EvilleJedi

These impressions are based on playing the demo through, modding it and settling on values that fixed what I felt could be fixed with very little effort and a lot of gain to both visual elements and general playability fx get rid of the flat shockwave effects in space, you should be doing everything possible to make space combat look 3d, make them spherical or something, but don't make it look like saranwrap over a toilet ditch the blue explosions for ship death, they can be used for missiles (like the baradium charges) when a ship blows up, don't make the chunks fall down always, make them float randomly in any direction, if it will impact the camera, then blow the piece up early, this will heighten the 3d effect that is lacking hopefully the current explosions are placeholders, they don't have the awesome chunkyness that we see in the movies (ISD blowing up in ROTJ, TF DCS in TPM) nor do they glow like in other scifi games, honestly the effect needs transition work into the heat effect (which should be more subtle, it will look better if its subdued) the effecct just feels incomplete and needs more bulk and glow along with better timing with the smoke, debris and heat effect the sprites generated during explosions for small debris at first glance look like people, make the pieces darker so they stand out against the bright explosion, it will make the exploision feel like it is more powerful make lasers skinnier (0.8 wide by 24 long for large laser) and give them a velocity of around 100, this looks much much closer to the movies, where the projectiles cross kms in a few frames, it shouldn't effect balance at all and it was excellent seeing an AT-AT peg tanks and they occasionally instantly explode (it almost feels like the movies were the scene jumps to cut in the pyrotechnics reel) consider a hi res texture pack and uncompressed normal maps for those with more texture memory (if nothing else, pimp the ISD and mon cal with high res textures) there is not a lot of depth in the crenulations on the ISD, it needs more camera/interface do anything you can to reduce the clunkyness of the interface art (shave pixels), make parts of it collapsible or something, I find myself toggling it/zooming out just to see what is on the bottom of the screen alot returning to the close in camera always seems to reset the angle, its confusing, save the angle when the overview map is entered and return to it, i've consistantly ordered my units off screen and had to start issuing move orders strictly through the minimap or zoomed out view (kudos on that large scale view) there is a player driven problem with the cinematic camera, usually when a player would want to watch, they are too busy giving orders, it is easy to remedy this by lengthening the battles, giving players time to watch the results (making the cinematic camera something they will more likely use) make alt-click focus/ track on a target for rotation and recenter the camera, easy fix, makes it infinately more controlable instead of rotating around a void and missing your target and having to scroll combine that with the cinematic camera (move the camera view point to different views around the user specified target, keeping the target at least partially in the frame) provide a way to cancel a fleet move or a invasion order (especially a orbit to ground action, that should be more easily recallable, I sent the wrong army and then had to enter in and retreat, wasting time) the subsystem targetting icons are too easily clicked, it is hard to simply tell a ship to attack a star destroyer, instead they try to hit a subsystem, I would say make subsystem targetting automatic in the AI balance and gameplay slow space unit speeds down when not in boost, ships have no feeling of mass to them, placing an ISD at a speed of .8 and a 50% lower turn rate and acceleration gives it a greater presence, smaller craft like gunships can retain thier relative speed and manuverability and boost can remain high for straight line runs smooth out turning and slow it down for bigger ships, they have turrets for a reason, right now a ship jerks slightly when it turns or paths (not sure which) put a rotational acceleration on to smooth out any movements make torpedos effect shields, but able to hit subsystems through shields, right now torpedos are infinately powerful and there is no point in building capital ships, make them devastating with shields down though. increase range as much as possible, turbolaser ranges of 10000 , medium lasers of 7000 and light of 5000 with AI tweaks works well, ships should still manuver close, but open up at long range initially increase shielding 6x or 7x, and ISD with 35000 shields (recharge of 500 a second) and 20000 hull was very imposing, subsystem damage was necessary and strategy was needed to manuver around its damaged flanks (coupled with the longer weapons range) mon cals get more sheilding and less hull. obviously damage rates have to be adjusted, 50 for a turbolaser, 25 for a heavy laser, 17 for medium and 10 for light worked no real changes need to be made to hull values, though boosting them on larger ships helps land unit speeds and health seem fine speeder bikes need to zip around more and troops need to actively move around rather than act like they are at waterloo (think endor with the rebels, imps can have lines, rebels need to visually move around) vehicle ranges should be increased a bit, probably 2x, while also moving the camera out about 25% at max zoom before moving to the first overhead stage, in staging areas the camera is too tight and I found myself not using the close camera much (again not watching the battle because I was playing it) units won't pile up as much either, making battles easier to contol abilities like overcharge weapons, boost, concentrate fire feel like they should be on all ships modding support issues: need luac for 5.1 (though it may be 5.0, I know a decompiler is an issue because of chunks) XML needs to be broken up better, there are files like constants xml and hardpoints xml that have so many different values that debugging is going to be an absolute nightmare. one file per unit/clones, with folders seperating them by category would be fine how are glow/emission calculated, the diffuse map only has a stripe channel in alpha for skirmish I believe (unless you are masking and doing additive blending? net result? battles take a bit longer, positioning plays a more important role as does taking out subsystems and more importantly the player will watch the battle unfold

http://eaw.swrebellion.com/wiki/ Please use this to collaboratively document the XML and LUA code, as well as provide a tool list and link list to tutorials and relavent posts

Config.meg and handy notepad if its like other ('westwood' games it should just be able to be edited like config.ini) Follow this: http://pff.swrebellion.com/index.php?topic=1905.0

TEXT_UNIT_JEDI_CRUISER Tartan_Patrol_Cruiser Broadside_Class_Cruiser Star_Destroyer Victory_Destroyer TIE_Bomber NV_JEDICRUISER.ALO 0.999 1.2 30 3200 650 3200 40 3000 500 Space Frigate 2.2 0.7 0.2 5 Yes 2.0 .1 .1 -90 Armor_Nebulon_B 1.6 400 -30 35.0 1.5 Empire,Rebel,Pirates Yes No frigate 3 yes no 0 10 8 1 1800 No 8 DUMMY_STARSHIP, SELECTABLE, POWERED, SHIELDED ABILITY_COUNTDOWN, SIMPLE_SPACE_LOCOMOTOR, TARGETING, REVEAL, HIDE_WHEN_FOGGED, UNIT_AI, ASTEROID_FIELD_DAMAGE, ION_STUN_EFFECT, NEBULA 1200.0 0.24 1000.0 Yes Large_Explosion_Space Small_Damage_Space HP_Jedi_Cruiser_Shield_Gen, HP_Jedi_Cruiser_Engines, HP_Jedi_Cruiser_FL, HP_Jedi_Cruiser_FR, HP_Jedi_Cruiser_ML, HP_Jedi_Cruiser_MR, HP_Jedi_Cruiser_BL, HP_Jedi_Cruiser_BR Frigate | AntiCorvette i_button_jedi_cruiser.tga yes True RHD_Unit_Canceled Unit_Acclamator_Moving_Engine_Loop Unit_Select_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Move_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Fleet_Move_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Attack_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Guard_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Stop_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Barrage_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Asteroids_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Nebula_Jedi_Cruiser HARD_POINT_WEAPON_LASER, Unit_HP_LASER_Jedi_Cruiser HARD_POINT_WEAPON_MISSILE, Unit_HP_MISSILE_Jedi_Cruiser HARD_POINT_WEAPON_TORPEDO, Unit_HP_TORP_Jedi_Cruiser HARD_POINT_WEAPON_ION_CANNON, Unit_HP_ION_Jedi_Cruiser HARD_POINT_SHIELD_GENERATOR, Unit_HP_SHIELDS_Jedi_Cruiser HARD_POINT_ENGINE, Unit_HP_ENGINES_Jedi_Cruiser HARD_POINT_GRAVITY_WELL, Unit_HP_GRAV_Jedi_Cruiser Unit_Acclamator_Idle_Engine_Loop Unit_Acclamator_Moving_Engine_Loop Unit_Acclamator_Cinematic_Engine_Loop Unit_Cruiser_Death_SFX Yes Yes 1.0 1.0 1000.0 0.0 400.0 5.0 Frigate Damage_Normal, Jedi_Cruiser_Death_Clone 3.0 5.0 5.0 0.5 TEXT_TOOLTIP_VENETOR TEXT_ENCYCLOPEDIA_CLASS_FRIGATE 12000 DEFEND 25 60 WEAPON_DELAY_MULTIPLIER, 1.0f SHIELD_REGEN_MULTIPLIER, 1.0f SHIELD_REGEN_INTERVAL_MULTIPLIER, 0.10f ENERGY_REGEN_INTERVAL_MULTIPLIER, 0.10f ENERGY_REGEN_MULTIPLIER, 3.0f SPEED_MULTIPLIER, 0.8f Unit_Defend_Assault_Frigate

yay another game that may have modding be horribly crippled by the publishers 'good intentions(IE content control and $$$)' modding will be entirely dependant on what level of lua stubs are put in the game, this could be the same thing that happened in homeworld2, huge team support for a week and then here's hoping

http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/AFMK2.jpg

any concept of warlords in EAW is highly dependant on the flexibility of an unreleased SDK, warlords for EAW is essentially vaporware until I decide that there is sufficient flexibility in the engine, hence why I have thrown my support to multiple mods that intrest me this entire thread spam is essentially about control and posturing for position seriously, get over yourselves it's annoying oh wait, I guess I should comment on the topic... what really needs to happen is that the EAWnexus framework needs to be expanded, off the shelf solutions like gallery and blogs (choose your poison) would significantly expand the initial development and allow the mod teams more flexibility. mediawiki(or other poison) as an overall information source is essential for organizing information on modding ESPECIALLY since EAW will have lua and XML(don't think for a second that we will get intelligently commented/documented code, LA is not paying for it). Igor also brought to my attention TRAC, which provides both versioning, integration with cvs, and bug tracking. I don't like rigidly structured organizations either, that is why I think an effort like NMA should be more focused on getting people up to speed, pointing them in the right direction and setting up the tools and information they need to get to work, as well as solving issues that benefit everyone. Additionally the collaborative aspect of eaw nexus needs to be exploited to keep people interested(OMG how do I do this!!!? QUIT) and new people coming in by letting content creators work on actual content rather than blindly fight with the vaguities that plague all development(for those of you that have ever seriously modded without or limited dev tool support, you can understand). NMA needs to be more of a support organization than anything else and EAW nexus needs to be more than a forum/showcase and provide real collaborative tools to the mods that it supports. I sincerely hope that the distinction between EAW:nexus and NMA goes away and we simply become the single central source for all EAW development and modding information

http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/tartantex1.jpg http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/tartantex2.jpg http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/bstex.jpg http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/bstex2.jpg

or just grab the 0.5 test that has all the ships

tartan, didn't change much, just made it a bit sleeker http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/tartan1.jpg http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/tartan2.jpg

yeah I'm trying to fix their impressionistic charicature, similarly the broadside and the tartan look like they are in a funhouse mirror, strangely though the normal ships look proportional I don't doubt the radiator theory, but they seem to be structured to also provide some sort of stability in atmosphere (imagine this pogo stick landing?)

problem with that is then its a KDY ship that we haven't seen and the design just doesn't fit in the neb-b, neb-b2, corona line, I'm willing to write it off as some sort of freighter conversion, mainly because we don't have many other easily obtainable heavy warship hulls out there like we have the dreadnaughts, so either its a preclonewars-clonewars era ship that is cut down, or its a frieghter conversion.

its not from a dreadnaught, the MKII is from something we've never seen before this is the official assault frigate, from a dreadnaught, (though its significantly less modified then some assault frigates which sometimes remove more plating) a dreadnaught http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/dreadnaught.jpg modified into an Dodonna- class assault frigate http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/assaultfrigated.jpg one thing people have to realize is that a lot of star wars ships have multiple official references that may not look alike or at all, but the AF Mk II is definately new to EAW

maybe like 2 and a half hours by the time I got dinner and did some laundry, maybe a bit more

the Assault Frigate Mk II's design is so painful I propose a mod just to make it look better. Here's my take on it (note this is for warlords right now) http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/AFMK22.jpg http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/AFMK21.jpg http://warlords.swrebellion.com/albums/Development/AFMK23.jpg anyone else want to give it a shot? not only that, what ship did it come from ?!

these nefarious little devils? http://warlords.swrebellion.com/EWOK_ASSAULT/ sure, consider the mesh donated

wooo now I can annihilate people without a thought yay!

Quite literally the goal is to crush the EAW engine to do my bidding We'll see how well that works.

I'll just bring my two cents to the table for the fun of it 1) I believe what Cain is trying to do is centralize the 'backend process' having EAW forums hosted on SWR along with the nexus or whatever other sites means centralized administration and equal access to resources (we do have our own dedicated server if you don't realize that). I mean we can host anything we want and keep it on a seperate domain, to the point that unless you did a dns lookup you wouldn't know unless we wanted you to. I don't see any reason to not bring more sites into the fold. 2) just for all you people that are 'I'm competing with so and so' I do plan on open sourcing nearly 99% of warlords models for anyone to use ( I will have a few requirements though) so let the clusterfuck begin. quite honestly thats the absolute wrong attitude, everyone has their place and can be helpful, but you have to figure out where they actually do the most good and bickering over 'turf' will only lead to irrepairble rifts in the community. Honest disagreements about the direction of a mod are worthy canidates for seperate development paths (a reality mod vs a gameplay mod) but don't fool yourself into thinking that these things will get done overnight. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that it will be grueling, disappointing and has a huge probability of failure unless people are willing to commit to it. and quite honestly my personal goal with EAW is to make a mod good enough that it forces petroglyph to make something better, a lot better (even if EAW is good we all know that we want more, much more...)[/i]

For those of you that don't know what warlords is http://warlords.swrebellion.com/gallery/ Its for homeworld 2 etc etc ... Anyway 0.5 test 3 will be up within the next 8 hours (11/18/05) so check the chat channel for a link http://www.swrebellion.com/modules.php?name=Chat&gochat=1 This release cleans up a lot of issues, primarily 1)ship health(and some but not all shields) 2)ship manuverability and acceleration 3) adds a few ships like the watchkeeper and implacable 4) fixes a lot of sound and fx issues 5)adds back in the milita and rebs and vong, have fun ! This is a list of things that are not in this TEST release (which doesn't mean its not infinately more playable than release 1 or 2 of 0.5) 1) prices are not fixed yet, same with build times 2)AI values are not calculated 3) not all shields are updated 4)some specific stats haven't been tweaked yet 5)the KDY republic and star galleon are in, but untextured and hardpointed 6)the implacable and praetor along with a few other super caps have shield problems(IE shields need work) 7)era and tonnage settings are still disabled (so imps and rebs can build clone wars era stuff) 8)some icons are going to be missing 9)some scipted modes are disabled 10)some fx and or death animations may be mistimed/corrupted/too large 11)minor issues with sounds 12)some starting fleets/settings may crash, known to work with small/medium/large/unlimited caps, with reinforcemnts or facilities 13)vong AI my break if research is on 14)not all ships have had thier weapons tweaked to the new ion modelling, so they may be significantly overpowered

Glad to see direct developer feedback, pretty refreshing

not to mention that you need exponentially more energy to reach relatavistic speeds. the speed limit is not only the fraction of the exhaust speed and your efficiency, but also the ability to store the fuel, the reactor power needed to excite and accelerate it and the fun stuff like time dilation that happens when you go too fast too much also the acceleration rate is directly linked to the hull integrity and the inertial dampers ability to maintain a comfortable operating 'gravity'. anyway star destroyers can go at around 2000km/s at 'top speed' after an hour or so of acceleration (this is the 8 hour intra innersystem transit time claimed in many books) our current ion engines can only reach 40km/s after months of acceleration. a star destroyer is capable of much higher velocities simply because it has a larger emitter area and a phenomnally larger reactor (if you scale the ties engines emission rate/sq area by the reactor capacity of an SD and the emitter area you get some really big numbers) there is also something to be said for the energy density of large star ships (in the supernova+ range/ second) and the mass implyed that must be moved. but since star wars has repulsor lifts and gravity negating technologies I'm pretty confident that they can 'reduce their effective mass' by enough to overcome this.

I have two monitors and depending on the drivers HW2 crashes when having the second monitor enabled or is usually slower. If you are having problems with a specific race try creating a new in game profile. sometimes old settings are retained.

http://www.swrebellion.com/modules.php?name=Chat web based version, no effort required use /nick to change your name, no spaces also if tower.blazeirc.net doesn't work try penguin.blazeirc.net

heh I showed this to igor, its something I did in two seconds so I'll have to make a better quality version. http://warlords.swrebellion.com/junk/hutt2.png if it doesn't display, stop using IE anyway after talking it over with igor we are probably looking for a two color non-animated mascot that scales very well also I made these a while back (like a year ago) http://warlords.swrebellion.com/junk/webaddy.png http://warlords.swrebellion.com/junk/swrlogo.png