Your Modding Experiences

Hrm. Particle effects are probably the most easily viewable thing in sins. You can show both Bailknight's mod and mine if you like.

There are a few good particle modders out there, most notably Bailknight, (but he has not been around for some time, as far as I know) who change the sins experience and overload people's computers with flashy awesomeness dispersed throughout the game. Even I use a couple of Bailknight's effects in my mod as fillers or starting points.

My mod, Totaleffects, focuses on changing every effect in sins. I am only behind by about 20, and I have added several other effects in order to have players see certain ability effects.

PARTICLE FORGE

It is quite easy to use and learn, though it does have many limitations. Such as: the difficulty of being able to control huge numbers of exact emitter locations, or incorrectly displaying textures that have an alternate linker type.

CREAM/VIM

Basically Notepad on steroids. I like to use it for precise particle effect editing.

Anything else?

Me/my perspective;

Sins is a late game in my modding lifespan. I modded Starcraft: Brood War since 1999 and moved up from there, including Diablo 2, Supreme Commander, Homeworld 2, Age of Wonders 2: Shadow Magic and such. My experience with sins is that out of all the games I've modded it's the most limited, as in most of the game is hardcoded, especially in regards to weapons and computer AI. To force my design around these limits I have to compensate for the lack of functionality with immersiveness and impression, focusing on audiovisual elements to create the most impact possible. Yet despite being the most limited, it's a far more user-friendly and enjoyable game to work with than Homeworld 2 which suffers from major mechanical issues and has very limited tools available. Particle Forge especially is a bloody god-send in modding. You wouldn't believe how hard it can be to get custom effects in most games.

I use 3ds max for creating my models, and XSI for conversions.

I use Adobe Audition 1.5 for my sound engineering and editing vocal assets.

Notepad for editing entities, Notepad++ for editing meshes.

Photoshop for facerolling my way through textures.

Sony Vegas for producing video media, but I want to learn After Effects one of these days.

Although my mod is not public, you could show Episode 0 in part or full to your discretion if possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0ZmMkdB5eM

Most of the issues I've been encountering with the game are related to my pipeline of converting graphics. XSI does everything it can to throw things into the wheelworks of my models, and only now am I beginning to understand how to get around some of the issues I regularly encounter.

By far the biggest issue I have with the game right now though is the computer AI's automated fleet formations. They keep trying to move ships inside of each other. This is troubling enough with small ships, but large ones especially tend to flail around each other a lot. This behavior is all completely hardcoded and I've already had to massively resize everything in the game to 1/10 their original sizes. But, it's not enough - I desperately need the AI behavior regarding formation distancing to be softcoded to make any progress in that area.

I plan to be making video developer logs for this project throughout its production, but the first one might not be ready for your paper/demonstration.

Biggest hard ship is the hard code limits and the lack of modding support from the devs. Even the sticky posts are very out of date.

The reference files are out of date. harpo and myself took it upon ourselves to help the community here creating up-to-date reference files.

Working for 2 straight days trying to find a work around for something thats hard coded in, sometimes possible, most times not. Best one I figured out was getting the player selection screen to show 6 races. Three days on that one and almost gave up a few times but now its in a bunch of mods. http://soase.weebly.com/add-race-pics.html

I created that weebly because it was so hard to find good posts in this forum so whan I did find one I made a web page for it. I would say half are from helpful modders and half I wrote. If there is no credit at the bottom it was me. No moderator in the forum means searching for adding a planet will bring up 100 posts with useless info.

http://soase.weebly.com/modding-tools.html

http://soase.weebly.com/modeling-tools.html

Lots of free tools if you know where to look.

Thanks for your input guys. Syneptus, could you tell me some of the problems you've had, if any, creating and implementing these particle effects?

Iskatu, that's exactly the stuff i was looking for. Thank you very much. And my paper is due in about 4 weeks, so if your video is up by then PM me and i'll sure show it 

Myfist0, i've been planning to check the weebly out for some time, but i'd rather do so when i can really sit down and get myself into it. I've been thinking about doing a simple mod just to mess with the game for myself, as i am not an artist or modeler so i'd not be able to make any new objects myself. It seems like you and others in the mod community are very set on helping newbies into the process. I, in advance, thank you for your help.

So far i'm planning on showcasing the Distant Stars mod, as it changes many visuals as well as adds research and changes the strength/costs of many ships. Adding to that SoA2 for the models, effects, and the fighter movement.

Good mods to focus on. I've had a lot of fun with both online in the past.

My story...

I was quite simply in awe of what other people have done making and modding games and always wanted a taste of it. I started reading the forums specifically about how to mod Sins around August of 2009. I picked up Softimage XSI shortly after that and started playing around with manipulating primitives into something that resembeled a ship and low and behold after many months of trial and error I had some stuff that actually resembeled what I wanted. I created the thread Show off your Sin's model for amateurs like me to display to others the fruits of that effort.

After I decided I knew enough of the technical aspects of modding Sins I set out to create my races for Sins. While some like to mock the mods that add new content to the base game I can tell you the amount of work required to create my mod was significant both in time and energy. For starters I wanted to create something fairly unique so I began brainstorming on what interests me which narrowed it down supernatural things like Vampires, Zombies, Angels, etc. This eventually turned into the Plague and Nephilim races in my mod which serve as the back theme for the flavor text, looks and abilities. I spent a lot of time researching anything relating to the supernatural compiling different ideas and looks trying to come up with things to help support the backstory.

I worked on the core elements of the mod without much concern on the models for about 6-8 months which resulted in fairly flushed out races from unit names, abilities, concept art to use, etc. I finally posted my intent on this forum with some of the models I had completed as a start for my races around July of 2010. I'm glad I did as two modellers agreed to help with models for the two races. Combined with the models I had done I was able to create a fairly complete mod adding two new races with custom research trees, models, textures, buttons, icons, voice overs (still wip on plague)...

I'm especially grateful for the model assistance as Sins of the Fallen would have probably never been released if it was just using the same assets already in the game. I'm pretty happy with the end result for a first mod ever, but it's a lot of work for one person to do even with the model assistance.

What I've learned about modding is accept help when you can get it. People all have real lives and interests and tend to flow in and out.

In general...

Like myfist I saw a gap in useful tools and knowledge transfer for Sins modding and set out to create an Entity Validation tool that could validate an entire project for easily missed things like typos, or miss-spellings, etc. Well, this morphed well beyond my initial intentions as I quickly identified it could be ported to Eclipse as an Entity and Project Editor. I use this tool all the time for my modding and feel sorry for anyone that doesn't use or can't figure out how. To the latter folks I converted my Sins Validation Rules from xml to a readable wiki format so anyone could have access the sins structures.

Another gap I saw is how to add new races into Sins. To this end I created a template mod that can be used to add up to 3 new races. I'm currently using these files as the base to create my Transhuman races.

My original gool was to learn enough that I could help others and to that end I think I have.

Zombie, that adds a great deal into how virtually anybody can learn and develop a mod in this game, and how some tools are also very useable for many features. That's a good spot for me to write on as well.

Is there anybody who's had any supporting contact from the Developers that could tell me about such an exchange of information/tools/anything helpful to the community? It'd be nice to see how the developers themselves have added to supporting even further the modification growth with SoaSE.

My 2 cents:

Having just come from messing around with the Phoenix Rising mod for Star Wars: Empire at War, Sins modding was a blessing in usability and a curse in versatility. Large parts of the data in EaW didn't even work or was cryptic at best, while Sins' structure is easy to understand and work with. On the other hand, many of the things you can do in EaW just aren't possible in Sins, or take long or counter-intuitive work around.

Examples:

In EaW, nobody really knows how the combat auto-resolve works. Even the developers are no longer sure. It's the same with determining which ships can make bombing runs; nobody knows what controls it. There's lots of data in the files on a 'political' game mechanic that has no effect in-game. It also turns out there's a bug in that any non-turreted weapon fires with perfect accuracy no matter what the accuracy value is set to, despite that the developers used this for all of the fighters in the game and was never patched.  In Sins, virtually everything is intuitively labeled and everything but graphics and sound is easy to change with a text editor; excluding graphics and sound, a fairly extensive mod involving hundreds of files can be implemented in a couple hours.

However, in the Phoenix Rising mod (Which depicts ships as near as possible to the Star Wars canon) a Star Destroyer carries half a dozen different types of weapons with hundreds of firing points each individually with an individual firing arc and aim. In Sins, a ship can have only up to three weapon types, firing arcs are predefined into forward, back, and sides and the graphics are there just for show as accuracy just modifies the amount of damage.

I actually made a thread requesting a number of versatility enhancements centered largely around what couldn't be done compared to EaW.

I ran into problems and limits that were encoded into the engine itself. I tried to ask for some of them to be changed or added, but even I understood that they would be too major of a change to implement in normal patches...

At first, creating particle effects was difficult; I could make one a day(about 4 hours of effort), then I got faster and I understood more and more about the particle engine. Now I can churn out one in about 15 minutes. I can safely say that I have over 200 hours of particle effect experience with particle forge.

The only serious problems that I ran into consistently was that I had trouble making unique textures that suited what I needed them for. I have made a couple that I use in different effects, but I am still not good at making them.

Particle effects(at least for me) are just a combination of what looks nice in their given context, and what can blow the socks off anyone seeing them.

Implementation was easy. I just copied the names of all 450 existing particle effects and wrote over them with particle forge and then dropped them into a mod folder and was done.

I'll see if I can Nacey to put up a post for you for the DS crew. He is the main mod master of Distant Stars.

As for myself, Sins is the first time I every truly got into modding. Did mostly bug testing for DS early on then moved on to the pirates as they were weak in Entrenchment due to the starbases then got over done in Diplomacy. Started with Notepad then moved on to Notepad++ after hearing of it. The biggest annoyance to me is the hardcoded AI. Especially with the pirates as I truly wanted to change around how they operated. Used a work around of implementing Insurgency and improved with ZombieRus5's help but it still doesn't quite feel right. I also used Gimp to mess with the effects for the pirates. Any of the fancy models you see are from others that helped me with my project (SuperZERO0 and ZombieRus5). Having a good modding community to me is the biggest help as we are often willing to help and/or point others in the right direction.

Later on I plan on introducing a flagship mod concept into Distant Stars similar to ZombieRus5's only with my own tweaks and directions.

Well all of the bugs I've encountered so far are as a result of hardcode and so they can't be fixed. My bug "fixing" process for other games varies. Diablo 2 for example it took me months to fix very vague map-related bugs. Sins is simple enough that, unless it's something coming from XSI or convertXSI, any weirdness I encounter can usually be immediately identified and fixed. The one thing that gave me a bit of grief was the AI not using abilities not immediately available (even when they were supposedly available). A result of hardcode, again. So, I couldn't fix it, I had to just bring everything back to the first level anyways.

It's quite depressing to see developers making games so dependent on hardcode in the post-90's, but games are becoming less mod friendly these days, not more.

Well Sins has a nice dev.exe program that can catch common syntax errors and things, and it keeps a log of various operations that can come in handy if something you are attempting crashes the game. Its something I certainly wish the other games I've modded had (Rome: Total War and Rise of Nations). It also handles bugs a bit better in that if you made an error, it will try to just ignore the error and continue, which can also give you some clues to what went wrong.

That said sometimes the errors can be quite cryptic, though this is usually related to the mention hard code limits in some way.

I was thinking about that problem of yours, and I think there may be a work around. You may not be able to require a non-ultimate ability to start at a level beyond 1, but you could make that first level do something completely different and only work as originally intended at higher levels (which can be given a level limit).

Hmm. I'm afraid I haven't done hardly anything with abilities yet, so I'm not sure how something like that would work. They will definitely have to scale very differently than current abilities do right now to be competitive while not being overly powerful at early levels.

In my dev logs I'll talk a bit about my testing process though it isn't terrifically special. In sins I test stuff by running games with 9 computers on Viscious and let them beat each other up. My tech trees are limited only to functional stuff for the most part, so inevitably my new stuff appears. That's typically how I balance things as well. My testing processes in RTS games heavily involve computer AI. One of the reasons I put so much effort into getting the computers to work the best they possibly can. Mods cannot survive without computer AI working well imo.

This being one of the reasons why i chose this for the topic. I love how this game is so amazingly mod friendly, it has simple installs for mods and even a mod switch in the options menu, and the decelopers encourage and give tools to mod teams!

None of that stuff is really new, though. Age of Wonders 2 has a full-blown editor and native mod support built into it as well, and that's a turn-based game from 2001. By now most of that stuff is considered standard for games that have any mod support.

Yea, but unfortunately there are few games with full mod support. And it seems like the mod support for this game seems to be it's selling point.

It was the selling point for me, certainly. I would never have bought sins if it didn't support mods. My experience with Homeworld 2, much less its community, was less than stellar. Hardpointing these huge ships in their third party editor was something of a biblical-scale nightmare. That and the game's performance was utterly atrocious on ATI cards. I could not get any of the mods or vanilla game to perform well on a X2 6000/HD2900/4 gigs of ram while anyone with half my specs on an nvidia card could make the game fly.

At least in sins I've narrowed most of the performance in the game to mines and fighters so far. Removing mines and massively reducing fighters has made the game quite enjoyable in big games. I'm not sure how close I am to the 2gb ram limit but I can vaporize all of the vanilla assets when possible. That should reduce it considerably.

I am hoping to get episode 1 of my dev log out in a week or two. Work has slowed down as of late and I need to pick it back up and flip on the record button as I do so.

If you mean priority (ex. K-Wing vs. Y-Wing) that's governed by the Squadron's <Formation_Priority> iirc. Though, odds are you're referring to something else. :v

Anyways, I started out modding a number of years ago, on EaW. Made my own mod (I'm sure nobody here's even heard of the Hull Breach Mod) and then offered to help with IA2's coding, though that never went anywhere. After a hiatus I came back and a friend and I add to and changed the CIS mod for ours and a group of friends to MP with. After some convincing from Chimaera, I got Sins after he told me about Sins of a Galatic Empire. Liked the mod so much that I started doing some unofficial addons with him for it, and now I'm actually a part of the SoGE staff.

The good thing about Sins is that it's fairly user friendly, and it's what things do is fairly clear cut and known, which is a really nice feature. This makes it fairly easy to learn things quickly, as I did, though this also means a ton of stuff is hardcoded, as others have already covered. One of the most surprising features of Sins, imo, is that ships lack any sort of scaling option/code line, aka. ship models have to be the size you want them to be. This makes it harder to get ships to scale, and adds more of a burden to modelors. In terms of coding, my tool of preference is Notepad, and I use Notepad ++ if I ever have to go to a line (as regular Notepad can never do that for some reason, even though it should). For icon editting and texture re-saving/conversions I use Adobe Photoshop CS5. For converting the original Entitys, editting String files, and such, before I really knew of these forums, I did a google search and found this tool called "Sins Mod Helper". After some tweaking I got it to work with Entrenchment with no issue. Making it work with normal Sins is a matter of renaming 2 files, and vice versa. Kudos to whomever made it, if you're reading this!

Bug squashing in Sins, at least compared to EaW, is nearly a joke. With the ability to turn ShowErrors on, finding the source of troubles is fairly easy (assuming it isn't due to a hardcoded limit being broken/breeched), and then it's a simple question of fixing that space or recounting a bunch of groups in GalaxyScenDef. In the past it could take me hours to fix a simple error, in Sins I can fix things within minutes, which is an amazing feat. I really regret not buying Sins early, when it first came out, a close friend of mine even recommended it at the time.

Tools are, at least from my limited experiance, one of the areas where Sins shines. Besides third party applications like the Sins Mod Helper, IC has released some really nifty tools. The Galaxy Forge makes it fairly easy to make maps, letting things fairly exact (thanks to being able to manually input numbers for certain things), and is actually fun to use. I was plesently surprised when I took it up last month, to make a map I had previously drawn/planned by hand last August, to find the GF fairly easy and simple to use, and also being very portable as well, it runs without a hitch off of a USB stick, thanks to no installation being required.

Someone made a mesh resize tool that's quite easy to use. It takes me less than an hour to resize things, and that's mostly just figuring out the scale (twice as big, 1/4 etc.) I'm sure someone at SOGE knows of it, though sadly not a lot of new modders do.

Anyways, an anecdote: Modding the AI in Sins is actually better than in Command and Conquer 3. In Sins, you're limited to things like ship roletype and ability autocasting. In CnC3, you can mod a lot of the AI. Just even the most minor change will cause it to crash. There was a mod group that tried to make an advanced AI for it, but they eventually just gave up it was so bad. To illustrate: The AI in skirmish builds their base in the exact same way, down to building rotation and position, every single time. If you change it so they'll build one of the buildings slightly to the left, it'll crash. That's about as far as AI modding for it goes.

Oh my, Kitkun, that's sure to make the CnC3 modders all different kinds of frustrated 

CF105, that's certainly helpful information. I was once signed up for beta testing with SOGE, but i cahnged computers and forgot all of my login info, so i can't play it anymore  .

The only thing i seem to be missing here as far as great information (although i'll take all of the modding stories i can get, the more the better!) is that i just need a little bit on the IC Dev involvement with the mod devs. Such as: communication between the modders and the devs about the roadblocks and what was taken into consideration for changing, as well as any specific things the devs have added in to games because of ideas that the modders had.

If anyone can tell me any of those things, i'd be just about finished to write up this paper. I really do appreciate everybody's help with this, i'm flattered by the helpful Sins community. Keep doing what you do best, because you all do some really excellent work.

Well they haven't been very talkative lately, but they are usually pretty reseptive when they respond. I can think of two things off the top of my head that they did after being urged by modders. One was get rid of the limit of the various number of files the game could load (this sort of went together with the multiple mod system and the shift to manifests to tell the game what files to load), which as you might guess was a killer for the original Sins modding. The second was enabling the use of the fighter movement system for non-strikecraft ships, instead of hard coding it to the fighter entity. Manshooter's Dynamic Combat mod was eccentially the offspring of this change, and only came about after being asked by the modding community many times.

The devs have also used/or will be using some of the things that us modders have done like the TSOP project that fixes a lot of memory issues.