JasonTL

yeah, exactly, 2d representation to 3d space is very subjective. though its helpful tha the atlas has uniform maps with a north to space, but i'll just have to decide what picture to use as my galaxy background, then look at the spacing of my sectors. want to keep things as uniform and in tune with galactic maps from the essential atlas, but might have to just rotate things as a whole a bit for it to look nice. research is progressing, pretty much have the inner core and core worlds figured out. have to do some combining, but think i picked a good set of systems with important and recognizable planets to make things interesting and fun. now onto the colonies and beyond

if you find vader and keep getting force boosts as a decoy or just foiled missions, its pretty easy to do. i remember a few times i've had luke as a jedi master before he even left to go to dagobah, lol. and if you wait til your jedi trainer has a very high force rating, then its easy to send a combined mission and have all of your trainees come back as masters.

yes, i like zahn's work too, like you, in particular the chiss. not sure yet if i'll include it or not, probably not just because kind of cutting that part of the galaxy out lets me spread out the other 20 sectors a bit so it doens't only take a day to get between sectors. although, i guess i could also do that with rebed and the hyperspace values as well, hmmmmmm. only problem with that is han is still hard wired at 50 and sending a manufactured item from a facility would get there faster than capitol ships could travel. military regiments and non hyperdrive fighters would be faster too, lol. its so goofy that you can manufacture things like that and deploy them on the other side of the galaxy, yet TIE fighters just have to stay there and die in tactical, haha. then again, shorter hops might be fun, so i'm still working things out. i'm going to take more of a sector approach too, maybe combine some things like you did too. still doing alot of reading on wookieepedia on regions and systems making my lists up and figuring it out. definitley using the essential atlas as my basis for setting things up though. probably will end up looking much like yours will. maybe just zoomed in a little bit and tilted a bit. its space, i really don't think there's any true north to set up a map, lol.

damn, you zipped up everything and then some, didn't you? THANKS. and the bmp converter is there, with the strategic and tactical color palettes. hope other people that are having trouble with masks tutorials not working anymore and that need these little programs find that link before it goes off that site too. just about everything you need to start on a conversion, besides research and some other free modelling software and a photo editing suit. i'll keep hold of that 7zip file so i don't ever lose all those things for yet another time. thanks again

thanks so much. that helps a lot. look forward to the beta, i'll check out the alpha too, think i remember which thread its posted in. maybe all have to do the same this go around. put up some of the dll files and rebed files as i go through different aspects of my mod. wish i knew computer programming. looks like slocket is doing an awsome job reinventing the entire game. would have made it so much easier if the base code for rebellion had been released. don't know why lucasarts, after 14 years and the albeit small, but failthful cult following this game has had for so long, still can't give out anything. i could see if they had done it right the first time, ground tactical, planetary systems at least in the right regions of space if not the right sectors, lol. for what the game is, the galaxy map isn't bad for the gameplay, but i'm going to begin my tc with totally revamping the sectors, systems and maps too. with the atlas out and pictures on the net, have some good ideas. definitely want to have some inner core things going on, at least byss. maybe as just part of the inner core, or possibly oversector 0. that should be somwhere on one of the sides or top or bottom, and the other regions spreading out in a C or semicircle like way. no reason the unknown regions need to be in there, so that's what i'm thinking right now. still researching regions and sectors and systems, trying to get my list down. one thing i know for sure is that all 200 will be available via rebed for all three sized galaxies. that way, you can accrue more leadership points by recruiting a few more characters, and there's you'll only have to see if there's one or two goofy ones available at the start that don't make sense. i always hated starting a new game and having lando already available right after the battle of yavin, makes absolutely no sense. but cant' control that when you get six extra characters at the beginning of a huge galaxy game. so 200 star systems and only 6 characters to start, i like that. unless one is lando, then i start another new game, lol.

been going through some of your other threads, mrphildevil. sounds like you're doing a great job. love to see it when its done. i'm soooooooooooooo far behind you, but hope to get there with my complete overhaul at some point too. i know its probably around here somewhere, but couldn't find it in the downloads section. have most of my other tools ready to go to start editing, but i'm really still in reasearch mode for now. i don't kow if any the tutorials have the bmpconverter in them, but if you could zip that up with the rest of them if they don't and get it to me, it would be greatly appreciated

cool. all the turorials would be great. like i said, been a while since i've done any of this, would love to have them just to brush up and keep as a reference. my yim is in my profile, email is the same at that id. send either way whenever possible. thanks alot

sweet, that looks like old school animated optimus, not the movie version. looks awesome.

changing all the bmp files in the game is tedius and time consuming, but worth it if you want a tc that you really like when you play. you do have to take alot of time to find out what numbers go with every picture in the game with reshack or resoursce explorer. sorry, i used to have a complete list, but i have to start over making that again. mask's tutorials were great, but i can't get them to come up in the model download section anymore. if anybody out there has them, email them to me at jasonlaviolette2012 either yahoo im or email, both are the same, even in text form would be great. the game uses a certain palette, actually two, the one for fighters is even smaller than the other, or maybe its all things in tactical. find a picture of what planet you want to use, doesn't have to be a .bmp. then you have to play with a photo editing or paint program. you have to that that original picture and apply the correct pallete to it in such a program, then save it as a .bmp. after that, you can can use the converter to turn it into a .bin with the correct file name (numbers, in this case). be careful, of the 200 systems, the same planet picture can be used for a few of them, so you have to make sure the one you're changing is really the one you want to be changing. start out with one you know isn't duplicated in the game and see if that works. change the right files with the correct color palette and the right size and pixels, and it should look like you want. perhaps not exactly like the pic you started with, because the color pallete changed it a bit, but it should work.

yeah, i've tried some modelling from scratch, got a few things to look ok, but i'm not very good at it or computer programming. some easy things you can do, though, are as simple as taking the models from the original game and texture them a bit better to make them look nicer in tactical. there's lots of models here too (though it seems a good number have broken links now ) and other places around the web that are sweet in game. even large file size complex models with lots of polys can be stripped down, tweaked, and textured to look a hell of a lot better than the originals. i hardly ever use a model as is, even from the ones in the downloads here. so i don't do alot of modelling per se, but i'll edit them, texture, add, take away, fiddle with size, til i get them how i like them. all those things can be done with just a few free modelling software programs, even though you might have to go through three of four of them to get a collada or google sketchup model tweaked to your liking and from the original type of file into a .x

tried to take a peek at the demos on this crap laptop and had the same problems that were mentioned throughout the thread. new ps should be here within the hour, so i'll get back to you when i've had a chance to take a look once that is set up

wow, i'm so glad i decided to look at the posts tonight and saw this thread, even though its been hard to read because i've been up going on 40 hours now, lol. i know absolutely nothing about programming, sadly, but it sounds like you're programming a version of rebellion from scratch just based on it? wish i would have gone into computer science, i would have tried something like this a decade ago. new compute is coming tomorrow, i just got a shipping confirmation. pentium 3.2ghz, 6gigs of ram, terabyte hard drive, windows 7 (which i was going to multiboot, but if you have this working in 7, might not have to, but will anyway for other older games) vid card is integrated, but at least it is HD, can always put another ine in, have the extra PCI slots. and gonna hook it up to my 32" wide screen hd lcd tv that i've been running this crap vista laptop off for years. not top of the line, but it was cheap for what i'm getting, so can't complain. can't wait to set it up and check out your delta demo build, almost want to stay up, but i'm falling over right now and my new system will come faster if i sleep til then, haha. while waiting the last week, i've started doing some researching. was going to start my own mod for rebellion, probably still will at some point. definitely want to go by the new atlas maps out, set up the correct regions, sectors and systems. i'm getting my bearings back on info about the galaxy, its history, characters, military units and ships, so will be starting to build an information archive about things like that for encyclopedia entries. don't know too much about modelling, and don't have the money for 3dsmax, but getting together those resourses too, cheap or free programs to at least edit, texture, and convert models. not really an artist either, but i can find pics on the web or capture them and get them with the right palletes and resulution for the different came pictures. can get some vid clips out of movies, maybe record some audio. was going to be doing those things anyway for my own TC. hope when you're done coding this, they'll be a program like rebed or be able to use some easy utilities to mod it too. sounds like you're doing a great job, really can't wait to see it. if you're programming this the way i think, you should be able to make this not only so much better in terms of the intelligence of the gameplay and AI, and some better graphics, which are nice, but nobody here has played rebellion for the last 14 years just for the graphics, lol. but also make it on a grander scale. maybe not in terms of thousands upon thousands of ships going into a tactical battle (which would be cool every once in a while, especialy with better control over the fleets) but 1.5-2x the amount of characters to control, small galaxy of 20 sectors, large of 35, huge of 50, more specialized special forces and fighter types and ground defense and assault troops, manufacturing and and defensive facilities. how cool would it be to have two sets of mines refineries. have to research new more efficient types that would increase your materials and rate of collecting them and purifying them and give more maintenance to build your bigger units as you research those too? and of course, more ships, from millenium falcons and lambda shuttles and slave Is to death start IIs, other battle stations, eclipses with superlasers, and viscount star defenders. and then there's teh dream, also being able to control ground forces in a tactical battle, but i think that's one wish we're never going to get, the game the way it should have been from the start, at least not from lusacarts. damn, i really ramble when i'm sleep deprives. anyway, i'm excited to check it out and give you feedback. at any point that the little skills that i have, besides ideas, cause i guess i already gave you some of those, would come in handy for you, just let me know whatever i can do. right now, i need sleepy. you're awesome for doing this slocket, keep up the good work

yeah, i haven't seen the cardspace thing in a while. might be in one of the tcs around and i just haven't found it again yet. it is harder, but i was well on my way of editing the encyclopedia entries in reshack a couple years agao. just have to get used to the hex coding. its a pain in the ass, but i am a masochist, and is nice when you get it right. the burns is one thing i didn't get to before, and wasnt' looking forward to. if you don't change them, do they just keep the same ones and look all goofy? probably one of the last things i'll get to again, think i'll start like i did before, change the map, the sectors, systems, planet pics, the encyclopedia entries for the characters and facilities and special forces and troops, then fighters, and then tackle the modelling and changing the in game ship pics and all that entails. oh good lord i have a long road ahead, but rebellion and working out are pretty much my rehab after giving up some things for new years, lol

don't know if you spent the time to insert all of them from one program to the other. this post is a couple years old. i think from one tc to another, or if you just want to have them at your disposal if you like them, zip the parts of of each model from the tc's that you like and change the file extensions to rmd. keep them in an archive and you can swap them out quick and easy whenever you want eith the model importer. what i plan to do as i am starting a new tc myself. shame so many of the models that were on here previously have vanished though, along with the tutorials. guess i'm gonna have to relearn how to do everything again without them, unless someone has saved copies of them and could send them to me jasonlaviolette2012@yahoo.com

i know, i know, sometimes i babble when i'm bored and especially when sleep deprived

gencores are the only way to stop invasions, but that won't stop blockades or bombardments, and depending on the strenth of the fleet, orbital and even land based facilities could be destroyed with a high bombardment factor. ion cannons do lower bombardment, because they disable some of the ships in the fleet, theoretically. lnr cannons can rip through and even destroy ships if they bombard. try using rebed to make these kinds of structures even stronger. ion cannon's don't do anything to invading troops. i guess they could stop at-ats from functioning, but they can't hurt pople. they do, however, fire on blockading ships when you're trying to move troops, characters, and special forces off the blockaded planet, so most of them will get through. this feature of the ion cannon does make it useful, still maybe not as useful as the lnr, but its nice to be able to move troops and personnel off a planet and have the ion cannon there to help get them out of harms way. lnr series cannons do fire on assaulting forces, you might need troops there to help with that too. put a general in command and you'll see a difference there too. not only does a general help with your troops, but i think it also helps with yoru defensive facilities as well. make things easy on yourself though. if ou have a planet that only has one ion cannon or one lnr, either build some gencores and some more defenses and protect that planet with the best troops and personel if its going to be a place or manufacturing or research. if its going to be filled with mines and refineries, my advise is not to defend it at all. do have a base in each sector with fighters and a fleet and lots of troops and characters and special forces though. if the enemy invades an undefended planet, its actually easier to get it back. you can do espionage and sabotage, in fact you'll have to sabotage any defensive facilites if youhad some there when the enemy took it, or risk losing your own troops and personnel in retaking it, which is a waste. just one little capitol ship with some turbolaser cannons can mosey on over and take out 6 garrison troops if they didn't leave a fleet or fighters there to defend it. which they usually just leave the troops because the AI is dumb. with no ion cannon or lnr, its in no danger and can easily blow the hell out of the garrison troops, usually without much collateral damage. little trick, change the bombardment resistance numbers of your mining and refining facilities, if they survive while you destroy the enemy troops from orbit, you'll not lose any of the support that planet or any other in the system have for you, when you liberate it, you might sway others to neutral, your side, or start uprisings. its always fun when your enemy has to deal with those pain in the butt situations while you can put your strategy to use without much interference for a while. in short though, either thoroughly defend important planetswith defensive facilities, troops, fleets, fighters, and personnel, your headquarters, of course, and planets with large manufacturing complexes. even if your fleet gets driven away by a bigger fleet, your personnel, sheilds, troops, and defensive facilites will keep it yours. if they stay in blockade, and halt your production, put a counter attack fleet together, or have the characters and special forces there to pick off the blockading fleet ship by ship. they'll be able to do this if the defensive facilites are there to keep the planet under your control, safe from invading troops, and your base will be back to manufacturing what you want it to in no time. as for the planets under your control that only provide you with materials and maintenence points, leave them completely undefended and just have a ship or small bombardment fleet somewhere in the sector to blow the garrison troops to hell and liberate that planet back to your side. if not, uprisings and sabotage are the way to go, which is a bit of fun, but does take longer and things can change on the planet if you're sabotaging from another planet, so keep doing espionage too. i like to keep my special forces in a fleet most of the time anyway, that way, you can do sabotage right from orbit, or from the most nearby neutral or loyal planet if they did leave a fleet or fighters that can fend you off, it takes much less time. playing as the rebels, i dont' use troops much, especially for invasion, more for inhabiting the outer rim. first of all, they're pretty weak and are better at defending against sabotage and espionage. mon cal have some bombardment strength, but you don't have real tough troops til wookiees. so definitely keep your troops and manufacturing capabilities safe from the enemy with shields and kdy and lnr facilities. as the empire, use yoru stormtroopers to invade and garrison planets by force they way the empire would, its fun, but you'll lose too many in a short time if you do it just willy nilly. fun thing to do, you can set up coruscant and the rebel base with as many facilities as you want. so, instead of searching for that best planet to make your main base, you can have it already with 20 or more energy slots if you change that in rebed. so use rebed to give your home base lots of energy, hopefully some mines and refineries, and lots of defensive facilites. you can always scrap them in favor or new ones or other material/maintenance and manufacturing faciliteis. but you will want a plethora of shields and some kdy and lnr II installations around too, so its nice to have a home base with 20-30 energy slots that will be that much tougher for your enemy to take

yeah, you can change the cards without using rebed, its just a long process. pretty much you're be making your own cards. but, that's what i do when i edit rebellion, come up with my own characters and cards, facilities and fighters and ships too. also, if you use resource hacker instead of rebed to do things, you can have the encyclopedia entries be as long as you want, if i remember correctly. you will eventualy need to do a full install and use rebed to change character and unit values, but if you dont' mind doing things the long way or would enjoy creating your own cards and other things to mod the game the way you like, go for it. it does take a long time, but its fun and satisfying as well. one fun thing you can do with resource hacker, is change the names of leadership positions too. you need to use rebed to change the ablity to become a certain type of leader, but, for example, you can set han as an admiral, commander, or general, and use reshack to make it say "captain solo" for each of them. or "commander skywalker" no matter what leadership position he is set at. this is pretty cool in terms of ranks throughout the game, because even though you an only set them as admirals for fleets, commanders for fighters, and generals for troops, you can set any character to have the abilities you want, set thier skill levels at the different skills, and have grand admirals, admirals, commanders, captains, generals, majors, whatever you want. at least that's what it will say in the game. also, as the game progresses, and experience leads to higher skill points, you can go back into reshack and change them, so captain peitt can get promoted to admiral piett, for example. granted its just a name and they still do the same job when you set them in command, but its cool to have certain ranks and promote them over time if you wish. when it comes to research, you can use rebed to change the research values of units and facilities. you can also change character values to have as many people or not to have the abilities to do certain research. you can always just not do research missions too, you'll eventually make research progress anyway, but it will take a very long time to complete it all. one thing that not many people touch on, or maybe even know, is that the number of facilites that you have help research along. that is, the number of consctuction yards under your control each contribute a bit to facility research, training facilites to troops, and shipyards to ship research. i think this is just part of the base code to the game and i'm not sure you could even find or edit the way this works in reshacker. do the full install and play around with setting the research numbers for units and facilities, then, even with people having successful missions alwaysmaking progress (which they should) it can take longer to research things. the AI is all about the numbers. if you change ship cards and models (of even if you don't) you'll have to fool around with the numbers to give yourself a challenge playing aganist the computers. i know there's a thing around here to even get the empire to build death stars, but just in general, set all the research and abilities and construction and maintenance costs of units and facilities, then make two different rebed files, one with things reduced for the empire, and one reduced for the alliance, so you can change it depending on what side you want to play. there's no way of getting around the computer being a moron, but with cut down construction and maintenance costs, and boosted skills for characters and even special forces and military units within the game, it will be much more of a challenge, just because the ai will do a better and faster and easier job of being an idiot, lol. it works though, fiddle with the numbers, put them too low and you'll see huge fleets with such strength and characters and units with skills in the game that it will be hard to complete any missions and you'll be running from one side while trying to keep a foothold in the galaxy. but, with all those foils, lukes jedi rating and skills will soar in no time just fool around until you find the challenge level that's good for you. like i siad, the ai is stupid, but it will be able to build bigger better and faster than you with the right settings and hence make your game much more difficult for you.

okay, been away from this site and rebellion for quite a while now. been working off a crappy vista laptop. was just looking into a new pc, most available with win7 home premium, so no virtual xp mode. don't feel like shelling out for vmware just for the player that only has a 30 day trial if dowloaded for free. after reading this whole thread, sounds like there are still some problems after going through all the work around, like having to sit through that damn driod intro and having problems with rebed and modding even if someone gets rebellion to play perfectly on win7 or a virtual OS. used to play rebellion A LOT and had my own tc in the works. i'm looking to start over again. i built three of my own systems starting with win95, win98, and winxp home, and still have all the disks. when i built my xp system, i had it multiboot optioned with 95 and 98 as well, to play some of my really old games that didn't even want to play on xp. i did have some problems with peripherals and drivers but just disabled thier ports and such depending which os i wanted to use. pain in the butt to go into bios all the time to shut down usb ports and such, but once you learn your bios, its easy. so, with all the problems i've read about, and having found a great how to page on howtogeek.com, am i safe in assuming that if i don't want to have any problems running rebellion on a win7 system, and also to use rebed and all the other modding and old modelling software that i was used to years ago without any of the problems described in this long thread, my best bet would be to partition what is sure to be my terabyte hard drive and install at least winxp home if not an even older version or two and dedicate it to rebellion for years to come? multi boot seems pretty easy on win7, not much different than xp except for needing a free program to set up the multiboot screen after the older version bootlogger overwrites win7's. i just want to be able to play bug free, full screen, and get started eventually on another total conversion of my own at some point. think i'm on the right track just setting up my win7 home premium to multiboot into my older operating systems for my ancient games, or think it's worth it to upgrade to win7 pro or ult and shell out the cash for a good virtual player to switch back into older win versions. if i'm playing rebellion, i don't need any of the abilities of win7, just need rebellion to work right, have a browser to come onto this sight and do star wars reasearch, and have enough hard drive space for lots of game saves, picture, video, and model archives, and programs that i need to mod the game without all the bugs everybody else seems to be having. opinions very welcome, thanks everybody

that's friggin awesome. i've done what you did before, just i let luke stay there and be beaten. never thought of sending him somewhere. so it actually showed up in a sector on the galaxy map? could you see him there in the personel window of degobah, and could you see resourses and facilities?. did you just quit the game or did the empire become aware of degobah and came there and captured that planet and luke for you to lose the game? guess you had no other units or personnel at that point, regardless of if you let it play out to lose or just closed the game. how fantastic would it be if you still had some semblings of a fleet left and they also flet to degobah along with luke, especially if your headquarters was enroute to your last planet as the previous one then the other were seized by the empire. a few troop, couple ships and fighters, headquarters, and all your personnel flee do degobah. wow, that might actually be a really fun way to try to come back after that, one planet and only personnel and a few military units and your headquarters on degobah, then try to reclaim all other 200 systems and beat the odds of a huge imperial power being overthrown by what truly would be a rag tag bunch of rebels now that's tough AI and sounds like a hell of a time i'm definitely going to have to try to set that up at some point. damn, its so sad that you didn't put the game clock back to slow and make a save file before sending luke on that mission. now THAT would have been amazing, being able to spread that save file around so everybody could see degobah show up and try to play the game from there on. mmmmm, recruiting everybody, stockpiling a bunch of ships, fighters, troops, special forces, having all research done, the whole large galaxy opened up and in green while degobah shows up as the last hope of the rebel alliance. everything enroute across the galaxy and last two planets taken by the empire. then taking the whole galaxy back over and winning the game. i'm drooling right now...