Hello all,
Just putting out feelers to see if anyone was interested in participating in putting together a Star Trek mod. For the first time, airmaster and Omnibus (the two best Star Trek ship designers by a pretty wide margin) are on board and we are full steam ahead.
If anyone is interested in participating or helping out, we'd love to have you aboard.
Thanks all!
Wow, those are the two of best shipbuilders for sure! I finally dug into the files and got the AI to use custom ships. Not exactly easy. Wish you all the best with this!
Is it possible you could share your insights?
Use the video Gauntlet was so good to make posted in this thread:
https://forums.galciv3.com/472426/page/1/#3597120
everything he mentions is good, except the shipyard files you will need to change, as they use assets that are only available in his mod. I highly recommend you download it (even if you don't actually use the files) for reference.
Use his ship set files to create your own (Just remember to also change the shipyard!).
Start the game up, and see what faction is using what style. IE the Klingons are using Dregin style ships. Start the game with them, and use the unlock command. Find the ship you want to use and save it as a template (I highly recommend renaming the files like suggesting in the video) so you have something like:
0-KE-Small Destroyer
0-KE-Huge Missile Battleship
The 0 allows the file to be at the top of your designed ship folder, and the KE signifies the Klingon Empire, next is hull size and finally be as specific as you want for what role the ship is filling. The game already uses a potential separate design for each weapon type + a balanced ship and a support ship. However you can use the same mode for each role if you want.
Then find a shipstyle file that uses the same as the race you are working on (in this case Drengin) in his files. They are much easier to work with that the ones used in the base game, only hiccup is the shipyard thing I mentioned.
The video is pretty informative, and covers most of what you will encounter.
Yeah, I've actually made some custom shipsets in the past but I was having a couple issues. Like you mention, the AI doesn't always use them and when I play as that race in the future, other designs from outside my customized shipstyle sometimes show up in the buildlist.
Moreover, the switch to 1.4 broke all my custom shipstyles and deleted the associated factions. Any insights on why that would be?
Airmaster here guys,
Ryne, I would like to put you in touch with Stefen at I-mod, he is an experienced Modder who can help you when you need it. In fact the whole idea of my participating in doing a Star Trek mod for me came from him as an invitation. You can contact him at jamest.cookie@gmail.com. Let him know we have agreed to go forward with the Mod and allow him to advise and help you when you need it or have problems.
Edit: Let me know if I need to make custom shipyards and it shall be done.
Astus here,
I'd love to participate.
I wrote you a pm rynebrandon.
Feel free to use my Star Trek Faction Pictures i was planning to make more and kinda got side tracked so if your needing help i could put some time aside to finish them.https://forums.galciv3.com/465270/page/2/#3571214
PS: i want a bonus sexy Picard faction.. you can see it in the post hehe
Good luck, I'm excited to see how this turn out
Fee free to use any parts of my Starfleet Academy mod and Genesis Project mod. I can also probably make some minor changes if you like.
Thanks everyone!
This is Airmaster.
Just an FYI, I am working with Ryne and I will be providing the factions images and ships he will be using for the mod using my ships and factions. This will include faction images from those who are actually involved making the mods a reality. I really do not care for half naked images of Star Trek characters so banish the thought of even trying to get him to use them unless he is making mods from your own design work. This mod is our brain child and if you are a Modder and would like to jump aboard and help I am all for it however, lets keep it serious and fully clothed.
Thanks,
The big issue with the mod visually is giving it a cohesive look. Most of the images of Star Trek races come from screen grabs of the race on the show itself which is of a very low resolution. Getting a high res Ferengi or Federation picture is relatively easy. Getting a high-res picture of a Gorn or a Tholian is much trickier. The Gorn have never appeared in the later high-def shows and a Tholian only appears in a single episode of Enterprise in which there is a visual effect that undercuts the value of the screen grab. The way people have solved this online is to use Star Trek online images (which look pretty bad) or to not use images of the races at all (which undermines immersiveness).
I have chosen to use screenshots from actual episodes when necessary but to stylize all images in a hand-drawn way so that salient differences between the resolution of images is less noticeable.
The best solution would be to have art commissioned specifically for this project of each of the Star Trek races we would need. I have currently created ten major factions - The Federation, Klingons, Cardassians, Breen, Dominion, Romulans, Tholians, Gorn, Ferengi, and Borg each with a Faction photo, logo, background, defined faction file and shipstyle set (with the exception of the Breen, Tholians, and Gorn. The Ferengi shipstyle set is also pretty bad).
I have also made 18 minor races: The Andorians, Bajorans, Betazoids, Bolians, Bynars, Chalnoth, Denobulan, Hirogen, Kazon, Nausicaan, Orion, Takaran, Talarian, Tellarite, Trill, Vulcan, Xindi and Yridians.
Airmaster (Mr. Star Trek) is looking for a more founding-of-the-Federation style mod (wherein the Vulcans, Tellarites and such would be upgraded to Major races and there would be no Cardassians, Breen, Dominion, etc.) and I personally prefer the DS9 Dominion War era. I'm not totally sure how to implement this in practice. Perhaps there will be two different releases for the two different eras or maybe I'll just include some minor races as major races as well. There may some kind of code I can include that will automatically turn on/off major and minor races to reflect the preferred era of the player.
Anyway, that's where it's at. There are likely details of the implementation people will not like (there are implementation details I don't like but had to choose) and I'd be curious to get feedback once the first release is good to go.
Well, once you've settled on a thing, please do post a link to the master Star Trek mod thread going forward. I am truly looking forward to this one. d('-' )
I personally like the idea of a founding-of-the-Federation style mod, as that feels more immersive with the style of game, whereby you start with one world and no techs and go out and expand and research more techs, thereby showing the passage of time. I used to love playing the Star Trek mod for Civ IV as you could play that in the same style.
I noticed Airmaster had some collection on Steam, but it wasn't enough and didn't feel like Star Trek to me. Unfort I pulled all those mods off.
What we need is a complete package, that contain music themes, video animations, proper setups for each factions. Just like Q did to GCII, they did a great job on it and believe it is lost now.
If possible someone put all this together and set it up like the real thing in the galaxy as insane map in proper location for each factions, that would be great. Maybe Airmaster can pull this off.
Anyway I loved playing Star Trek, just not set up right and still feel like GCIII while playing it. Looking forward to this, once you get all the pieces together You wanna know why I bought this game? Hopefully to play Star Trek lol, seriously.
@Ryne - what I did for the AI Ferengi was have the Maurader as medium / large and huge ships. Since ship classes for them are so scarce.The AI ignores usual shipbuilding rules, so if you tell it to use a medium template on a huge hull it will (upscales the medium model to huge and fills it up according to the blueprint).
Hopefully someone will come up with a Breen set. They were pretty pivotal during the DS9 era (my favorite as well!).
However in the long run what we need is exactly what you've suggested, a complete total conversion to the Star Trek universe. However until certain constraints in GC3 are lifted/removed this isn't completely possible at this time.
This would be excellent but not everything listed here is possible yet in GC3. As far as I know you can't set exact race starts on maps in the map editor but hopefully this will change in the future. A complete reworking of the tech trees are needed as well as changing the components added to ships. You'd have to replace missiles with torpedoes so that would require changing models and effects and again I'm not 100% this is possible yet. However in the long run what we need is exactly what you've suggested, a complete total conversion to the Star Trek universe. However until certain constraints in GC3 are lifted/removed this isn't completely possible at this time.
This would be excellent but not everything listed here is possible yet in GC3. As far as I know you can't set exact race starts on maps in the map editor but hopefully this will change in the future. A complete reworking of the tech trees are needed as well as changing the components added to ships. You'd have to replace missiles with torpedoes so that would require changing models and effects and again I'm not 100% this is possible yet.
There are more than just structural issues with the game itself - there is also the commitment of a development team, which at the moment consists of exactly two people: me and airmaster (and even at that, airmaster is purely a ship designer, albeit a very, very good one).
While these are all great ideas, unless more people want to sign on to actively helping develop the mod, they're probably a decent clip beyond the scope of what I planned to do in the near future. This is my first mod and, frankly, I don't have the training, coding expertise or time to do that ambitious a mod justice. Moreover, every new file you change means there are more things that can go wrong. For example, there is a fully fleshed out mod for a Federation-style faction with a custom tech tree, colors and shipset and it has broken more than once with new updates.
Right not the mod basically includes shipsets, custom color pallettes, custom art, star names and custom factions. Anything beyond that is going to be, at best, a long-term goal.
I hate to throw cold water on such excited discussion but I just can't commit to devoting that kind of time to this project.
While these are all great ideas, unless more people want to sign on to actively helping develop the mod, they're probably a decent clip beyond the scope of what I planned to do in the near future. This is my first mod and, frankly, I don't have the training, coding expertise or time to do that ambitious a mod justice. Moreover, every new file you change means there are more things that can go wrong. For example, there is a fully fleshed out mod for a Federation-style faction with a custom tech tree, colors and shipset and it has broken more than once with new updates.Right not the mod basically includes shipsets, custom color pallettes, custom art, star names and custom factions. Anything beyond that is going to be, at best, a long-term goal.I hate to throw cold water on such excited discussion but I just can't commit to devoting that kind of time to this project.
I would be more than happy to assist with this mod where I can. So far my modding exploits have all been for my own use, whereby I have created a mod that removed the stock civs from the game and just left the ones from Gauntlet's Race Mod (and the pirate faction, otherwise the game crashes). I have also replaced many of the events with one's that reflect that mod and remove references to the stock GC3 civs within the events/encounters/anomalies. Of course these are quite basic accomplishments (in fact I wouldn't even go as far as to call them that!) compared to the ideas I've floated above, but I would be more than happy to play around with the idea of reworking the tech tree and ship components into something more in-line with the Star Trek universe. I'm not very good with creating graphics so I'd be more comfortable working with the XML files.
If you would like me to come up with some examples of events/encounters/anomalies, and tech tree and ship/station component changes to share with you and Airmaster, so you could decide on whether it was something you'd be interested in me doing for this mod, then please let me know!
My e-mail is nothingplural@yahoo.com. If anyone really wants to get involved, reach out and I'll create a dropbox folder with the files I've created so far. People can change whatever they like.
Well I could help out some, but got other modding to do atm. Infact I still have those Star Trek Mod for GCII, if you want to take a look at it. Not sure how much I can upload. Q and others did a great job on it!
Too bad there isn't a video on yoube, but you can google images by entering Galactic Civilization II Star Trek Mod.
Just look at the files of GCII Star Trek mod here, all these video clips came from ST series as well movies. And it is going to take a lot of space on your hard drive, not mention how long it would take me to upload them. This gonna make me go play it again. Also noticed cant get back in there on that site, guess you cant download it anymore
Stoked for this! I love the star trek mods for both GalCiv2 and Sins of a Solar Empire!
Harro!
This project still active? I would be intested in contributing/helping.
I am new to these forums. I only really poped on by here due to having an issue with a mod I have been working on and was looking for a possible solution. Its Star Trek based hense my intrest here. From reading this thread I see we have quite a lot of cross over but I guess thats to be expected(Kinda teach me not to check forums earlier). But, there are some elements that could expand on what you currently have. I have 9 major factions (atm using base shipsets/techs) and 26 Minors. It was/is mainly a flavor mod for self use.
I am not what you call a Pro modder(More like Average), but, I do know XML and a bit of art. 90% of my modding experience is from the Fraxis Civ games.
Hello!
So, the little bit of work I did do on this mod - creating races and shipsets, was broken by the most recent update. The dev streams have implied they're going to release some tools eventually that may make modding simple things like ship styles a little simple. I tried to start over from scratch a couple weeks ago and I didn't have much luck. To be honest with you guys, I was thoroughly underwhelmed the Mercs expansion and continue to be thoroughly underwhelmed by the mod support among the devs. I have been a huge, huge GalCiv fan since 1 but I'm, frankly, ready to move on to something else. I'm not talented enough to make this mod on my own and their doesn't seem to be much of a community around modding or much interest among the devs to help build one.
This sounds like sour grapes and it's not that. I just don't have the time to or the technical knowledge to become a truly great modder on my own and I don't think there's enough of a community to help maintain something through the near constant deluge of mod-breaking updates that only marginally improve the game itself. Gauntlet has to come out with a new version of GRM pretty much every time there's an update. I just don't have that kind of time.
Anyway, apologies to anyone who's got their hopes up because of me but I just don't think a Star Trek mod will happen. I'm really sorry everyone.
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