Nah, I'm quite peaceful. I'm afraid you're stuck with practising Zen for the time being.

Soor, I understand better now. The texture design is supposed to offer an "armored up" feel to the ship, with few details and complicated parts all tucked away in the belly pit and on the back of the chin. It looks better in motion and next to other ships, where size reference is then easily available (same with EvE ships, even though they're supposed to be huge, without other objects to compare them to they tend to look small, even with high-res textures). Not to mention that huge slabs of relatively smooth metal plating is sort of a Xin theme.

I'm actually quite pleased with the overall result since it uses a mid-res texture size (1024x1024), and I was afraid all that surface detail and high-res bump-mapping would be lost on a texture that size.

wow .  you have put a LOT of work into this! this mod seems like it might be so huge it might collapse on itself and form a black hole and suck up the earth entirely. wait a minute.....The stuff about the mines and titans and outpost new race....... *GASP*!!! THIS IS A CONSPIRACY! A conspiracy cooked up by stardock to put out entrenchment early! and... for FREE?   it's probably the coolest conspiracy theory i've ever had. Bless you and your dedication to all the people who play sins to make such an awesome mod!

Never ignore the IRS. we can send our trainees after you for assimilation training before we assign them to a cube. trust me, when a borg tries to assimilate you but doesn't know how it's a bad experience for all involved.

i have an idea for the xin base defense, a structure that opens a black hole inside of a ship (as a special ability) and that ship is instantly destroyed and it causes aoe damage, as well as twin plasma cannons for other ships while the ability cools down...

THAT IS COMPLETELY AWESOME!!!

One-hit-kill attacks tend to be game-breaking. The removal of them is about the only thing everyone can agree on as "a good thing" about D&D 4E.

Looks much better now that you've fixed the texture.

if it did a large amount of damage over time, it could still destroy a titan if it was weakened, but then  the titan might also survive, plus it would be more like a black hole opening up in the middle of the ship and breaking it apart from the inside, it may also disable the ship for the duration of the ability. ( hopefully about 5-10 secs.)

It's a Flash movie. To see it, you need to download and install the Flash Player (its free and widely used). If you do have the player installed, perhaps you are using Flash Player 10, these forums seem to be having issues with the latest version. I am using Flash Player 9 myself for the time being. Can anyone with version 10 confirm they can see the movie?

You can download it and run it directly from here. Just make sure you download it first to your computer or else its going to stretch to fill your browser screen and look grainy.

Ok, time for another update. But first some bad news. Looks like I'll have to postpone the release of the Episode I scheduled for this Christmas - the combination of RL work and me slightly underestimating the amount of time needed to make the core assets for the mod is to blame.

I know some of you may be a bit dissapointed to hear this, hell, so am I - but I would still rather deploy the mod in a workable and finished state than something which is missing half its intended features. And come to think of it, the amount of content Episode I alone should deliver is such it can be considered on par with an expansion, so... have patience. I'm steaming ahead regardless.

Of course, the beta version will be released sooner than the final version of Episode I, but I won't speculate again as to when, I'll rather revert to the old - when its ready. I can, however, definitely say you won't have to wait as long as you waited so far.

On to the update. Remember that "space whale" scout I posted at the very beginning of development of this mod? Top pictures in the title post if you forgot. Well, some bozos thought it looked tasty and they ate it. So the Xin came up with something that isn't quite so... fishy (and yes, I know a whale is not a fish).

This is just a quick visual overhaul (took me two days to do it, which is quite fast, at least for me), the scout remains the same; tiny, well armored and shielded, slower than scout average, armed only with a short-range charge weapon which is practically useless for anything but frying fighters which come too close. And how often does that happen.

But, it has a nifty ability which should give the Xin commanders a reason to build these even late game...

i like it, but you could make it a bit smaller in the height, it looks to... round to be an animal with armor on it.  perhaps make the top extend a bit farther out than the bottom and give it more flipper looking things   just some suggestions

Well, I may experiment with flattening it a bit, but since I've done textures in Z-Brush, I don't think I'll be adding anything to it, since you have to do the whole process over again. But thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely see if I can get a better result by a little tweaking. The idea here is to make it look a bit cumbersome, not too sleek and fast-looking, because it isn't. Good thing it can take more punishment than your average scout.

Oh and by the way, its supposed to be an insect-like, or better said, one of those crab-like creatures which lives in prehistoric oceans, can't remember the name right now. And of course, since all superstructure lifeforms the Xin use are heavily genetically modified, I can always get away with all sorts of weird shapes.

Must be trilobites.