SoaSE Celestial Bodies Mod - My first steps, concepts and ideas

How I started modding SoaSE

Published on March 19, 2009 By TohKlidan In Stardock Games

At the beginning of this year i bought Sins, because i was looking for a space strategy game like Masters of Orion 2 or Heagemonia . After some skirmish matches I know this was the game I was looking for. So I joined the Entrenchment beta, I never regret this decision.

After I downloaded the Forge Tools (I just wanted to create my own map of our Sol System), I saw there was a lot of stuff missing for the ideas I had for this map.

I stumbled across Cybdevil's Different Planetsizes Sol System Mod . I though wow cool stuff, but then I relized it is not working with Entrenchment. So I began to convert the files on my own. Since this mod was in an early stage, I began to make a new concept for a mod.

Here an early stage of the concept spread sheet:

Instead of creating completly new planets (see mods like 7Sins), I just want to extend the existing ones. But I also noticed that there is no planet type for "no atmosphere" planets like our moon or mercury.

I decided to split up each planet into 4 different sizes (moon, dwarf, normal and huge) as base size I used the original scale of a normal planet. Moon meshes become x0.25 of that size, dwarfs x0.6, normal one left unchanged, and huge one become x1.3 of that size. Also the gravity wells, planet health and population where changed for each size, and a lot other small adjustments where added during the mod progress.

Next step was creating new HUD graphics especially for the main view. Here some examples:

I tried a lot until i got the cake-edge idea, to show the different sizes in the HUD. The first idea was to resize all icons, but for the player it was to hard to discern the different sizes. So only the moons got smaller icons and all other sizes get this little cake-edges. While one edge stands for dwarf, 2 for normal and 3 for huge planets.For the gasgiants I variied the edges a little, since the have only to different sizes.

So thats all for now, I hope you enjoyed this story.

Meanwhile I made a lot of progress with this little mod. You can also visit my thread:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/338406

or stay tuned here to get some more background informations in my next article!

Comments

TohKlidan

on Mar 27, 2009

Since filefront closes in a view days I have begun to move my files and images to mediafire. Also I uploaded some new images.

Here is the 2nd table which contains the unique celestial bodies of our sol system:

The turquoise colored planets have a unique texture.

The next images show you the first Researchtree changes I made, maybe there will be more changes in the future. I will only add new ones, if its nessecary for new planets or anomalies. I will keep the tech-tree-changes as small as possible, cause there are enough other mods (e.g. Mad Scientist) which have research changes as focus.

TohKlidan

on Apr 06, 2009

Here are 2 images of the redesigned black hole:

The blackhole from 7DS mod reminded me of "The Black Hole" movie by Disney, it is very dark. And I wanted to make a more friendly looking blackhole.

TohKlidan

on Apr 23, 2009

I updated the techtree pics in the first reply (see above), for the next version (0.9).

The Colonization Research for "Ancient Relic" Planets, they are placed in low tiers, but cost allways the same as tier 5 techs, like Gas Giant Colonization.

The new research is for a few new special planets, one of them is the Dyson Sphere (see: http://tohklidan.impulsedriven.net/article/344732/Dyson_Sphere_for_SoaSE_Celestial_Bodies_Mod )

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