The Backroads — an alternate route

Planning, discussion, release and support of registered extensions, libraries, adventures and other content is here.
Post Reply
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

CURRENT STATUS: Closed Beta (0.5.6)
TBR’S MINISTRY PAGE

 …So. I was, a ways back, going to do a full rewrite of the ships in the game with the intent of giving all of them forty facings. I didn’t have access to the original graphics at the time and didn’t know about PSD, meaning I now have approximately a metric kackton of ships.
 I suppose that means I should do something with them.
 Wolfy is partially to blame for this one, since he’s the one who suggested it. I say “partially” because there’s a high probability that I would have eventually done something along these lines, anyway. And since I already had the ships built, it was mostly just a matter of assembling them into factions as necessary — which took some mix-n’-match work, since a lot of vanilla factions only have, like, two or three ships, and I wanted a certain feel of stylistic continuity between them. Fortunately, a few of the ships were fairly easy to convert into stations, which solves part of the problem Wolfy seems to run into a lot. What I have in mind is somewhere around eight factions and an alternate path, starting from either Eridani or Tau Ceti, through to somewhere around Point Juno or thereabouts.

 To that end, here are some of the ideas I have for factions:
 » Avian Enterprises — If you’ve used my mod that put out a few new playerships, this is what the AE stands for. Here, it will be a Corporate-style faction. They’ll accept either credits or rins, but will probably only pay out in one or the other (which will likely depend on system level). I’m not planning on a direct conversion between the currencies at their stations, but buying from them in one currency and selling it in another will be doable. One of the highlights at the stations will be either a weapon, device, or set of four armor segments with the NotForSale attribute (which may or may not be useful, depending on what the RNG feels like throwing at you, since you could easily wind up with a Heavy CLAW or an Ares Plasma Archcannon at any of them).
 » The Quadri Collective — Also introduced in my playership mod as one of the NPC ships. No concrete plans as yet, save that they’re a non-hostile AI.
 » Legion — The name may be expanded later. The idea here is a group of neo-human supremacists who are hostile toward any they deem to be lesser beings. Yes, this includes you. While their long term goal may be galactic domination, in the short term they just want to wipe out any non-neo-human races. The good news here is that they really don’t have the resources to pull it off, and most other neo-humans are bright enough not to trade extensively with them.
 » The Lambda Coalition — A mercenary faction. You never know what faction they’ll be (whether vanilla or mod) at any given encounter. You’ll have the option to hire a wingman or two at their stations.
 » Bane Starshipwrights — Religious extremists with a chip the size of Jupiter on their collective shoulder. Having renounced Domina in favor of Oracus, they feel they’ve been betrayed by him as well. Now they just want to see it all burn.
 » The Beasts — A federation of risen zoanthropes who have overthrown their neo-human masters. They’re generally only friendly with Ferians, and are in particular hostile towards slavers and neo-humans.
 » Trinity — A religious order other than the more commonly accepted Domina and Oracus churches. This faction consists of three subfactions, and while they’re all friendly with one another, they have their own individual alliances and enemies. None of them like either Domina or Oracus, or any of their followers. This includes pilgrims.
 » Afus Independents — A group of three neutral and unaligned ships. No particular friends or enemies.
 » The Yatfwan Accord and Ironground Jurisdiction — These two factions are openly at war with one another. The Yatfwan Accord believes the Ironground Jurisdiction want to eliminate personal freedoms; the Ironground Jurisdiction thinks the Yatfwan Accord are bent on sowing chaos and dissent. …Neither side is really particularly wrong.
    The Yatfwan Accord is technically a neutral faction, but they will attack slavers and Ironground or Commonwealth Militia/Fleet vessels. If you have a military rank, this also includes you.
    The Ironground Jurisdiction is technically a hostile faction, but will only attack if attacked first. The exceptions to this are Black Market vessels — including yours, if you have a Black Market rank — which they will attack on sight.
 » Haetenaro Union — An outlaw faction of unknown motivation, but they’re very definitely not friendly with the Black Market. Further details once I work them out. ¬.¬;
 » d’Etat Protectorate — A neutral faction under the protection of the Ironground Jurisdiction, largely because Ironground didn’t think they would be capable of making them part of the Jurisdiction.
 » The Unbound — A neutral but unpredictable faction, in which individual ships may occasionally decide they aren’t so neutral after all. Loosely allied with (but not a part of) the Yatfwan Accord
 » The Starborn — Space hippies, in so many words. Peace and love toward almost everyone. They’re not quite pacifists, but have a very much live-and-let-live philosophy.
 » The Zyrran Magistracy — A low level friendly faction with a death-before-dishonor mentality.

 Also planned in this mod are a handful of new weapons, armors, and devices, some sidequest stuff that can score you points with either the Yatfwan Accord or Ironground Jurisdiction (probably including an upgrade of some sort to your ship from each), and at least one really good boss fight before you get to Point Juno. More stuff will likely creep in along the way. I am probably going to be asking coding questions throughout creating this thing, though. A lot of them.

 Currently Completed:
» A lot.

 To Be Done:
» A lot more.

 Also, just so it’s easier to find both for anyone who wants to see it and for me when I want to update it, here’s an image of all of the ships currently included in TBR.
Image
Last edited by AssumedPseudonym on Fri Sep 04, 2015 7:10 am, edited 47 times in total.
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
pixelfck
Militia Captain
Militia Captain
Posts: 571
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2009 8:47 pm
Location: Travelling around in Europe

Sounds like a very interesting project. I hope you find the time to get it completed. Maybe you could post some sneak peak images from the completed sprites?

~Pixelfck
Image
Download the Black Market Expansion from Xelerus.de today!
My other mods at xelerus.de
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 I could do that. Three of the gunships for right now.

 The Lambda Coalition Psi Fighter:
LambdaPsi.gif
LambdaPsi.gif (190.19 KiB) Viewed 60692 times
 The Beasts’ Wyvern:
BeastsWyvern.gif
BeastsWyvern.gif (163.11 KiB) Viewed 60692 times
 And the Legion Gunship:
LegionPremier.gif
LegionPremier.gif (138.16 KiB) Viewed 60692 times
 I’ll toss out a few screenshots of some of these in action as I work on the project.
Last edited by AssumedPseudonym on Wed Jan 07, 2015 12:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
Aury
Fleet Admiral
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 5421
Joined: Tue Feb 05, 2008 1:10 am
Location: Somewhere in the Frontier on a Hycrotan station, working on new ships.

Yes! I'm not alone in expansion-region-land any more!
Good luck! Hope you see this through ^.^
(shpOrder gPlayership 'barrelRoll)
(plySetGenome gPlayer (list 'Varalyn 'nonBinary))
Homelab Servers: Xeon Silver 4110, 16GB | Via Quadcore C4650, 16GB | Athlon 200GE, 8GB | i7 7800X, 32GB | Threadripper 1950X, 32GB | Atom x5 8350, 4GB | Opteron 8174, 16GB | Xeon E5 2620 v3, 8GB | 2x Xeon Silver 4116, 96GB, 2x 1080ti | i7 8700, 32GB, 6500XT
Workstations & Render machines: Threadripper 3990X, 128GB, 6900XT | Threadripper 2990WX, 32GB, 1080ti | Xeon Platinum 8173M, 48GB, 1070ti | R9 3900X, 16GB, Vega64 | 2x E5 2430L v2, 24GB, 970 | R7 3700X, 32GB, A6000
Gaming Systems: R9 5950X, 32GB, 6700XT
Office Systems: Xeon 5318Y, 256GB, A4000
Misc Systems: R5 3500U, 20GB | R5 2400G, 16GB | i5 7640X, 16GB, Vega56 | E5 2620, 8GB, R5 260 | P4 1.8ghz, 0.75GB, Voodoo 5 5500 | Athlon 64 x2 4400+, 1.5GB, FX 5800 Ultra | Pentium D 3.2ghz, 4GB, 7600gt | Celeron g460, 8GB, 730gt | 2x Athlon FX 74, 8GB, 8800gts 512 | FX 9590, 16GB, R9 295x2 | E350, 8GB | Phenom X4 2.6ghz, 16GB, 8800gt | random core2 duo/atom/i5/i7 laptops
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 The ships being used in this mod (along with the ships used in the mods already up on Xelerus) have now been put up on DA. Here, have a link to the gallery if you want to give ’em a look.
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 Update of the (insert random time period here): I’m currently respriting ships for AE - New Ships. Once I get those done, I’ll be giving Backroads ships the same treatment. …One thousand, nine hundred twenty frames of Dragonfly… whimper… x.@;
 Bane Starshipwrights are now nominally functional, with encounter tables and stations and ships all present and accounted for. Actually, only Ironground and Yatfwan still need the ships coded in, though Lambda is likely to get another ship or two added to the faction. Legion even has a few new weapons on them. (So does Bane, but they’re all based on vanilla weapons.)
 I’m probably going to get all of the ships coded, possibly some new gear to put onto some of them, and then work on stations and encounter tables. I’ll worry about details like Ironground’s behavior and a boss fight or two after I have the basics done.
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 Update of the (insert random time period here): I’ve (finally) finished respriting everything to 120 facings. That actually wrapped up a couple of days ago. More ship coding has been the project du jour, and the only faction left needing ships coded in is the Yatfwan Accord. After that, I’m probably going to do encounter tables and stations, but I’m likely going to throw in a side project first to give my self a break from this monstrosity.
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 Update of the (insert random time period here): And then I decided I hate the complete lack of cohesion or continuity of several of the intrafaction ship designs. Avian Enterprises (a.k.a. AE Ships) is a complete jumble of unrelated ships without even a common color scheme between them. The Beasts, Haetenaro Union, the Ironground Jurisdiction, and the Yatfwan Accord were all cobbled together from existing ships when I was trying to rewrite all of the vanilla ships to forty facings without the original models and therefore just making up my own replacements, and with most vanilla factions having only a few ships, it wound up making for a hodgepodge of designs.
 …That actually works fine for the Yatfwan Accord now that I think about it, since they’re supposed to be a loosely bound coalition to begin with where design dissimilarities would be expected. I might still replace one or two of theirs I’m not entirely happy with replaced about half their ships, primarily stolen from old designs from The Beasts. The Beasts might be excusable, given their background, but they’ll probably still get at least a few design commonalities built into them. I did that with Haetenaro Union, and it works well enough for what they are are getting have gotten a complete workover, based on the ship previously used for the Ironground Jurisdiction’s Ranseur-class heavy gunship.
 Avian Enterprises and the Ironground Jurisdiction have no excuses, though. They just don’t. They need work, and there’s no getting around it. The basic frameworks on them should be sound (or so I hope), so mostly it should be a matter of picking and choosing design elements from ships and redesigning bits and pieces from all of the ships to incorporate said elements. And I already think I know where I’m going to start on that. Avian Enterprises is already almost done, and I do at least have ideas for the Ironground Jurisdiction.
 Bane Starshipwrights, the Lambda Coalition, and Legion are fine as is, since they were made by reusing certain design elements (if not entire parts) from the start. Trinity was blatantly plagiarized from Gummi Ship designs I’d created in Kingdom Hearts II almost a decade ago, so they have their own style about them already. Afus… Mleh. Afus. I’ll sort out what I want to do there later. I’ll still sort out what I want to do there later. It took me forever to decide how to deal with them, but I think they’ll work, now.
Last edited by AssumedPseudonym on Thu Aug 21, 2014 10:52 am, edited 2 times in total.
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 Update of the (insert random time period here): Significant progress on Avian Enterprises station code. Each one will have of special offer of a weapon, shield, or complete set of armor. Said equipment will either be tagged NotForSale or have a frequency of notrandom, and will be installed straight onto the ship. In the case of armor, a “complete set” is exactly that, regardless of how many segments your ship has. Most of the coding on that is done, it’s mainly just a matter of actually assembling the station.
 With the ships already generally done (except for some of the re-rendering mentioned in the last post), I’ve been working on factional equipment to put onto them instead of the stock gear. Part of my ideas are general randomosity, part of them are inspired by vanilla stuff, and part of them are still very much works in progress inspired by wandering through the function list on Xelerus. I have to give props to Wolfy, too; not for giving me ideas in and of themselves, but for giving me ideas on how to go about making my ideas work.
 …Also, I learned today that trying to install a reactor as an armor segment will crash the game…
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
RPC
Fleet Admiral
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 2876
Joined: Thu Feb 03, 2011 5:21 am
Location: Hmm... I'm confused. Anybody have a starmap to the Core?

Report "installing reactor as armor crash" as a bug on the bug forum?
Tutorial List on the Wiki and Installing Mods
Get on Discord for mod help and general chat
Image
Image
Der Tod ist der zeitlose Frieden und das leben ist der Krieg
Wir müssen wissen — wir werden wissen!
I don't want any sort of copyright on my Transcendence mods. Feel free to take/modify whatever you want.
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 Update of the (insert random time period here):
AssumedPseudonym wrote:…I’m probably going to do encounter tables and stations…
 I lied. I’m working on items, instead. So far I have a couple of barrels, a device or two, a handful of weapons (though most aren’t especially creative), and some armor and shields with a few assorted gimmicks (including some synergistic effects for Legion’s, mostly achieved with a virtual device that gets quietly installed in the background). …I’m discovering that I don’t seem to be as creative with designing weapons as I am with the coming up with the means to defend against them…
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 Update of the (insert random time period here): Random shield tinkering and a general case of bluh has had me sort of sidetracked and unproductive, although I did at least come out with some fun little gimmicks for shields (DR a la D&D, anyone?). I finally started buckling down and getting ship redesigns back underway, though. Avian Enterprises is done (and have been for a while), the Beasts are done (finally), and the Ironground Jurisdiction is next up. Bane Starshipwrights, the Beasts, the Ironground Jurisdiction, the Lambda Coalition, and the Yatfwan Accord all got paint jobs, too (some more so than others).
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
AssumedPseudonym
Fleet Officer
Fleet Officer
Posts: 1190
Joined: Thu Aug 29, 2013 5:18 am
Location: On the other side of the screen.

 Update of the (insert random time period here): I was feeling both motivated and unmotivated this morning. It was weird. It still kinda is. I wanted to do some work on something, but couldn’t really be arsed with coding (either in tLISP or in POV-Ray to work on Ironground ships). So I took all of my sprite renders, grabbed the one pointed downward, rendered the ones I didn’t already have (though just the one facing, not all of them, since that would take a while) and did this:
 

Code: Select all

[IMAGE REDACTED]
 Everything from all of the factions I have, color coded and to scale as they would be seen in game. I threw Charon and the Marauders in for good measure, as a size reference to judge everything else by, and added the old versions of my AE Ships to fill up some of the blank space at the bottom. I still need to get around to actually updating those on Xelerus. …That lettering was a pain, lemme tell ya… x.@;
Last edited by AssumedPseudonym on Wed Jan 07, 2015 12:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Image

Mod prefixes: 0xA010 (registered) and 0xDCC8 (miscellaneous)

My mods on Xelerus: Click here!

Of all the things I’ve lost in life, I miss my mind the least. (I’m having a lot more fun without it!)
User avatar
Atarlost
Fleet Admiral
Fleet Admiral
Posts: 2391
Joined: Tue Aug 26, 2008 12:02 am

The modeling is fine, but your textures are primitive. They look okay where they're curved, but most look terribly 2d on flat surfaces.

Also, I'd pegged the Avianity as a small yacht. The engines are huge on a cruiser.
Literally is the new Figuratively
StealthX051
Commonwealth Pilot
Commonwealth Pilot
Posts: 80
Joined: Sat Jul 26, 2014 5:26 pm

The AE textures look fine, and that is just about it.
Post Reply