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Babylon 5 Mod Ideas

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Babylon 5 Mod Ideas

from Sins Forums
So since it should be inevitable for a B5 mod to get made, i figure it couldn't hurt to talk some about it, and perhaps maybe plan and get a team going for it.

Major Major Questions...

1. How many playable races to attempt, and which ones?

2. How many ships per faction, should ship roles/designs and numbers be based off the existing Sins races or not care?

3. Which general era of ships to use for the Earth Alliance?

4. Should capital ship mechanics remain the same? IE should the current game mechanics be kept in more or less the same condition?

My personal ideas is that the general game should play about the same, but that many ships should be condensed into one for some races, or expanded for others, notably I am in favor of maintaining only 3 Capital ship choices, as I think finding 5 for each major race would be quickly silly.

I would say for the beggining 3 balanced major races would be best, in general I view the technical/qualitative tiers being as such

Lowest: League Worlds, Early EA, Dilgar
Medium: EA, Centauri, Narn
High: Minbari, Drahk
Godish: Shadows, Vorlons, Additional Ancients

The mod would preferably come with several maps, one of which would represent the B5 universe just before the shadow war, it would be nice if a timer was included so that perhaps 3 hours into the game 2 special pirate worlds (the Shadows and the Vorlons) launch massive and mean pirate strikes... regular Raider Pirates would otherwise conduct themselves normally.

Other special maps/scenarios: Dilgar EA war... Earth Minbari War, and Narn Centauri War (The Shadows should/could be present here as well.)

While some races would be playable in these scenarios, for example in the Earth-Dilgar war you could play these or the League worlds, as the Early EA faction would be balanced with them; but the Earth Minbari War should be a 2V1, with the Minbari being powerful enough to take on two players.

This means that in the generic game, the balanced races would be EA, Narn and Centauri. The Minbari, Drahk and League worlds would all be special militia or pirate forces, we could easily design new planets that corresponded to these races and would spawn with special militia units, thus you wouldn't have Minbar being guarded by Raiders or Drazi.

Ship wise, the most important is obviously the Capitals- My personal choices for the 3 main powers are as such, with the TEC similar ship noted.

EA: Omega Destroyer (Kol) Posideon Super Carrier (Sova) Nova Dreadnought (Marza)

Narn: Bin`Tak Dreadnought (Kol) G`Quan Heavy Cruiser (Dunov) (Third????)

Centauri: Primus BattleCruiser (Dunov?) Octurion Battlship (Kol) Balvarin Carrier (Akkan?)



Additional Scenarios: Psi Corp Rebellion, EA Civil War, Mars Rebellion, The Centauri-League War (with Drahk as Pirates?) The list goes on and on.

Oh and for the EA, I would use Hyperions as the basic combat unit, to give fans an iconic mainstay for their fleets, as opposed to the too awesome for Frigate Omega, and the lesser known Olympus, Tethys, Saggitarius, or Oracle... (or the others   )
modding
479,465 views 311 replies
Reply #51 from Sins Forums Top
I feel that for default gameplay they shouldn't be playable but in certain scenarios they would be.


One trick that's common enough to see to create the feel for technologically superior races is to just limit the number of ships you can produce. In the case of Sins, it could either be greatly increased resource costs, fleet point cost, or both. Then if their fewer ships would be able to take out a larger force, you'd get the feeling that they are indeed quite a bit superior
Reply #52 from Sins Forums Top
They don't have the numbers of the 'lesser' races though. They can be balanced in the same way the Vasari will be balanced.
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Reply #53 from Sins Forums Top
That list I put up is the list of ships, ive done stats for, not what i was ganna add in.

As for my modding skills, im not a great texture or modeler but text based stuff i can do. Right now I have been taking my stats and converting them into the format that the current Sins ships are in, yes I am writing the code.....

As for the Minbari, they can be easily balanced, I know they dont have a great big shiplist to choose from and their ships are massively powerful, thats why you make them cost more, the number one rule to easily balance something, just change the cost.

From what i've seen writing up code and looking through the files, this game can easily be modded to add more ships in and other things, so giving players a huge list to choose from wont be that hard, except alot for modeling and texturing and code to write.

As for abilities in the game, I've come up with 2

Interceptors (active)
Rank I - reduces incoming damage by 25% for 15 sec?
Rank II - reduces incoming damage by 50% for 15 sec?
Rank III - reduces incoming damage by 75% for 15 sec?

Cooldown time 5 min.


Stealth (passive)
Rank I - reduces enemy fire hit chance by 10%
Rank II - reduces enemy fire hit chance by 20%
Rank III - reduces enemy fire hit chance by 30%

And for the non cap ships they get the rank I stuff if they have those tech on board.
Reply #54 from Sins Forums Top
Unless of course you limit their numbers, so only x-1 Minbari Heavy Crusiers are allowed vs. x+1 Earth Alliance Destroyers. As long as you aren't going to include their homeworlds its a plausable scenario.

The HW2 mod which allowed you to play the other more powerful race(s)from the single player game basically did that... I forget its name X-mod or something like that..

What would really be cool is with the Vorlons & Shadows as Pirate replacements so you could ally yourself with one side or the other. It would seem to be an impossible scenario to allow a player to occupy either of those 2 races unless it was a fight with only those 2 races.
Reply #55 from Sins Forums Top
Read my original post: I had the same Idea. It would be great.

I wouldn't mess with the Sins system all that much, heck right now I think I plan on making 2 versions of this mod, 1 where I change everything how I think it would work, but another smaller mod that would only change the ships visually everything else (including the balance) would remain the same. Would change buildings apropriately too.
Reply #56 from Sins Forums Top
The way to make sure the game stays balanced, is of course dont mess with the current setup, use it to our advantage, lets say a minbari sharlin class war cruiser costs x amount, ect... and uses 1 cap ship slot and 60 fleet slots, while an omega would use 1 cap with lets say 35? fleet slots. All we have to do is get this in place and the game can be easily balanced from there (after balancing weapons   )
Reply #57 from Sins Forums Top
there is a Babylon 5 mod for Star Trek Armada 2 they balanced things out rather well.
Reply #58 from Sins Forums Top
Have you guys seen the work and ship mesh's from the X3 Babylon 5 mod?

http://b5.hc-gamer.de/mods/gallery/image.php?pic=54

Pretty impressive if you ask me, but more importantly if you think how good the fleet management interface is in SoaSE vs. X3 (which is next to useless)... well you get the idea = awesome mod
Reply #59 from Sins Forums Top
Just gonna put it out there! This Game Was made for a Babylon 5 total conversion Mod!

Let's just hope that the right modder finds the game interesting enough to do an awesome mod befitting a wonderful series like Babylon 5!
And to be able to capture the action and excitement of the huge scale battles!
Reply #60 from Sins Forums Top
I thought we had an old thread (beta 1 time frame)for B5.
Anyway, count me in on the action for the new B5 project. We still have some stuff to set up yet, I hope you guys will like but after that...
Reply #61 from Sins Forums Top
I've actually collected some Babylon 5 ship models. Somebody should also see about getting those Homeworld 2 models for Battlestar Galactica and Stargate.

As for the Homeworld 2 Star Wars models, hopefully EvileJedi will give us permission to use his...or even better, will be involved with SoaSE modding personally.
Reply #62 from Sins Forums Top
Cool! You should post them all in the downloads section on the forums as a start of the model db.
Reply #63 from Sins Forums Top
Through talking to some of the X3 modding community I have also collected various B5 models to try out. I haven't seen the HW2 B5 models myself but even an average X3 model is pretty detailed compared with a HW2 model which might make them unsuitable I guess we'll see.

The problem is the models are in the proprietary X3 format '.xsp' and need conversion or a friendly chat with the author(s) to obtain a compatible format for SoaSE i.e. '.3ds'

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions on how to do the conversion please say, I have a vague idea how to do it but it involves:

xsp source -> Import to X3 (bod) -> Export to 3DStudio -> Import to SoaSE as 3ds

Easy if you know how, nightmare if you don't...

I'm only going to attempt it for One ship, besides anything else the authors have not expressly given consent for their models to be used in SoaSE so I have no intention of 'ripping off their entire portfolio'.
Reply #64 from Sins Forums Top
I have imported the first B5 model as you can see from the 'And so it begins....' thread.

The purpose of this test was to see how SoaSE handled a high-polygon model and I have to report so far so good. What I want to do next is to see how the game handles 20+ Shadow vessels, then apply a more advanced texture.

Reply #65 from Sins Forums Top
completely agree that minbari are doable. Simply cut their crew in half, as was stated higher up. Increasing cost tends to create a steamroller effect. They would be annoyingly slow early on and retardedly strong later when theres an economy. I think halving supply is the way to go.
Reply #66 from Sins Forums Top
I tend to agree and would also like to see some picts of the high poly tests. Shoot even a short video would rock.
Reply #67 from Sins Forums Top


I have 20 shadow vessels flying around now, I'll try and get some video footage.
Reply #68 from Sins Forums Top
Wow, sweet! Get rid of the glow and drop shadow it and it would rock something fierce. Otherwise looking good man. I cant wait for the video. If you need a host for it let me know or multi (I think) we can both host it for you. Then there is always utube or some similar incarnation. Thanks again for you time and effort in doing this for the community.

I hope very much that IG or SD would be able to get a license to make an official B5 game. Hell the next anniversary is just around the corner product life cycle wise - hint, hint...
Reply #69 from Sins Forums Top
Get rid of the glow and drop shadow it and it would rock something fierce.


I haven't learnt how to do that yet I'm a bit new to this.

Anyway a short video clip as promised with 20 Shadow vessels in sector, I'll do a better one once I've sorted out the unwanted alpha channel bloom effect and got a better texture going.

WWW Link
Reply #70 from Sins Forums Top
There's an issue I wasn't expecting... you can't get ships to move right under this engine!
Reply #71 from Sins Forums Top
Can you explain what you mean Ron?
Reply #72 from Sins Forums Top

Can you explain what you mean Ron?


Go watch how ships move in the movies -- A) its much more newtonian, and B) shadow ships have this weird movement pattern.
Reply #73 from Sins Forums Top
Thanks for the video preview.

I think Ron is right about the fleet movement as it is sloppy for lack of better words. The turning puts me in mind of a star fury and not majestic large scale cruisers. To be fair however the single ship movement is akin to the reawakened ship recovered from Mars in the series but I would have to see more to really make a call.
Reply #74 from Sins Forums Top
The ships tend to collide a bit when grouped together as well, I see that happen prior to phase jump quite often. It might have something to do with the fact I've replaced the TEC Scout Frig with the Shadow Capital Ship. This was because I wanted to quickly spawn the ships for the test and have them move at a fast speed.

Joblist:

1) Remove bloom
2) Add texture, preferably animated texture
3) Use a TEC Capship as a replacement model instead of a frigate
4) Modify weapon effects to 'purple/pink particle beam'
5) Modify shield, hull & speed
6) Tweak the size/volume of the Shadow vessel to a better scale vs. other SoaSE capships as a reference.
Reply #75 from Sins Forums Top
The job list looks right. I cant wait for the next update.