Federation and Empire

Dude I am so looking forward to this game, I love the Starfleet Universe. I realy wish they would create a Federation and Empires pcgame, since it takes days to play the boardgame. But this will work nicely.

it seems to take me a week or so to work on one. My hope is to upload the Tholians on Saturday to get approved.

I love the work you've done.
I have Trek ships styles in DA, mainly ones I've taken out of the Startrek mod, and that i've made texture alterations to, added normal maps etc.

I've not had the drive to move them into TA yet. Looking at the ships you've done with the editor, I find them more satisfying to see. Perhaps it's because they have race colours and are more easy to use when making new classes of ships.

Either way, great work, these will stay in my TA as a permanent addition!

I've been trying to make ships from the PS1 series of games Colony wars, but am failing miserably. I seem to lack the patience required.

Any plans for the ISC?

Oh I've been looking at ISC. They tease me they do. But for now I'm sticking with my current selection.



Never played it but I just googled it and found some screenshots. You could pull that off. I lost patience with the Romulans 3 times. I figure after this I'll work on the ships from author David Weber's Honor Harrington sci-fi series.

I found a Youtube video that was low quality sadly, but it was good enough to allow me to make sketches of one of the sides in colony wars. Hopefully i'll be able to find images of the other side soon.

The isc shouldn't be that hard, at least if you're going for the SFB style designs.
The seltorians aren't much different either.

Look forward to more hulls.

I kinda consider the Orions to be a "minor race" so I could probably do the ISC. But for a 10th Race to fill up the entire game would you want the Seltorians or Andromedans? I'm partial to the latter.

Great stuff!
I find the Gorn fleet really slick to watch and play with. It's kinda weird to see a Bird-of-Prey as a Romulan ship (anyone knowing TOS can relate) when the general public might stick to the Klingon's version.
Gotta say thank you for this, since it gives me another good primer on creating my own styles and what else!

Now, once you're all done with these wonderful ships, do you want a full-time job?
As the official ship designer for the X-Coms & Aliens sets to be (eventually) integrated in the X-Worlds mod?
All of those are, in fact, isometric_tiles based and could probably be translated as true 3D models or patched up together with some default GC structures & components.
What i can't handle so far is the numerous shapes available and yet not exactly fitting the general precision necessary to get fair enough results with the UFOD_Avenger or even the APOC_Annihilator, for example.

Serious, i would possibly need someone with that kind of skills and creativity drive.
And if you were to say yes... i'd have a whole bunch of resources (images, tilesets, etc) to share to ease the process.

Until I did some research I thought the popular Klingon Bird of Prey was a Klingon Design. What I found were two explanations on why the Klingons have them. 1. The Romulans traded them to the Klingons during there short alliance. Much to the Romulan dismay the Klingons liked them . . . ALOT and expanded on the design. 2. The Klingons stole the Bird of Prey and then expanded the design.

But anyway. The Romulan Bird of Prey(Klingon style) is in there in case you want to use it. Otherwise the exact same ship is with the Klingon ship set.

As for my Tholians. I'm taking a break from them and going to try another set because I just can't seem to get them right. I'm moving on to the Kzinti.

Thanks, Zyxpsilon. Of course if you just saw the batch of Tholians I threw out you'd take back that offer.

I like all the mods and ship templates that are available with this game. My goal in this is to make sets of star ships that anyone can play with just the normal game. No need for the Kyro Hull System Design mod or any other.

Hay could you make Da compatible as well.

Makes a whole bunch of sense (for compatibility reasons) to maintain standard sets.

So, what this all means is that i should forget any *direct* help for X-Worlds ships, i gather. But, after inspecting your methods... i think i can manage a few tries at least - just to see where it leads.

Then, i'd have to get very busy just to keep up pace with YOUR wonderful designs!

One of the rarest ship i've yet to see in any mod is the Khan Noonien's Botany-Bay;
not a fleet, but some relic legend of Star Trek if there's ever one.
Up for that special thingy?

Got any images of X-world ships for me to play with? I figure I can try one out. Last night I got some inspiration on the Tholians so I'll try again in a few days. I want to move on and keep building.

When done I'll knock out a Botany-Bay for you.

You bet... lemme patch something up to upload on IShack in order to give you a fair idea on the 'extent' of a few key ships. From which you may select try-out(s) as you'd please.

In general;

-- X-Com_UFOD has 5 major type for Humans (Interceptor, SkyRanger, FireStorm, Lightning and Avenger) and 8 for Aliens (of different sizes & shape configurations), as does TFTD.

-- Apocalypse is much more involving though; 7 reddish retro_50's look (essentials + others less important to me!) for Humans and 10 Saucer-like for the Aliens and, a whole armada of Civilian 'vehicles' which adds a lot of coloring variety to the thematic Races.

Now, i won't give you ALL of that at once... but two or three to simply have fun and evaluate the tasks.

** I'll post some of these snapshots (most probably, an Avenger_Barracuda_Retaliator combo set or somethin') right here probably tomorrow -- and many thanks, in advance.

Well, that was fast.
There they all are with a couple of small ones added just for kicks!



Just lemme know what you think may come out of this (or when, if...)!

Just at first glace I'd say the Retaliator and Avenger should be easy to do. The Tholians are driving me nuts. TOO MANY SMOOTH ANGLES!!!

Dear Stardock,
I need more jewelry pieces.
many thanks,
af_ronin

Yes I know I can use a mod but the point of my ships was that you wouldn't need a mod. So I for all of you waiting for my next ship style I will warn you in advance I will be taking a lot of creative license with these Tholians.

I'll make an Avenger and throw a screenshot on here. At work now so you'll have to wait.

Oh wait, how big (small, large, so on) are these X-Com ships suppose to be?

In the case of the Avenger & Retaliator, it may be a matter of having the 'spare room' to fit the extra wing spans. I'd recommend at least Large if not Huge hulls since those would be usable only very far down the tech-tree paths.

In fact, they both would be required for some special 'Victory alternatives' with preqs such as Low-Hyperwarp & Ultimate Miniaturization, Transport_or_Colony Modules, high range, etc. They get activated after Discovery Sphere (in three new tech-slot groups) but before Galactic Understanding. A sort of temporary deviation from aiming straight for Techno-Victory.

Now, that's all in theory since i do have a plan for them; tricky part should be to give these to all active races **without** having to alter the many different default ship styles. I could always create supplemental ship styles to integrate in X-Worlds, but that's possibly for much later once i get a full grasp over the extent or numbers necessary.

Many Thanks for you help and take your time.

Yeah I would have to second that. I am not complaining or anything the TA expansion was great and all but I would like to see a patch released with a bunch more ship jewels too.

Though I have to say your doing nice work though AF, I know you don't want to make it a mod but I say go for it. Really all you would want to do at this point would be to add a few more logos and add a couple race pics and buddle up what you already have done so far and you have a nice little mod their.

Thanks.

Once I'm done I'll put them together in one nice neat download.

The risk with even more jewels is that the GDI could get sluggish in some setups... thus, the modder would need to compromize between cooler looking ships & risky slow-downs in later game turns.

The NVidia 6200 (yep, that much old!) i have does handle the texturing_weaponing_moving quite well, although by turning off a few key options. I do get a relatively fast render and high enough frame-rates in much of the games i play -- but, it wouldn't take long for an entire Immense or Gigantic map with literaly thousands of different ships (all built off with a few dozens specific jewels each!) roaming around to grind painstackingly slow on my PC, anyway.

So, be extra-careful with filling a model with too many jewels - i'd say.

Well that is true but if there are more jewels to choose from then a particular shape might now be avaible that required several part together to form it before or it might just look better but its doesn't mean that ships will have to have more polys thus slow down the game. Also since the TA expansion has come out they have been able to lower the overall poly count of jewels and hulls so there should be some room for additions there. I am sure they just did not have the time with all the other improvements.

Personally I would like to see some smoother hull parts that would be a bit more in the style of Starfleet hulls designs. Makes me wonder how close they could get to creating some scifi inspired parts without getting introuble with Paramount or Fox for that matter, won't mind seeing some better selection for that ISD I have always wanted to creat out of ship jewels I mean atleast there is a saucer part now not wedge yet.

TA has its advantages, that's quite true; the general 1024 textures are by themselves a huge step towards getting coherent style(s) together, filling polygons efficiently on models and what else.

What i'd kill for though is a thorough set of 'standard shapes' to work with rather than the usual pre-defined (already grouped and basic materials colored, hard-points located, etc) roaster which we MUST take and get on from there.

Where's the very simplistic sphere, cube (although, this one is there indirectly), pyramid, cylinder? But, with **adaptable & controllable** Dummies placement!

Don't get me wrong, this isn't about having a full 3D drawing environment into the shipyard (unless, of course, devs could design us an external version to work with) to create personal Hulls or alternate components... but, it would make things much easier for some specific tasks. Namely, styling a series of 3D_Items, and put them into the new favorites tab for later use.

How do I load this MOD? please help.

Thanks

All these ships are available here: Federation and Empire Ships

Download the ships from the Library and put the files in their appropriate folders found in: C:\Documents and Settings\My Documents\My Games\GC2TwilightArnor\

More ships and ship styles on their way.

You make a interesting point there, not to get off subject, but I wonder how hard it would be to do something like that? I mean the general shapes part is not hard as long as you own max I think the hard part would be texturing them so that they blended in with the rest of the jewels.