So, a continuation from the first post about my Sins mod project, which was made on my main blog site. this one falls into Game Design, because there’s very little artwork involved, and mostly deals with game integration.

I wasn’t feeling up to more work getting the UVs and such done on the Astraea and decided to take a break from it to get a better feel for the process of sticking things into the game. I also just kind of wanted to see her fly, even if it wasn’t pretty. So, a fast UV projection so that I could apply a plain white texture, and off we go to see if we can get it working!

It’s a surprisingly painless process. The documentation Ironclad put out does a decent job of covering the basic needs towards getting a mesh ready for conversion and there aren’t many surprises. I still don’t like XSI very much, but modeling in Modo and using an OBJ file to import into the XSI mod tool went off without a hitch, minimizing what I needed to actually do in XSI to adding Meshpoints and hooking up the materials. Run through the steps, export the .mesh file, and it’s all good. there was some sort of error in exporting, but it didn’t break the file, so it’s nothing to worry about it seems.

I opted to start with the Kol Battleship’s entity file as a point to start adding the ship from, because it’s pretty close, gameplay-wise, to the sort of feel I want for the Astraea. At first, changes were the bare minimum needed to get the thing working. The Kol’s weapons slotted right into the Astraea’s available points, and all that I changed was the front/back/left/right settings so they’d match properly, with vague guesses at how much damage should be in each. Ostensibly, the point here was just to get the thing in the game where I could see it working.

One early stumbling block– unlike most games I’ve modded, Sins appears to crash hard if the mod directory doesn’t include all of the GameInfo files, even if you haven’t changed them. Kind of bothersome, really. It makes managing and working on the files a little more problematic, but it’s workable enough. If I had my druthers I’d see it changed to only override the base versions of the files if a mod file exists. Anyway, it was an easy fix to get around the crash– I was worried I’d torched something up badly. That was really the only initial problem, though, and once fixed, boom– there’s the ship.

At this point… mission complete, she works. But as long as I’m here, I’d like to get some more experience with the entity files and such, so I start doing some extra tweaks. First up is getting some of the weapons more appropriate to the Astraea’s armament. For now, this means just filching existing weapon definitions from other ships. The beams are fine as they are, except for color, so i adjust that to start with. Swap the autocannons for missles from the LRM frigate, and give the anti-fighter guns the flak frigate’s weapon def, and then tweak to fit. Simple enough.

It’s worth mentioning at this point, a keystone of the Sins modding process– the Developer EXE. This is a development version of the game’s executable, and it’s beyond useful. It has tons to recommend it, but the fact that it reloads altered files on the fly would be more than enough. Tweak values in Notepad, save, and the next time the weapon fires, the changes show up. Awesome. This helped a lot while getting the color for the beams right. I still need to go in and change the muzzle and hit effects, which I believe is going to be a bigger job than the beams themselves, but it’s a start.

One of the issues I noticed while doing this is sometimes it’s hard to see the beams against the backdrop(it’s an issue with using violet lasers against the blue backdrop). I addressed this, in the end, by increasing the beam width to keep them a little more visible.

There’s a lot more to be done, mostly in backtracking to finish up the model’s UVs and textures, getting the smoothing settled, generate the tangent map like I’m technically supposed to(this version didn’t have a normal map anyway), and so on. I’ll also need to adjust the meshpoints a bit– the particles are clipping a little badly in places. And of course, custom UI icons, custom particle effects and SDF-specific weapons, new and more proper abilities… all that stuff. It’s a great start on the whole thing, though.