emp. file?

[Alan Bolte]

Damn, just can't figure out what's wrong with the mapping. Guess I'll try to remap the things myself. That'll take forever though, so probably not happening for this game, if ever.

[Hotfoot]

I was toying with the demo, and I just found out that there's a savegame in the demo which lets you play as the Shaderni Empire, ruled by Price Mortova.

Needless to say, I was a little shocked, since this was a custom race I had created years ago in Space Empires 4, and then posted a fair amount of fiction for on the old Shrapnel Games website. It's not in the full game, but if you download the demo and load up the default savegame you should see it.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

If I'm using a stock shipset.....Do I still need to send you an emp. file?

Yep. I don't want to download things from two sources, plus there's no way to tell whether the PBW .emp's are up to date or not, so all files that I'll use will come from e-mail.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I was toying with the demo, and I just found out that there's a savegame in the demo which lets you play as the Shaderni Empire, ruled by Price Mortova.

Needless to say, I was a little shocked, since this was a custom race I had created years ago in Space Empires 4, and then posted a fair amount of fiction for on the old Shrapnel Games website. It's not in the full game, but if you download the demo and load up the default savegame you should see it.

Sweet. I had a moment like that one time with Age of Wonders where I stumbled onto a Dwarven clan that I had created. I had recruited one or two people and then lost interest and wandered off, only to find their site years later that still had the fight song I had written displayed prominently. They had over a dozen members, but none of them had been around when I created it, so they didn't believe me.

[Hotfoot]

Apparently the moment is an illusion, apparently the demo was on my laptop once before, but for the life of me I can't remember doing it.

Right now, the only conclusion we can come to is a mirror universe that installed the program on my laptop, got rid of it, and is trying to drive me insane. It's working.

[Covenant]

OKAY! Time to share the knowledge here. No more of this stonecold silence I've been getting.

How do I package up ships for use in the game? I can make the bestest most wellest skinned hordes of shippies, spit them out as .X files, but what the hell does that get me if I can't put them in-game?

And so far nobody has or is willing to tell me how to do that. Will someone finally rectify this? Otherwise, I'm going to have a giant pile of Homeworld ships sitting around with no war to fight.

Also, how are turrets handled? If they're just stationary widgets on the hull with no real purpose, I'll probably just leave them off most of the models. No reason to add extra cluttered polycounts to things you'll never even see.

[brianeyci]

Well I don't know exactly how to do it Covenant, but I remember the links: the info is here and for the inventory slot modding it's here.

Brian

[Covenant]

Awesome!

And so, when a ship fires, the bullets just come out of the body, right?

Also also, how many shiptypes do I need? This isn't like Adamant with the 500 types of Freighters and 1000 types of Supercarriers, right?

I can make a full set, but I want to know which are going to be called by the game.

[brianeyci]

I don't know. I do know that a mod called Gritty Galaxy implements "directional armor" and maybe directional guns. I don't know how that's done though, or even how it works, maybe Tuxedo knows.

I do know when I zoom it, it looks like it's just coming out of the center of the body.

[Covenant]

So, how do we test these things? Or can I send them to someone to be checked out?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I think the models have "firing points" where the fire (from any and all of its guns) can come from, but I don't know any of the technicalities of it or how to actually do it.

[GuppyShark]

Wow. Freespace ships! Nifty keen!

I STILL can't decide which of a few Empire ideas to try out. Hopefully I'll have time over the weekend to throw a custom flag set together.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I approved SeonSai because he's having trouble registering on SDN, but has given indication that he's aware of the thread here. As long as he checks the thread for news, I suppose it's not a big deal whether he actually makes posts or not. The other two will have to make a post if they want to play.

[Nephtys]

Hmm. I want to make an Honorverse set. They're seriously basic ships, but... well. The gameplay would admittedly look pretty neat with them. Missile broadsides? The game already forms 3d walls with dreadnaught squadrons

Or failing that, wooden ships, iron asteroids!

[Covenant]

Hmm. I want to make an Honorverse set. They're seriously basic ships, but... well. The gameplay would admittedly look pretty neat with them. Missile broadsides? The game already forms 3d walls with dreadnaught squadrons

Or failing that, wooden ships, iron asteroids!

I'm sorry. Fighting a fleet full of similarly designed doublesided wangs really isn't what I call a good time. They're as bad as the Syreen at encouraging enemy officers to snicker and make lesbian jokes.

[Nephtys]

Hmm. I want to make an Honorverse set. They're seriously basic ships, but... well. The gameplay would admittedly look pretty neat with them. Missile broadsides? The game already forms 3d walls with dreadnaught squadrons

Or failing that, wooden ships, iron asteroids!

I'm sorry. Fighting a fleet full of similarly designed doublesided wangs really isn't what I call a good time. They're as bad as the Syreen at encouraging enemy officers to snicker and make lesbian jokes.

Fine, I want to see broadsides. I hereby command that the universe makes one of those 40k shipsets with the space churches!

[Alan Bolte]

Well, I give up. The problem seems to be that SE5 reads non-256x256 textures differently then the rest of the universe, and changing the textures themselves is actually making the problem worse. It's definitely a remapping issue, and I'd have to learn how to UV-map to fix this.

[Covenant]

I wonder if SEV has changed the way the game handles mines. Before heavy mines were useless.

And Neph, someone IS making a Honor Suckington shipset! Do a google for it, you'll find it out there somewhere, coming along slowly.

[Covenant]

Every time I try to load the game with my shipset added, I get a "cannot find file" error and a crash. Gaaah! What am I doing wrong? Seriously, share the info here. ;p

Alright, fixed it clumsily. I just extracted the FedTNG folder into my Hiigaaran folder, and whatever file was missing no longer is. Now all I need to do is correct their facing angles and sizes. They're all massively huge and facing straight up.

[Alan Bolte]

Looks like mines are getting a radical change in 1.07 anyway to fix an exploit.