Comments - McShooterz

The uGUI system introduced in Unity 4.6 is fantastic for designers to be able to create great looking UIs without any programming knowledge, but is proving to be a nightmare when it comes to creating complex dynamic systems. I have been trying to convert my shipyard screen/system from the old immediate mode GUI to the newer uGUI, but it has proven to be far more difficult and time consuming than I like, which is why it is taking forever for me to update this.

I am probably going to shelve the shipyard so I can work on converting the ship combat info bar and at least be able to play around with the ship combat again.

I could definitely use 3d assets.

Either they could be included in the project as unprotected files or packaged so they cannot be opened by others.

If you make contributions to the project I can added you to the credits screen if you want.

The major reason for Unity comes from how easy it is to use compared to Unreal or Cryengine. I'll need to create instructions on how create new game objects and package them, but compared with how other game engine editors work I believe people will be able to learn it easier in the Unity editor.

From a design aspect moving as much data into external text files means that the barrier to modding is just a text editor like notepad or better notepad++.
Edit: This does have a small negative side effect as loading many small files takes longer than loading one big database.

As of right now resources are hardcoded, but their icons, tool tips, and value can be edited by external files. It would require a bit of work, but I could potential create a system where resources are defined in their own files, and there could be an indefinite amount added. Perhaps I would keep the construction resources hardcoded, and allow for infinite numbers of trade resources to be defined externally.

Something I had been think about is growing different foods with farms, and for the most part that would just give different bonuses to the farms like moral or population growth. The defining of resources gives me the idea of being able to define indefinite types of food resources that all get used as your empires food. Different food types could provide tiny bonuses based on their percentage compares to other foods your empire is eating.

I would say that the economy is most likely going to be comparable to Ages of Empires, where there are a set of resource types, which are collected to be used for construction. Also there is to be a market system for buying and sell resources, and prices change based on how much you buy and sell. Anything that uses resources can also be built by simply using money, but the cost is related to the market value of all of the resources.

Production will work in a similar manner as it does in Stardrive; it determines how long something takes to build.

Food will work like it does in other 4x games, as something required to support populations. If you do not have enough food, then it can be bought from the market, but this will cause the food market price to rise.

Under the OpenSpace4x_Data\StreamingAssets folder are all of the files that get loaded at run time. Technically these files can be edited, but as a best practice there is a mod system to use.

Under OpenSpace4x_Data\StreamingAssets\Mods is a folder named MyMod, which is meant for a starting point to creating a mod. The file structure inside a mod folder is identical as under OpenSpace4x_Data\StreamingAssets, so if you copy the OpenSpace4x_Data\StreamingAssets\Modules into MyMod folder, then changes made to the copied module files will be used instead of the originals.

Audio files must to be .wav or .ogg, texture files must be .png, and anything with the .unity3d extension is a packaged Unity object that cannot be edited, but can be overwritten by another file.

This currently is just a personal project of mine. If it remains a personal project, then it will get done as I have time to work on it. If I could run a successful crowd funding campaign or at least get funding, then I would guess that I could possibly finish what I want in roughly two years.

Just uploaded again, because I had forgotten to include the launcher, which has the mod manager built in, thus without it mods cannot be loaded.

Actually Shattered Alliance II development has already started. It can be located on the Steam Workshop for Stardrive II or manually downloaded from the forums.

Stardrivegame.com

Currently modding support is very limited, so for now the mod just adds a bunch of additional ships to each race, and changes race images; module/weapon and tech tree support is no yet up to supporting a total conversion.

Yes you need 1.15B, and BB 0318 should be good, I just tested it on BB 0405, and it loaded. Yes it will take a minute or so to load the mod, there is a lot going on behind the scenes.

Adding more ship designs would give the AI more ships to choose from, and this would increase the potential diversity of ships used by the AI.

An additional issue is a change to the BlackBox mod I had done, but did not re-balance the economy for. The AI could have an issue of not having the income to afford larger ship upkeep. One solution to this is playing at the hardest difficultly levels since the AI will have considerably more money. I know that this is not a perfect solution, but it does increase the likelihood of seeing more enemy ships of larger sizes.

The primary reason would be that there needs to be a large pool of ship designs for the AI to choose from. As it stands all races have Shuttlecraft designs, but larger ship designs not so much. There are some other reasons, but ultimately it is an issue with the mod itself.

If you are referring to vanilla 1.14 Stardrive, then no. This must be used with the BackBox code mod, which should be able to be installed on top of any version of Stardrive.

The next version it will be fixed, but I have stalled the release of the next version while bug fixing the BlackBox mod.

I want to experiment with using an installer instead, but since the installation is so simple as it is I will be going back to distributing it as a rar archive.

I forgot to include the ReadMe and all the original ReadMes for the models when I packed it into the exe for v0.2, but v0.1, v0.15, and v0.17 include the ReadMe with credit to artists for each of their respective models, and original ReadMes from their source.

The reason for using some models from SoA 2 is from a user named Elethio that was helping with this project getting permission from Major Stress on the Sins forums to use models provided proper credits were cited.

Just to make sure we are on the same page here is the download location for the latest BlackBox: Bitbucket.org

Installing BlackBox is key to all of this; Download a BlackBox version, and extract all of its files directly into the main StarDrive directory; for most this will be c:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/StarDrive

Then launch StarDrive like normal, but if BlackBox is working it will be displayed in the bottom left hand corner.

BlackBox is not a traditional mod in any respect, but is a new executable we created from the original game, so you are overwriting the original exe, but this can be uninstalled with steam by verifying local cache, which will restore the original StarDrive files and Exe.

You can find the latest test version of the BlackBox mod here: Bitbucket.org
I have attempted to fix all bugs found in the last version, but if you find any please feel free to report them here: Stardrivegame.com

There is a bug with the Large Freighter research, this will be fixed in next version.

For anyone playing as the Klingons or Cardassians: you will have a module called "Small Combat Thruster", which is from vanilla and its presence is a bug. This module will not appear in future versions, so it is advised not to build ship designs with it considering they would not show up in future releases.

Due to large changes in tech tree old saved games might not work; some will, but it's not a guarantee. BlackBox 0819 just got released, so maybe try that one. If at all possible a screen shot of the error message; would be very helpful.

Developing a code mod and a separate content mod simultaneously is a huge can of worms if you have never tried it. The latest version of the code mod is BlackBox RadicalElements test 0816. If that ones is crashing try some of the earlier RadicalElements tests. If you are still getting a crash have steam check the integrity of the game cache, then try installing BlackBox. Once you have BlackBox up and running, then add this mod and active it in the mod manager.

Because I am also part of the team developing the code mod for StarDrive; there countless features in this mod that require the latest version of the Blackbox code mod: the newest can always be found here: Bitbucket.org

There are features that I added to the code mod that add special properties to certain hulls, and I haven't finished applying them yet. What this means is that old ship designs will not have these bonuses.

Changes to ship modules and tech tree means that older save games will probably not work with newer updates.

For these reasons the new few versions will focus on finalizing ship hulls, modules, and tech tree.