First off, Hi Sins forums. Have been lurking here for a few months now. Up until fairly recently, I played EVE Online almost exclusively.Then I found Sins.Anyway, following a few months of playing, it occurred to me the tactical element of EVE combat and Empire politics fitted perfectly with the Iron engine (at least from what I’ve seen in sins and on the modding forums here)Excited, I searched for EVE-O Sins mods, however, all I could find were suggestions for doing so, or ancient threads that looked like they’d gone nowhere, nothing substantial. (Please correct me if there’s anything major I’ve missed)I’ve headed up several modding projects before (although never in sins) and have a hell of a lot of ideas, concepts and stuff going around in my head.Whilst I can’t pull anything together until at least the end of February, I’d be interested in setting up the peripherals for an EVE mod and getting some good health discussion going in the mean time. I was thinking of a TC, major changes to game mechanics, gameplay, aesthetics, etc, etc. Couple o’ thing I had in mind:
Whilst these three points are not everything I have in mind (would probably exceed a forum character limit if I went over everything) I’d love to see everyone else’s inputs on this. Importing models from Tri-Exporter and getting CCP’s permission to use models isn’t that hard if we have a conceivable plan to start with.Apologies for being the upstart sins nubbin here and suggesting this if it’s out of line/place. I’m a huge Sins/EVE fan, and would love to head up something like this.If anyone’s interested in really getting involved, shout here, or PM me, I’d love to hear from you all about this.
Unfortunately there's a limit on the number of ships you can build. Sins is limited to nine frigates, nine cruisers, and nine capitals. You can't build any more than that. Subsystems also can't be done as there is no ship module capability in Sins. Sure, you could add subsystems as abilities, but the only ships in Sins capable of doing limited abilities are capital ships. The other ships all have them unlocked and leveled via researches, and researches in Sins can't be made mutually exclusive. Having weapons being unlocked via ability also contradicts with E-War capabilites, since all those would have to be done via abilities, and the most abilites a ship can have is 5, and the 5th ability on capitals has to be passive since its covered up by the level up button. And no, you can't make it so systems can be blockaded just by having ships present there. The best you could do is give ships an ability similar to the Sova's Embargo which blocks credit, metal, and crystal income, but again that uses an ability slot and would probably be overpowered.
The best you could do with Sins is make it Sins with Eve ships. Major Stress tried to make Sins into Star Trek, but even he couldn't do it, and so SoA plays extremely similarly to base Sins. The biggest culprit in this is the un-moddable A.I. Sins uses. And CCP is extremely protective of their IP. Good luck getting permission to use their models.
Not quite sure what you mean by this. Nine Frigates, Nine Cruisers and Nine capitals per race would be more than adequate for what I had in mind if there's a hard limit on the number of shiptypes you can have.
Thinking similar to what you do when upgrading starbases, it just changes the functions. I can't see why this wouldn't work on other ships. If it requires research to unlock, that's fine. I can work things into that as well.
Ewar ships in EVE are not built for firepower. Is it not possible to make the ewar effect an 'attack' with little/no damage that has x effect on the target? I'm not really familiar with the sins code, but it looks like It could be doable with a little work. I'm good at pushing boundaries. (Ninja Edit: Cobalts with antimatter theft, targetable abilities on some of the cruisers, yadda yadda)
Precisely what I wanted to avoid. Additionally, CCP will draft something through if they think it's going to reflect well on EVE/Other CCP products. I've talked with ISD about it in the past.
1. Okay, if 9 frigates, 9 cruisers, and 9 capitals works, that's great.
2. Only starbases can be upgraded like that. Ships and planet modules can't be upgraded via selected individual upgrades.
3. Yes, its possible to code E-War as various abilities. ECM is problematic though. I'm not sure how that would be done.
4. Sorry, but chances are you will run smack into hardcoded limits and a retarded A.I. if you change the gameplay too much. Sins' Iron Engine is great for Sins and similar gameplay, but it won't like it if you change it too much. Ask Major Stress about his difficulties if you want to know more.
I think that IF (and a VERY big IF at that) you got permission to use the IP, it would certainly be very interesting.
The major problem I see here is the fact that Sins doesn't have the customizability options that EVE does.
Other than that, and the ECM, the only other problem I can see is- DON'T USE EXCEL TO TYPE UP YOUR POSTS!!! Really, it is EXTREMELY annoying to have wierd font, the whole "emptyifparams" deal, and other Excel-import related stuff. So please, just use the normal forum posting box.
Is it not possible to list the ships as 'starbases' and getting upgrades round like that? If not, I'd be happy to settle for research/then ability in order to get subsystems
Something fairly weak with severe stacking penalties. I'm looking into the numbers behind it at the moment.
I've worked with AI before. The changes wouldn't be so extreme as to move away from sins 'core' gameplay, but the AI will certainly require some tweaking. I'll look into contacting Major Stress about it when I can find time.
Apologies Re: the format. My Internet connection is pretty sporadic and I tend to type up longer stuff in a word processor. will fix it.
Even without the IP, sorting the balance stuff would make it interesting. I'd be more than happy to fiddle and write things around it should obtaining persmission fail.
not possible to list ships as SBs. SBs cannot do anything that a ship would be able to do in the manner of movement. Oh sure, an SB can maraud about the GW, but cannot phase jump.
The AI is not moddable in Sins. About the only AI-related stuff to do with it, simply set unit roletypes or maybe edit things in the Gameplay.CONSTANTS file.
Forget the IP (and the AI) and you can create a game that doesn't play similarly to Sins at all. SoA has done the best job shoehorning Star Trek gameplay into Sins but it's still Sins as you noted. If you do a mod setting out to change Sins gameplay considerably with the setting as your secondary focus, you will never succeed in escaping a lot of the trappings of Sins but you can do a pretty damn good job.
Changing sins gameplay is EASY if you do it right.
Enter: my Tri-Pirate Mod
and the DOME mod.
Admittidly, the AI generaly doesn't work. Small price to pay for making an awsome mod.
Me and Shadow Mastiff got so good, that at one point in time we were developing a mod for SOASE that was based off of Demigod. (Would have been fun too if we had ever finished it)/
Most of the stuff mentioned may be possible if you find a way to do it without making the game crash. That is the trick, and where sins is unforgiving in some aspects. Many of the suggestions that were made for SoA 2 mod were tried,... and they failed miserably, because of the sins hard code. An example is the cloaking ability. Which sins has sort of a cloaking ability in itself. The Vasari Phase cloak, and Phase out hull ability. We just tried to modify it to where the ships, icons, and hud were all invisible. That is impossible to do, because this is hard coded into sins itself. We can however simulate a cloak to where the ships cant fire on one another, but you still know the ship is present. Many other things were tried like tractor beams, Borg assimilation etc. etc. You can "simulate" many things, but it is not the same as a full blown ability from scratch.
The only way you are going to find out if you can similate tech 1, tech 2, Kinetic, EM, Explosive, and heat in Weapon damage, Shields, and Armor is to try it. If it fails at least you know you tried. ECM/ECCM to-hit buff, and debuff abilitys can be simulated easily. So can radar enhancers, jammers. Afterburners, etc. Even warp scrammers can be simulated. The things you cant simulate are weapon/ammo changes on the fly. If a ship has one damage type it always has that damage type. If a Caracal is equiped with tech 2 kinetics it will always have tech 2 kinetics.
Yes you can make a ship upgrade with a new physical model to represent that upgrade. The ship entitys do support this. We tried it in SoA 2 with the Excelsior, and Lakota refit. The only part we couldnt get right was the old excelsior model dissapearing after the upgrade was complete. It would spawn a new ship on top of the old. We tried to have it as a researchable ability not as research itself then all models upgraded like the hangar defense, turrets, and starbases. So that idea was scrapped for now. Again the only way you will know for sure is to try it.
Yes CCP is very protective of its IP. Nuff said. If you can pull it off with their approval then good on ya. I am not trying to discorage you here. I am all for an eve mod. However i would hate to see you make good progress then get cease, and desist letters. Check with CCP about this before you dive into it. They are pretty cool about it, as the HW2 eve mod shows.
Who says? Provided it's not built into the .exe something can usually be done. (Edit: What's the smiley been taking now?)
On-the fly ammo changes rarely happen ingame anyway, Aside from the short-range ammo's long-range T2 Variant (I honestly don't think the difference would be noticable on the scale of Sins.) Ammo changes don't happen much. In regards to T2 stuff, that'd fall under research: Ie- Boost range at the expense of damage to 'fine-tune' your fleets.
Could you not make the second model similar but with extensions? Or do you get that odd flickery effect you sometimes get when two models overlap one another?
In regards to 'modules', I'm fairly sure that it'd be possible to pull something off, if not the whole lot.
Look at the Tech hangar defense, and Advent beam turrets as examples. Both the models and their entity files. All Entrenchment ship entitys support upgrades. Those are the same models, but with new extentions added after they are upgraded. A new mesh with the visible upgrade replaces the old. Same with the Starbases for Tech and Vasari. I see no visible difference with Advent starbase upgrades. though it has upgrade meshes. We tried to do the same thing with the SoA 2 Excelsior, and Galaxy models to upgrade them to the Lakota variant, and the Venture refit. However we also tried to keep the original non-refitted ships buildable, and that is where we failed. If we made it to where it was a straight forward upgrade then it would have succeded.
I can give you an example that would work. The Caldari Roch battleship, or any eve ship with visible turrets. You can have a physical model that has a visible representation of short range tech 1 turrets. You can use an "upgrade mesh" to simulate it upgrading with long range tech 2 turrets. The upgrade mesh would be a roch model with visable tech 2 turrets or missile launchers. You can research the upgrade. Once the research is finished all roch t1 meshes would be replaced by the new upgraded t2 mesh. The drawback is that you cant build the old tech 1 ships again. Then again why would you want to.
It is possible to pull modules off. How you do it would be the trick.
What you do have to be careful with in this aspect is Sins hardcoded mesh and texture limits. Sins only supports 1000 textures, and 300 meshes total. With tons of upgrade meshes it would be easy to hit those limits.
Alright, so upgrades, modules and such are possible. Why the limit on meshes? Does the game just crash outright? or do weird things start happening?
I was thinking something in the realm of mesh changes for upgrades to T2 Ships. Ie: You can upgrade ships for specialisation. Turrets are a little too small to waste mesh changaes on, because if I did turret/mod changes for everything that'd be a Hell of a lot of Meshes.
Are there any other hardcoded limits anywhere I should be aware of? Think I read somewhere it's not possible to animate models in sins. That true?
yeah, Sins doesn't support model animation. The only known workaround is to use a particle mesh (reference the B5 mod).
i like this idea and am willing to help code, most of what u want sounds do-able and there should be a way around the SB's phase jumping let me know
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/363233
Consolidated list of sins hard code limits. The most important limits IMO are the mesh, and texture limits. Most of the others you probably can work around, or improvise. One way to get past the texture limit is to have more than one mesh use the same texture sheet. The limit is the actual number of textures not the size. Though you still want to keep your texture resolutions at 2048 or under. Sins has had trouble in the past using over 2 gigs of ram. It was supposedly fixed. Still when you mod just keep in mind less is more.
The 300 mesh limit could be problematic for you if you plan on using upgrade meshes. We are still not sure if sins loads all its meshes at once or accesses them as needed.
Weapon Hardpoints are limited to 10 per weapon type. You can have 3 weapon types max. I dont see any issues because most eve ships never had more than 7, or 8 weapon slots IIRC. Last time i played eve was 2007.
We have exceeded hardcode limits before and the game still functioned, but it functioned very poorly. Example if you used more than 10 points per weapon only 10 points would function. SoA 2 was way over the mesh, and texture limit for a long time. The 1.041 patch really made the hardcode limits a problem, and many mods (including mine) had to be rebuilt from scratch because of it. Now if you exceed the limits sins will just dump on you, and not give you a clue as to why. Developer exe only helps with some scripting troubleshooting, and sometimes it still wont tell you which file is giving you trouble.
Major Stress- the current weapon hardpoint limit is 20 points PER WEAPON PER BANK.
In Sins (as I'm sure you know Stress), there are 4 banks- FRONT, LEFT, BACK, and RIGHT. Plus the 3 weapon types that any unit can mount, and that makes for 80 points per weapon, or a total of 240 POINTS! Thus, you can have a very bristly ship that mounts up to 60 weapon points in each direction.
All other points are limited to 10/type.
Ok i stand corrected. I forgot that Entrenchment increased the weapon point limits. I was still going by the pre-entrenchment sins limit. So i guess weapon points will not be an issue here.
Hmm,... Eve online. I Get the feeling i know why people (more then ususaly cuz this is the 3rd post for an eve online mod in a month)want an eve online mod .
I think its cuz it gives them the ability to have everything they want without having to pay that monthly fee of 14. 95,
and work their buts off to get those fancy smacyy ships! This is certainly not the first time that someone has sugested an eve online mod but i can assure you if it were possible to have MANY of the ELEMENTS from eve online implemented in sins it would have been done by now. I mean you can problably get the ships, well most of them in the game and get some of the eve physics for the ships but as for the trading market, ships customizing,mining stuff like that, its far from possible. Like the experts above have said there are alot of hardcoded limits. If you want this to be possible
(bug a Programer!) i hated that line from the dev)
Anyway, good idea for a mod, it nice to know that people apreciate game modding and gather together to make them happen. Together nothing is to difficult!
Akkan117
Limits are usually possible to get around/fake around/etc, so I'm not that worried.
Alright, been running some spreadsheet work and am thinking of making each race sufficiently differnt in regards to mechanics behind resource gathering, culture, production and combat.
Possible to make Miners you can anchor them 'pack up'? I assume you could make a frigate that produces a structure that's consumed, then make the structure produce a frigate, but be consumed.
Doable? or not so much?
no, unless you do a starbase with an ability that generates income (or a frigate that is immobile). Structures must either be ready-spawned on neutral asteroids at map start, or be built from a planet menu.
u could most likely make a ship->starbase->refinery ships->mobile mining the trick is to make the SB into an orbital refinery
Care bear stuff like mining with barges wont be possible. However you can simulate a moon miner with the refinery structure, and have the smaller industrials like the badger, or badger II be the refinery/trade ships. It would be mostly for cosmetic purposes anyway. Pretty much all of the resource gathering mechanics in sins is hardcoded. So all you can do is simulate the cargo traffic. You cant make a mining ship that will mine the roids. The eve economy will be very tough to pull off.
Ship customizing can only be simulated with research, and leveling of cap ships. You have to remember eve is a 1st/3rd person RPG that focus's on the individual ships, and their mechanics. Sins focus's on massive fleets and empire building. The ships themselves are generalized. Despite being given specific roletypes.
Weapons are doable, but as i said above you cant switch weapons/change ammo on the fly. Improvements will have to be done through research.
The ship physics are very doable. Especially with entrenchments dynamic movement. One thing i did notice is the ship scales will have to be halved. Especially for the super capitals (if you use super caps). Otherwise there wont be room in the grav wells for them unless you triple the grav wells size, or improvise in another way.
Importing models themselves will be a cakewalk. Since the eve models and sins models have much in common. I already test imported the raven.
I have a spreadsheet of clearly doable ships and abilities.
I have EVE ships working in Sins with proper ability points and re-textured to have team color sections.
I have a VERY detailed instructions Word file on how to get tri-exported ships into Sins.
I do not have anyone to make the ability, ship, or race files (though I think I could do the race files, and at least part of the ship files).
I do not have any icons, although I could do that myself.
I was thinking CCP might be more inclined to grant permission if I had something of my mod I could show them that worked and looked alright.
Other than that, I mostly just ran out of time to complete it all on my own.
How many people are there that would be seriously interested in working on and completing an EVE mod for Sins?
Ahem
2010.01.20 05:40:00 CCP Applebabe------------------------------------------------------------------------Dear ####,Thank you for contacting us.You are allowed to use the EVE-related material as long as you1.add the copyright notice2.credit CCP appropriately3.do not make any money off of itBest regards,ApplebabeCommunity RepresentativeEVE Online , CCP Games:
Work will commence when I get back from New Zealand in February. Will be keeping an eye on things here. I have one thing to say: Told you so. =p
Gratz, and gl
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