Just checking in.

I need to ask for patience. The mod will be ready when its ready. I am on the road, and wont have all the factions structures ready for a while. Though i do have all the Federation structures finished minus mining bases which i am going to leave default sins (they are just asteroid bases so who cares what they look like).

Darkshimmer will keep updating the 0.03 series as needed until we can get the new models in game. I havent been sitting on my butt with the mod. I am however just one person, and the ONLY modeler on the team that can build models from scratch. Ive asked for modeling help before and got silence, or i dont know how to mod, but ill be more than happy to offer suggestions until you go nuts in return.

If SoA 2 is to make any faster progress i need at least one more ACTIVE modeler that can build models, and create/map textures with at least the same quality, and skills i use. My standards are very high, and my own work shows it. Which is why it takes weeks to months for me to build a model from scratch. The 3rd party works are just placeholders. They will all eventually be re-done to meet my standards (and the games standard) in the 0.05 update. For now they are good enough.

The enthusiasim is appreciated, but know that we are working on it. Let us do our thing, and enjoy what is released when it is released.

Hey Shimmer, sorry to hear about your loss. Take your time getting back to us and do what you have to do, the ones of us who are really looking forward to this understand.

Stress, We appriciate the fact that your standards are super high and believe us we definitely are proud that you guys do a great job.

Guys give them some time, I can't wait to get my hands on the final shabang but let it take its due course and when it comes out it comes out.

My condolences. No pressure. Just take your time to get it right.

You bastard...

I'm going to have to actually look at the models when I play, this is totally unfair.

wow really nice! so with outposts and starbases right?

what is the brown ship on the first picture between the sovreign and the starbase?

Hey Stress,

Those screen shots look amazing! Very well done. I can't wait until the next update.

I have a question. Do you plan on putting the orbital office complex from ST TMP in the mod? I know it is mostly just an upside down verison of Regula space station (although I imagine it as signifcantly larger), but I always thought it was much cooler looking. Thanks.

The original plan was for the orbital complex to be the trade station. I built the regula/375 model as the orbital complex (all three were basically the same studio model. just redressed, and re-scaled). The same texture is used for all 3 models. However, there were 2 problems. One the orbital complex is the same size as the regula station (minus the extra modules). So it is way too small to be used as a major trade hub. Two the orbital complex's poly count was way too high to be used in game. The model wound up being almost 10,000 tri's even with all my optimization tricks, and nonsense. If you built one at every planet your puter would become a space heater. I know mine did There are just way too many curves on the model to make a decent lower poly version.

The original orbital complex model is being donated to the Star Trek: Excalibur project.

Remember what i said from day one when the mod was in planning. The poly counts on mod ships, and structures cant be much higher than the vanilla sins ships they are replacing. Same with the texture resolutions. We have some room to play with here, but not very much, and we dont want to go overboard with triangles. In fact we plan on rebuilding some 3rd party work to lower the poly counts. We want the mod to be playable on any system that can run vanilla sins. At the same time we are also going to re-build some models to bring them up to sins standards. Some ships/stations are from the original SoA mod, and have very low resolution textures/models. They will all be re-done, but we want to make sure everything work in game first.

the 375 varient is a much larger station scale wise, and fits perfect as a trade station. Plus its canon

i got your pm's i will be sending out the instructions tomorrow

Looking forward to it, buildings look amazing! And I can't wait for fighter movement.

I heavily modified SoA myself to be more in line with what I like, and in doing so seperated the Cardassian Union from the Dominion Alliance. To give the Cardassians more ambiance I substracted Cardassian spoken lines from Deep Space 9 and implemented those, so the Cardassian ships now have Cardassian voices (though mainly Gul Dukat's voice, as he is one of the few Cardassians with suitable lines in the series) "They will pay for their arrogance, fire!" "It is not our fault we are the superior race, fate handed us that role". stuff like that. Heh I love Gul Dukat, just a shame of all that religious nonsense at the end in DS9.

Anyway, should the team want those Cardassian speech files (11 different ones) let me know and I'll zip & send them to you (no credits or any of that nonsense required obviously), took me a few hours to extract and convert them to the right format, and would be a shame for that time to be wasted just for myself.

i dont even like star trek but those pictures look sweet. will cop

In your /mods/SoA/Textures map is a serie of 14 graphic files starting with Unit_  ,they contain the icons you are looking for.

As for the .dds files, I use photoshop to open them, but so far the only thing I dared to do was changing some beam colours, as I have no idea how they exactly work.

I had posted a link to a file that had alternate names for the capitol ships that are being used in the game.  I dunno if it will help, but if you want them, they are free to have.

Check it out here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=3bbe5bd399c6bbf590a82c7bb0fad7ade04e75f6e8ebb871