[redalbatross]

Attention! This post has been edited to reflect developments.

Hello HLP community! A very informal project has been started to adapt the assets of the RTS/4x game Sins of a Solar Empire to the FSO engine. So far, it's been determined that the models contained with the SoaSE assets are almost perfectly to scale and only require a little texture tweaking to be ready for inclusion into the FSO engine upon completion of tabling and debris.

If you like Sins and would like to see a SoaSE mod project come to fruition, we could use your help! The project is pretty informal at the moment, but we'll be organizing and choosing a direction to take this ambitious project on the fly! 

[Retsof]

I brought up a similar topic a while ago, and sadly am in a similar predicament to you.  The first thing would be getting the models and textures out of Sins and into something more manageable.  Then given subsystems to make the turrets work, then put in POF format.  Then given proper table files.  Then you get to make weapons for them.  Then you get to FRED stuff for them.  So yeah, it'd be quite a project.

[MatthTheGeek]

Not to mention the lack of fighter/bomber variants (2 per faction), which forces you to design more.

[redalbatross]

Not to mention the lack of fighter/bomber variants (2 per faction), which forces you to design more.

Yeah, it would probably work better as a capship command sort of thing. I just downloaded Wings 3D and I'm going to see what I can do with the SoaSE .mesh files. Even with no prior experience, I'm bound to figure things out eventually. The prospect of having the Kol in FSO is great motivation. 

[Retsof]

Heck, I don't even mind the lack of variety for the chance to see an epic Sins battle from the cockpit.

[redalbatross]

Heck, I don't even mind the lack of variety for the chance to see an epic Sins battle from the cockpit.

Yeah, I would probably be okay with one fighter, as long as it didn't suck. Imagine assaulting a starbase. I'm going to see what I can do with this. Even just seeing a Kol or a Vengeance in the FSO engine would be epic.

[ZeroCooL]

 Excelent!!!!


I Love Soase!!
 ^^

[Vengence]

Even so flying as a frigate or cruiser isn't that bad of a thing. Really even capship combat would be fun itself. Also remember that through most of some campaigns in The Babylon Project the player was only in one or two fighters. Now granted I wouldn't mind (if it was my project) designing more fighters. Frankly its a good idea and will likely be fun in the end. But I don't know the beginning of Sins editing. Granted they have the DDs files practially out in the open, but I don't know about the meshes. So good luck there..

[redalbatross]

Even so flying as a frigate or cruiser isn't that bad of a thing. Really even capship combat would be fun itself. Also remember that through most of some campaigns in The Babylon Project the player was only in one or two fighters. Now granted I wouldn't mind (if it was my project) designing more fighters. Frankly its a good idea and will likely be fun in the end. But I don't know the beginning of Sins editing. Granted they have the DDs files practially out in the open, but I don't know about the meshes. So good luck there..

The mesh files for all for all of the resources are right in the game folder, I'm trying to figure out how I can import them into Wings 3D to check out if it's feasible to use them. Since the ships are very small in SoaSE, they might be a bit low-poly for the FSO engine. Nothing some good textures and bump mapping couldn't tart up, I suppose.

I just keep thinking about how great it would be if the importing process isn't too difficult. Maybe the Vasari are actually running from the Shivans. 

Watching a Kol take on a Radiance would be an awesome spectacle. I love the Advent. Illuminators would be perfect for FSO. Glorious beamspam!

[Thaeris]

What file format does Sins use, by the way?

[The E]

Something proprietary. There's a max plugin that can read it here: http://janvanderweg.com/SOASE/

Note, I do not know if this actually works, given that I do not own MAX.

But yeah, a Radiance would be a quite nice thing to have in FSO. I think that, in terms of polycount, they should be somewhere near or slightly above the higher-detail retail models.

[Vengence]

I do have 3DS Max on hand. Version 9 and 2010. And I have Sins installed. I'll give it a try. Mind you even if the polycount is low they can be remodeled.

[Black Wolf]

I do have 3DS Max on hand. Version 9 and 2010. And I have Sins installed. I'll give it a try. Mind you even if the polycount is low they can be remodeled.

Please Please Please, if anyone does this, make a R1 with just retail Sins ships. Faffing about remodelling them will see a half dozen awesome assets created followed by an essentially dead mod. A basic, foundational tables, effects and FRED mod using existing assets can probably be done inside of a few months, or a year of HLPtime - from there HTLing can be done ala the MVPs.

[redalbatross]

I do have 3DS Max on hand. Version 9 and 2010. And I have Sins installed. I'll give it a try. Mind you even if the polycount is low they can be remodeled.

Please Please Please, if anyone does this, make a R1 with just retail Sins ships. Faffing about remodelling them will see a half dozen awesome assets created followed by an essentially dead mod. A basic, foundational tables, effects and FRED mod using existing assets can probably be done inside of a few months, or a year of HLPtime - from there HTLing can be done ala the MVPs.

Yeah, I'd prefer to avoid remodeling. I don't think the models are really that low-poly, not any better or worse than some of the models we still use in FSO projects. We're gonna have to retexture anyway, so might as well use bump and normal maps to make up for any deficiencies - if it turns out the models look bad. But I think we should be okay.

[Vengence]

I don't exactly mean remodel from scratch. I mean making adjustments to the mesh for added detail. Example, what would be say a vent or whole in the texture could be modeled in on the mesh.

Okay I imported the Kol into 3DS Max and here's the immediate result. My 3DS Max 9 cannot read DDS for some reason so I'm in the process of converting the textures to a degree. Here is what I found:



Time for textures

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/1799/kolspecall.jpg

This is what I'd call the specular texture but it isn't 'specifically' specular but still, it handles most of the shiny stuff. Anyhow above you see the final image of all shaders.

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/3776/kolspecredshine.jpg
This is the 'shine' channel represented by red. It handles the highlight specs and all that. I'd convert this channel to -shine.

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/33/kolspecgreenhouse.jpg
The green channel is what I call the Housecolor layer. This channel modifies the 'stripes' and colors of ships to represent the selected Sins's color in the faction select screen. If this mod takes off we'll have to manually apply this to the Diffuse texture as a sort of color.

http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/6672/kolspecbluereflect.jpg
The blue channel is quite intriguing, I believe it is a 'reflection' layer. For FS2 I'd merge this into -shine as the alpha channel to produce alpha environment maps.

http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/3759/kolspecalphaglow.jpg
This here is the alpha channel and it is a glow layer. Obviously we'd use it as -glow.

Sins already has normal maps that can be easily converted to work with FS2.

I did some basic tinkering in photoshop to isolate each shader to be compatible with 3DS Max and combined the housecolor of my beloved color and merged it into the diffuse. Here's the end result:

[The E]

Ohhh yes, that is good.

What's the polycount like?

[Vengence]

4021. Ironclad designed Sins to look as good as possible while having the highest possible quality. I suspect that is why they use 1024x1024 DDS textures on even minor frigates. That's from memory however.

In all honesty everything's right there. It WILL however take a ton of tweaking and editing to make this stuff FS2 playable from debris, turrets, bays, the works. But all the texture shaders, normal maps, meshes, and all that is on hand. I suspect that with a small team of 3DS equipped rebels bring Sins to FS2 quite easily. Least when it comes to assets that is.

In estimation I cannot see each capital ship taking more than 4 hours each to make them FS2 ready, from start import to final product.

Times of War are Upon Us.

[SpardaSon21]

When will you be bringin' out the big guns?

[The E]

SoaSE mod is a go?

[Rodo]

Oh I found the ships on that game lovely, if only the gameplay would have been more obvious to me from the start, or if it had at least featured a history campaign I might have considered it a great game.

Impressive work Vengance, if you do get a team I'll be drooling to get my hands on the final product