- This mod is no longer active. Instead, TobiWahn_Kenobi is creating another B5 mod that looks very promising. You can find his mod here: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/361694
Please let this topic die in peace. -
Since it is pretty outrageous that there isn't a single mod for Sins featuring the Babylon 5 universe, I have begun working on it myself. This mod will be designed for Entrenchment, as a Babylon 5 mod just has to have starbases in my opinion.
Setting:
This mod (at least at this stage) will focus on the early Babylon 5 series, before the formation of the Interstellar Alliance. I always felt that the best part of the series were the earlier ones, with the Shadows being "the unknown hidden threat" and the younger races emboiled in diplomatic manipulations with one another. Think season 2 & 3, with the Centauri being manipulated by the Shadows to wage all-out war with the Narn, The Earth Alliance being frightened into a pact of non-agression with the Centauri while their Babylon-5 Space Station fights a series of skirmishes against Centauri forces, a renegade Minbari Sharlin warcruiser, in other words alot of possible reasons for the different races to fight eachother.
Aims:
- A summer first release, featuring:
- 4 Playable races at first release. These will be:- The Earth Alliance-> The Earth Alliance uses ponderous but very solid ships with impressive armor. Their ships that lack the powerful long range weapons of the other races, which is compensated by powerful although somewhat inaccurate short to medium ranged weaponry.- The Centauri Republic-> The Centauri use fast and highly maneuvrable ships with devastating weaponry. Their ships are however less durable than those of the other races, even though the Centauri experiment with a new type of shielding on some of their ships. Centauri fighters are superior to Narn & Earth Alliance fighters, but they generally deploy less of them as several of their ship classes are not capable of supporting fightercraft.- The Narn Regime-> More ponderous than the ships of the other races, Narn ships are durable and well armored. They favour powerful long range frontal weaponry, with their trademark weapon being the energy-mine launcher. Even though their frontal long range weaponry is impressive, most Narn vessels are undergunned compared to equivalent ship classes of the other races. Narn fighters are comparable to Earth Alliance's Starfuries, but somewhat less maneuvrable.- Minbari Federation-> The most powerful of the young races, their ships are superior in all regards to those of the other races. They are faster, have superior maneuvrability, carry extremely powerful beam weaponry, and are protected by a form of cloak that makes automatic targetting impossible. Oh, and their fighters are superior in every way too.
- At least 5 ship classes per race (plus fighters) for the initial release. Most ship models already exist, but they need to be converted to XSI which is difficult and tedious.
- One starbase per race.
- Sins pirates will be replaced by their B5 counterpart the Raiders.
- Buildings will be for a later release. Except for the Starbases I feel most Sins buildings can easily function as babylon 5 constructions.- Integration with several other mods to change planets, planet bonusses, explosions and other such things to better suit the Babylon universe
- This mod will aim to reflect what you see in the series/movies as best as possible. Most ships will not have shields but use armor that determines their amount of migitation. The best survival a ship has is to not get hit: weapons will have a substantial chance to miss, but when they do hit it will hurt.
- Supply lines that allow you to keep your ships working at their highest potential
- Small to medium-scale conflict. No fleets of hundreds upon hundreds of vessels that insta-zerg everything in their path.
- Loosing ships will matter. Loosing an entire fleet will be a disaster. Knowing when to retreat will be important.
- Meaningful special abilities that resemble the stuff you see in the series/movies. The Centauri Mass Drivers for planetary bombardment for example.
- Fully immersive music, sound and speech.
Plans for the second release include:
- More ships.
- Completely reworked research trees that allow new ships to be researched.
The second release will also introduce the Shadows and the Vorlons as playable factions. Both of these races will have the incredibly powerful ships we know from the series, which will be balanced out by their high cost and possibly other things as well like lack of trade income, or very limited research, but that will be a future concern. Both races will be designed around their respective philosophies "What do you want" and "Who are you".
Since I am currently working on this mod on my own, it is going to take some time before a release. In addition, I do not have much modelling experience, and even though I already have most ship models so far my first attempts to try and convert a LightWave-made Sharlin Class Warcruiser to a Sins compatible XSI format were not an overwhelming succes.
So if anyone with modelling experience is interested in converting/creating models let me know. In addition if anyone knows any good models we can use for this mod let me know.
Regards,
Lord Tareq
Great to know I'm not the only one working on B5 stuff for Sins. As for the latter, I also have explored the Vasari Phase Gate to use as a possible Jumpgate. Unfortunately the Phase Stabiliser ability basically gives a buff to the entire gravity-well to be a viable end-point for another planet with a Phase Gate, and so it will stay a bit "abstract", i.e. no ships will actually form a jumppoint inside or even near the Phase Gate.
I am currently toying with 3 possible workable idea's to try and approach B5's jumpgate-system: The first one is to make the normal phaselanes between planets conventional travel, and therefor really slow, with certain ships (for example the EA Explorer-class) being able to construct Jump Gates that allow for the much faster hyperspace travel.
The second one is to make the normal phaselanes between planets conventional travel as well, but adding a neutral&capturable Phase gate cq Jump Gate to every planet. Ideally one would have buildable capturable Jump Gates, but that doesn't seem to be possible.
The third one is the most unlikely to succeed, and is to somehow change the phase stabilizer ability to act as a starting-point instead of the current end-point, theoretically allowing travel to anywhere from a planet with a jumpgate. (edit: as I suspected hardcoded and as far as I can see impossible to do. I've spend an entire evening trying to get it to work, including trying to implement it as a passive ability on planets, but to no avail)
I'll post an update when I find out which of the 3 are truly workable.
@ BigBANGtheory
I saw your responses on the other thread, and I'm curious what you consider to be the sticking points. While I understand that you want to have moving/tracking turrets on the Nova & Omega... I, personally, don't mind them being stationary. This game has enough scale that the turrets are only visible half the time anyway (if that). What other "show stoppers" did you find? I saw that you found out how to do rotating sections for the Omegas. Did that (or mesh sizes) become too much of a resource hog?
As another post said, "I would rather be able to [play] it than have it be pristine perfect."
Resoures wasn't the problem it was simply getting silly the ammount of things that were having to be dropped, but rather than dwell too much on that lets focus on what can be done. I do own Entrenchment now so I am looking at it more thoughly, what really jumps out is how Entrenchment (and recent SoaSE patches) have improved the level of detail which is great for most players tbh it was something I always knew could be done right from the days of importing that Battlecrab.
Vasari Phase Gate Stabilisers -> B5 Jumpgates... These aren't going to do what is needed visually, they have a useful property concerning direct phase lane paths but you are still limited by gravity wells. Really even in vanilla Sins these objects should be used as gates but instead they act like beacons.
The only other example I see worth exploring is wormholes, which do act as more of a point to point system. Unlike phase jumping there dosen't seem to be an entry/exit animation whether or not one could be created I don't honestly know.
Sounds like a good mod.
1
I will soon convert this topic into a WIP topic which I shall regularly update as I'm making progress. I am currently working on the player portraits which I hope you will all like.
I'm not ealy in B5 but i think i found a solution to you'r jump gate problem (any way the way sins handle jump gate is a failure)
there is a vasari habilitie that allow ships to jump to an other planet from deeper in a gravity well
if you transform the habilitie so that it affect only ships in a cetain distance from it like an aura
and make it so that they can jump from anywhere inside the gavity well
then a fleet that reach a gate's aura should be able to jump right away
but only to any other grav well wit an other jump gate that i have no clue to it
Edit: Portraits moved to last post.
edit: Portraits moved to last post
Would it be possible to join the two concepts, the scout and colonize abilities into a B5 class vessel? It would give the AI what it needs and still be B5 centric.
-Teal
Would have to test that but afaik no; the AI simply needs a seperate colony, siege & scout entry or it will no longer know what to do and sit in its homeplanet for the entire match.
Portrait preview:
(note: preliminary portraits, may not make it into the mod exactly as shown)
Centauri Republic portraits:
Narn Regime portraits:
Earth Alliance portraits:
Minbari Federation portraits:
Shadows & Vorlons portraits:
All the best with this. I'm sure everyone will understand if certain sacrifices must be made in order to fit the Bab universe into the Sins engine. I for one just want to blow something up with a Minbari Sharlin, and I'll be happy. I will definately be watching this mod. Out of curiosity, what will you do as regards the lack of actual ship classes in Bab? I'm still getting through Series 4 at the moment (better late than never, i guess. Morden's just had his head put on a spike. Genius), but I think I've only seen 5 or 6 different ship classes for the humans, and really no more than 2 or 3 for the other races. Are you planning on designing your own, modifying existing designs, merging minor race ships into the larger factions, or limiting ship types?
lol. And why is Darth Vader standing behind Evil Pissed off Kosh #2?
Well, depending on the amount of modellers/texturers that join in, we will probably adapt some of the ship classes made for the tabletop miniature game to fill the gaps. The previous page has a ship-list.
But this mod will be about capital ships duking it out, so the lack of ship classes doesn't matter too much. Personally I never really saw the good in having dozens of different ship classes to choose from just for the sake of diversity, unless it really fits a particular faction (say Rebel Alliance)
Its a lie! There is no Darth Kosh, and there is no Darth Vader shadow. It's all in your mind I tell you.
Beautiful Portraits!!!
I know he's not a Captain or anything, but where's Garibaldi?
He's the poor mans Bruce Willis, I demand his inclusion!
I made a Jumpgate as well as a Jumpengine ability for Capital Ships. If your interested, got the first Version ready as of now
Features: researchable Jumpgate - tactical structure, own mesh and textures, solar panel color for team color
Based on Vasari Phasegate, added ability to turn on/off (to counter the beacon effect)
Researchable upgrades - makes hyperspacetravel REALLY fast
Jumpengine ability for Cap Ships as research (ability position index 3 for every cap, ultimate ability -> 4 as of now)
Icons for every item/research
Compatible with Entrenchment 1.02
ToDo's
Ability to travel between starsystems using Jumpgates. Any instruction or help on how to do this would be welcomed.
Be kind, my first modding of SOASE
LG
DerWahn
that;s sooo coool!!!! I can't wait.
I am looking forward to play first ones aka Vorlon and Shadow to pew pew all young (primitive) races in no time.
Please tell me that is an on off animation, cus if it is, you are a god.
Have you managed to get ships to pass through the centre of the gate to jump as opposed to anywhere else in the grav well limits? I couldn't get that to work for love nor money...
Excellent stuff TobiWahn, yes I'd love to incorporate your work into this mod. I'm good at coding & creating and implementing sound, music and artwork, but poor at modelling so anything made by others which I can implement will speed up the mod immensly.
Tricky, one way I can think of is making the jumpgate ability into the wormhole ability. Unfortunately that would mean instant travel so its not ideal.
@ vp21ct:
The animation turns on when you activate the jumpgate, and turns off when you deactivate it.
@ TFL BigBANGtheory:
No, the ships do not exit out of the jumpgate... As you already suspected, this seems impossible without commands to change shippositions. As for now, a little bit of imagination is required (until the devs get their act together
have you any idea how to get the VasariPhaseGate buff working between different starsystems?
@ Lord Tareq:
How do I do this? Must look into this, just for the sake of it. -> using ApplyBuffToSelf and then use the wormhole buff?Any instructions are welcomed!
This would be awsome (cos ships would come out of the Jumpgate)
Glad you all like it. I was always thinking it would add immensly to the strategy part of SOASE to be able to set up your own phase lane network.
Unfortunately on second thought I don't think it is possible as wormholes need to be linked in the map. Simply giving stations/ships the wormhole ability probably causes a minidump as the game doesn't know to which wormhole the station is linked. The exact working of the wormhole seem to be hardcoded, so its not possible to change anything other than the appearance of the wormhole, the ship-classes that can move through it, and the soundeffects.
Setting the hypergate up to be a star (and thus allow star travel) doesn't work either, so I really doubt it is at all possible unfortunately.
Well, thats not-so-good. But, on the other hand, someone already has made a B5 Galaxy map using only one StarSystem (search the forums to find it), which fits the bill nicely I would say. I'm already playtesting it (with minor modifications) feels good. Now I just need to work a bit more on the Jumpgate textures.
Wish there wouldn't be so many hardcoded limitations. Hopefully a c++ framework to develop more stuff will come out!
Jumpgates would be nice, but it's not the be-all and end-all. I for one would be happy just with Bab 5 ships in place of what's already there, but then I'm pretty easy to please. How far did BingBangTheory get with ship textures? I've seen a clip on youtube of an Earth destroyer that looked cool, and he's already shown the Sharlin.
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