 Space Empires V Stars! Mod? |
Fri, 22 September 2006 12:21  |
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 ekolis |
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Messages: 51
Registered: May 2006
Location: Cincinnati, OH, USA |     
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Say, Supernova might be dead, but who says fans of Stars! can't get together and make a Stars! style mod for a highly flexible game engine due to be released next month? I've tried to make a Stars! mod for SE4 but never got very far, but perhaps with the expanded modding capabilities in SE5 we can do it together! If anyone's interested in looking at the data file format, there's a demo of SE5 available. It's pretty buggy at the moment, but hopefully the most serious issues will be cleared up for a release-day patch.
Here's a collection of download links for the demo:
http://www.strategyfirst.com/en/games/SpaceEmpiresV/download s/
You can't actually test out any mods in the demo, of course, but you can make a copy of the data files and fool around with them just to get familiar with them! 
Mr. Flibble says...
Game over, boys!Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Space Empires V Stars! Mod? |
Fri, 22 September 2006 16:42  |
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| ekolis |
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Messages: 51
Registered: May 2006
Location: Cincinnati, OH, USA |
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The combat engine is now real-time, so no more "first player wipes out the second in one shot" silliness - but it's not a clickfest either: you can issue orders while paused!  Grab the demo, design some ships, run a simulated combat, and find out for yourself if you like it! There are a number of non-trivial UI issues where the interface is less streamlined than SE4, and the demo is prone to crashing on some machines (personally it only happened to me in one particular combat situation) The main game is still turn-based, of course - this is not Homeworld or anything! But it does look a lot nicer with a large 3D rendered hex map instead of the top-down square map...
edit: oh, to address multilis' concerns as well:
There is an automatic combat mode in SE4 and SE5 (not sure if it was in SE3), and multiplayer in SE4 works mainly through PBW, which is very similar to Autohost in its operation. Yes, there are sectors and systems and warp points and whatnot, but in SE5 you are able to change the size of the systems so (theoretically) you could create a custom map consisting of one very large system with no warp points! (The current UI doesn't let you actually zoom in, though, so viewing such a map might be difficult...) SE4 and SE5 do have minefields; they just operate somewhat differently than in Stars!: minefields take up one sector and are typically placed either in orbit of planets to defend them or on the warp points to choke off enemy invasions. But minefields are limited in size so if you really want to defend against huge fleets you will need to put mines in several sectors surrounding the area you want to protect. (This is rarely done in practice, though, as the default minefield size limit is quite high. You can mod it lower, however; I think Proportions Mod does this to make minefields more "realistic".) Damage is quite interesting indeed; components take damage individually, and it's even more detailed in SE5 (ships can run out of ordnance, which prevents them from firing missiles a
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[Updated on: Fri, 22 September 2006 16:57]
Mr. Flibble says...
Game over, boys!Report message to a moderator
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Saying that "i will go to surgery at tuesday and probably recover after it at least for two weeks" (so it goes i am not kidding) had impact of Armaggedon missile. 
All levels of management ended their meetings, turned off their cell phones and ran together to discuss that disasterous situation. 
"May we install all neccessary hardware into your bedroom?" 
In such environment one got to use 98% cloaks to hide he is working on open source C/C++ project. 
