Space Empires V PBW game?

[Covenant]

I've encountered another bit of wierdness. I'm not sure what's driving it, but it seems like the ship's bounding box is always, or nearly always, a cube. So if my ship is shaped like a Hiigaran Battlecruiser, there's still a rough 'cube' shape in the middle of it that is the target for enemy fire. I can't be positive, since I can't really get an ideal situation where ships just sit there and paint each other's boxes with lasers. I'm just guessing.

And I'm not too entirely sure what makes what a certain size, but I think the base size is actually the size of the little white target thing. That's the "base" I think. Gonna test it... but I gotta say, wow. For two things.

Number one, wow for having such a clunky way of handling combat. Just letting me define a bounding box would be nice, as would not having all ships default to like .13 of maximum size. Scaling, anyone?

And number two, wow for giving me such a powerful modding ability with just some numbers. It may be pretty sluggish and wierd, but it's still fun, and it moves along pretty quickly. I don't want to spend all weekend on this, and if it gets too late in the game, I'll just disable the engine lights. No biggie there.

I just wish I knew how it handled things like turning. These ships make some wideass turns, and have the most insane bounding boxes. Even though I tried to make it smaller, the bounding box on the destroyer is the size of an X-Box controller.

Update:

Okay, seems they always fire into the interior of the ship. The fact that it appeared that they were shooting the front of the ship before is merely because the bounding box was really off. I kinda fixed it, but it gives additional woes--such as the gunfire. It comes flying out from all over the freaking place! My BC's are about 1x4 in size, so I'm going to open up a normal game and figure out how big that is compared to a real faction's battlecruiser. Then I can work back from there and fire out how big the battleship should be based off of that. The battleship (hiigaran destroyer) is really giving me a lot of problems because it's one of those "I am bigger than you think" ships that the gamemakers decided should be NEARLY as big as a dreadnaught. That's unacceptable to me, the modder, since it looks goofy. It also causes clipping errors. I have battleships molesting each other all over the place.

Oh, and did I mention I love my Engines?

[ColonialAdmiral]

Very nice.
I will be using it if you ever upload it to Spaceempires.net or anyother sharing site

[Covenant]

Very nice.
I will be using it if you ever upload it to Spaceempires.net or anyother sharing site

HAX!

Just wait for us to finish texturing them. Also, for everyone's reference, the average size of a Dreadnought is around 2x2 with empty space. Mine is over twice that size, at a nearly fully 2x4. That is really freakin' huge. But now I think I can shrink it down. I believe the engine lights will scale down as well... but I'm not positive. Instead of hitting submit, I'll check that out.

Huzzah! It does. How odd. I guess that's why everything is set to .1 or such. It's easier to place lights and engine flares when it's big, and then shrink it. Now it's around a flat 3x2, which is not bad. It looks large, but it appears to have the same relative mass as a big fatty 2x2 dread like most races. And best part is I can grab the firing points from a similarly shaped ship (such as the Phong) and paste it in there.

It seems a little sad to have the ship so small. It's got such nice and pretty textures! They're actually so high rez that it looks a little out of place. But zoomed in, it's all gravy. I don't blame people for wanting to use them! These HW2 textures are so professional.

[MKSheppard]

The 'advanced' hulls had other benefits, like the cruisers gave you a higher thrust-to-mass ratio and longer endurance. The idea was that the more complicated hulls were more than just boxes of weapons, and would encourage a wider degree of strategic maneuver and such. But by giving people the best hulls right up front you remove the mad dash for Dreadnought hulls and put more of the emphasis on deciding what to do with them rather than just making them bigger and bigger.

I once made a SEV mod that simply massively reduced every ship construction thing from "Light Hulls, Medium Hulls, Big Hulls, Even Bigger Hulls" to just one thing "Ship Hull Construction"; on the basis of the idea that historically, you didn't need to research cruiser/destroyer/battleship hulls separately in real life; you simply started out with small battleships and destroyers, and they grew from there.

So you would be able to build a battleship massing only 600 kt from turn one right away.

The big problem with that was the AI, since I play mostly AI-only games, and that simply broke the AI massively, and now the AI is much harder to work with due to the new "rar! we must compile scripts!" of SE5.

[GuppyShark]

Hrmm, every time I load my Davion empire file, the game changes my Racial picture. Arthur, when the game starts, do you think it'll be possible to make sure my new racial portrait is the Davion racial pic?

Thanks,

[Alan Bolte]

Well well well, it looks like we might be in business after all, I just have to sort out what ship models only have textures wider than they are tall. I'm gonna have a look at that HTL Fenris.

[Covenant]

That's pretty badass. All the little tweaking is a pain, but it's always nice to see a model ingame. I wish SEV had lighting effects, seeing some shadows would be nice. Also, little blinking lights would be good! There's a function for that, but I haven't even bothered trying yet.

[Covenant]

The big problem with that was the AI, since I play mostly AI-only games, and that simply broke the AI massively, and now the AI is much harder to work with due to the new "rar! we must compile scripts!" of SE5.

If you know how to write them, there's a script compiler right in SEV's file structure that will let you write your own scripts and then compile them. It works pretty well!

[Alan Bolte]

Mm, nevermind, looks like whether the game will render a nonsquare texture correctly is a crapshoot. The Orion just happens to have all square textures, except for debris and LOD, which I'm not using. Well, the nameplate isn't square, but you wouldn't even notice if that rendered incorrectly since I'm leaving it blank.

UPDATE: Got Orion, Aeolus, and Hecate working. Damn forgot how ugly these ships were before the Hard Light guys got to them. Can't use the HTL versions though, I don't think. Not enough square textures. Also, it was pretty funny seeing the Orions just sitting on top of each other because they lacked the range to hit each other otherwise.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I don't see anything on the list of 1.07 changes that would affect .emp files, so go ahead and send them along with any custom ship set you might be using. Be sure to include your PBW handle in the name of the .emp file so that I can put them in proper order more easily. Address is arthurtuxedo AT gmail DOT com. Make sure to get them in by Monday so we can start on Tuesday.

[Keevan_Colton]

Is there still room for one more?
I just picked up SEV the other day since it was reduced at the store

[brianeyci]

Large galaxy for sure then.

For Keevan and the people who haven't played a PBW game before (I'm not sure how many) we're talking about one turn every 48 hours. Since I fully expect the game to last until turn 100, it'll be seven months of playing this game. It's not really a big deal for people who go on their computers to game at all... 30 minutes every 48 hours. But it's something to be aware of, this isn't something that's done in two weeks or a month. Of course, Tuxedo is nice and gives breaks for vacations/exams etc., and we can find replacement players so that's not an issue.

Actually with the level of skill here and the "no annihilation" rule this could go on to turn 200.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Is there still room for one more?
I just picked up SEV the other day since it was reduced at the store

Yep. Join up! Need any clarifications about what you need to do?

[Keevan_Colton]

Is there still room for one more?
I just picked up SEV the other day since it was reduced at the store

Yep. Join up! Need any clarifications about what you need to do?

Yeah

I've got the Balance Mod and a full backup of my SEV directory. What else do I need to download or do on my end to be setup for it?

Also, where do I go to sign up?

And lastly, what shipsets/flags are already being used so I can download and avoid them?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Is there still room for one more?
I just picked up SEV the other day since it was reduced at the store

Yep. Join up! Need any clarifications about what you need to do?

Yeah

I've got the Balance Mod and a full backup of my SEV directory. What else do I need to download or do on my end to be setup for it?

Also, where do I go to sign up?

This is the PBW site. Simply register there and find the game entitled SDN SE V Balance Mod. I'd direct-link, but PBW is set up in a funny way so that doesn't work.

And lastly, what shipsets/flags are already being used so I can download and avoid them?

For flags, get the MKSheppard's Flagtastic pack, which I linked to on the first page. For ship sets, they'll be provided in a zip file once I receive them all. I think the only publicly available custom ones being used are the Romulan, Galactic Empire, and Ur-Quan.

[Keevan_Colton]

I guess I'll go with the Colonial shipset then.

I've signed up at the PBW website as Fearghul.

[Nephtys]

Since Keevan is doing Colonials, and I want to change, I think I'll make my own as well. I originally wanted HW2, then FS2... given that both are taken, I guess I'm ripping the ships out of Eve Online.

So far, it looks really easy. I got a program that rips them from the free trial directly into .x files, so woot. After less than an hour of work, I built a fleet.

[brianeyci]

Guys make your ships as big as you want. They'll just make for better fireworks .

How are you going to explain a ship a quarter the size blowing up something that's... 2 x 10 squares? Ah well firepower's a bitch isn't it.

Seriously that looks incredible.

[Nephtys]

I need to learn what is the 'standard' size, since these ships I'm extracting aren't normalized in size. And their 'truescale' is really way too different for the supersized ships for SEV.

How's this look? I may use these guys, the French Space Navy.

[GuppyShark]

Sniffle...

I... I have my own flag. It's pretty.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Looks great, Neph. Can't wait to duke it out against or alongside them.

[Covenant]

Mine has more polish! Look! Even the frigates have shiny bitz!



Does anyone have a .ROT extractor, or all the homeworld ship icons? I'd absolutely adore someone who would either screenshot all the ships for me for use as icons, or would go in and screenshot their little mini-schematics. You know the ones I'm talking about, on the build screen!

[Covenant]

Finished with all my engines. Oh wait, I gots to do all the carriers. Sits.

BTW, loading Tanis base always crashes me. Hrm. Perhaps not then. ;D

Tanis AND the mothership! I think I found the max polycount. I'm going to have to turn off all the bitz!

I got Tanis working now. I'm not sure if both tanis and the mothership were crashing SEV, mighta' been only tanis. The MS is hard to get in-game. I set up a baseship.x but it's not responding to it.

[MKSheppard]

These need to be given to me NOW NOW NOW

[Covenant]

Feedback on some race images:





Neph and I think they look fitting and alright, but I wasn't sure about the lack of color. I could try to colorize them somewhat, but I didn't know of that spoiled their iconic nature.