hello, i got this enabled but this ship set is not appearing? even when i try to make a custom race

"Now, after thirty years of constant warfare, our alliances have broken down. The Coalition's split between those who would withdraw, and those who would lash out."

Version 2.1 has now been released, introducing a couple of extra ship hulls and allowing Satellites to be used with the shipset's station hulls.

Hey Dalo, I'm noticing some weird flickering on some of the flat areas on the new ships. I've seen it before with duplicated faces at the same coordinates. I don't know if that's happening here but it might be worth checking into.

"Desperate, and unable to mount a resistance on their own, many worlds ceded their authority, transforming the Order into the Trader Emergency Coalition. United under a single banner, we finally stood a fighting chance - our vast commercial fleet was slowly retooled into a shield against the alien invaders."

Version 2.0 of the 'Trader Emergency Coalition' shipset has now been released. Remember to download dolynick's DOF shipset support library in order to continue using the shipset.

The update isn't happening after all... the models, even the ones already in the shipset, are falling apart, and if I fix one problem, a worse one pops in to take its place... this is impossible. ;(

Gah, I'll update the textures anyway... and add a few models I'm reasonably sure I have Rebellion versions of... watching my comparison screenshots is driving me nuts, and I'd feel silly about putting out a patch just for the texture updates (which is why I didn't want to do anything until I had all the models).

Okay, I lied, there is no Blender plugin or a new ETA... most wasteful April Fools Day hoax I've seen, apparently. :(

A taste of things to come... and a comparison with the current ships:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=657279196
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=657279229

HAH! Brilliant! How'd I miss this before?!

There's a Blender plugin that'll let me convert this stuff! :D

ETA has just shifted from 'when hell freezes over' to 'up to a few months'.

If anyone has the tools and the will to convert a bunch of Sins models into a more common format like .obj or .x or .fbx or something... that'd be great.

Speaking of which, my update has been somewhat sidetracked by the discovery that the quantity and quality of the new models is quite variable. Some are missing, others are inferior to the ones I've already got (lower polycount)... my guess is that some of them predate Rebellion.

lol SR2 made me realize Sins wanted to be this game so bad. sins was great but the forced chokepoints and the overall static fights were boring to me good models though 10/10

Posted an update.

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/discussion/362885493/485624040226822639/

Good to hear there is progess on this Dalo. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you on my offer to help. I ended up rather side-tracked with some of my own modding projects.

*walks in with megaphone* Can I have everyone's attention, please?

I have just received a substantial amount of SOASE models converted to .xsi (should be just about every model for each of the major races, based on my quick glance) and a tool with which to correctly extract .dds textures. The results are these:

1. This shipset and the Advent one will be overhauled with better textures and models, as well as a bunch of models that weren't in Prometeu's shipset. (Buckenfuzz, your wish for an Ankylon is coming true! :P)

2. There's a Vasari shipset on the way with all the bells and whistles these two are getting! :D

No timeline currently exists for any of these updates, as I still have a substantial amount of converting to do before model and texture alike become usable in SR2, but it is coming nonetheless. I'll announce these updates again as they near release.

Also, the sandbox does indeed apply two different empire colors. One empire is orange, another is cyan. Or teal. Something like that.

Heh, by applying white, you'd simultaneously fill it with team color (empire color, actually - curse Sins' inaccurate naming scheme! xD), engine lights and window lights. Not a pretty (or consistent) thing, and one that I have managed to conjure up on several occasions before I started using flat black for my mask maps.

As for Texture5, the skybox is there for skybox reflection. It's probably using sphere mapping instead of working with the model's UV maps, because the shape of the skybox would only ever match the model's shape (and thus, achieve the intended effect) if the model is a perfect sphere.

Ah. I'm just using a browser session of steam since I'm not at my home desktop so the client isn't logged in.

You are probably right about Tex6. It's possible that the Sandbox doesn't apply two team colors for ally vs enemy and that's why I didn't catch it. I figured the channels were doing something there but by using white in the composite, I should have filled all channels anyways (and ended up with team color as well as result).

Tex5 being skybox would explain the utter weirdness I ran into there.

Isn't masks Texture6, though? Texture5 is the skybox. In any case, you could consult jonmicheelsen - if he has enough spare time, he'll probably give you any info you need to figure out what's wrong.

As for hiding in plain sight, I'm commenting on how Steam says you're offline when you're clearly posting replies to my comments in real time. :P

I tried the green channel with a section overlay of the of the color map and it did not go into effect on the ship in the same coordinates as the UV Map would say. Like I said, it was really weird. If the coordinates had lined up, I'd have been fine but they didn't and that was kind of baffling.

Lightmaps have been working just fine for me using Texture6 instead of the masks Texture5.

(uh... Not sure I get the hiding in plain sight comment)

I use Photoshop to edit textures but GIMP is open source and should allow editing of the channels if you need something to do it with.

Uh, team color is the green channel of the mask map. Engines are blue, and window lights are red. (Assuming I didn't get those two backwards - but it's quite obvious if you look at the mask texture for the Gevron set.)

Also, hiding in plain sight, are we? ;P

Well, the -cl textures seem to have been used in Prometeu's shipset, seeing as they were still using their original names. (Just converted into .bmp or .jpg, not sure which.)

As for the -da textures, there's an article on the SOASE wiki with all the information either one of us needs for that, and the third texture you didn't mention contains the normals.

The bigger questions are whether the SC2 editor will be kind enough to help me out one more time, and whether I have anything to separate the channels with once I have the textures. I'll take a look at that.

Further to the previous post:

Team color map is also in there. I believe it may have been the alpha channel of the color map.

I recently did some playing around with the team map texture for SR2 though and something is very strange about it. It doesn't seem to work in the same way as other UV map layers. That or somehow I went totally wrong but I tried a couple times in different ways and got the same results. You may have to just settle for no team color map for now. At least until someone figures it out.

Well, I could start by maybe giving you a tip you might not know about already:

If you can open the original .dds textures you can at least get some of the work out of the way now. The -cl textures are the color maps and pretty standard. The -da are used as a container for the specular, reflective/gloss, light and bloom maps.

They are separated into the channels of the texture, red being one, green being another, etc. From memory I don't recall which is exactly which (I'd have to do a little digging since it's been a while since I was SoaSE modding). I believe red is specular, blue is reflective, green is light and alpha is bloom but I could be mistaken.

Once you split those out, all you'd need is the .obj conversion and it should just work.

I think I don't have to add my own 'that'd be great!' to say that that'd be appreciated by at least one person. :D

[quote]I would, but your 'if there is one' is far too appropriate. I only got the Advent and TEC sets - if I were porting directly from SOASE, I'd probably have Vasari as well as a broader Advent/TEC variety, but seeing as my tools can't open .mesh files... [/quote]

That would explain why the ships look a little off/different from what I remember from SoaSE. I have all the tools to do direct conversions from the original .mesh models and DDS textures. Maybe one of these days when I have my own workload under control I can help you out with this. It should be possible to pull near 100% faithful conversions of the originals with a little work.

Well if you ever come across an Ankylon hull with the right file type, I'd appreciate it greatly if you added it to the mod!

Yeah, pretty much.

Ohhh! Alright now I really understand lol. So whatever file format the TEC and Advent files were in when ported to SE5, also made it easy to port them to SR2? Right, so that also means you were stuck with whatever hulls this Prometeu specifically wanted. I see I see.

(Continued from previous post)

--> Because SE5 uses fairly common (or even obsolete as far as computer games are concerned by now, depending on the format?) formats such as .x (and .bmp, .png or .jpg for textures), and because Prometeu's TEC and Advent shipsets don't need me to merge the textures or the corresponding models' UV maps, they're suitable candidates for porting, and their high quality also helps convince me to work on them
--> I make the shipset
--> People don't understand why I can't port more

To be honest, though, the absence of certain hulls isn't the only thing that's 'wrong' about my shipsets. :P

It's not at all weird if you remember how the models got to me.

--> Prometeu, who evidently has the professional tools and the plugin required to access .mesh files, as well as the tools needed to mess with .dds files, decides to make Space Empires 5 shipsets for the TEC and Advent
--> SE5 doesn't require as many hulls as SOASE has to offer
--> Prometeu acts accordingly, picking whatever models he feels are most suitable and converting them
--> I get Prometeu's shipset pack, hoping to get a bunch of new Stargate stuff to play SE5 with (didn't get a lot of that, sadly)
--> At some point, I decide to port shipsets left and right from any science fiction franchise/game I'm fond of and capable of porting from

(Continued in next post)

I understand, though I dont know much about texture/mesh files. Thats seems weird though. That the Ragnarov's files are easily accessible/modifiable and the Ankylon's are not, as well as the Vasari's. Interesting. Thanks for the mod anyway, its awesome!

The answer is two comments below:

"I would, but your 'if there is one' is far too appropriate. I only got the Advent and TEC sets - if I were porting directly from SOASE, I'd probably have Vasari as well as a broader Advent/TEC variety, but seeing as my tools can't open .mesh files..."

In other words, while I do have SOASE, I don't have any tools capable of opening its model files directly. Last I heard, there was no Blender or MilkShape plugin for the job.

Awesome shipset, use it evertime I play! On\ a side note though just wondering why the Ragnarov titan model was included but not Ankylon titan?

Okay then, thanks! Still love the other sets!

I would, but your 'if there is one' is far too appropriate. I only got the Advent and TEC sets - if I were porting directly from SOASE, I'd probably have Vasari as well as a broader Advent/TEC variety, but seeing as my tools can't open .mesh files...

Out of polite curiosity, are you planning to port the Vasari shipset, if there is one?

No s***, Sherlock. :P

Seriously, though, they ARE the best (in terms of model/texture quality) sets I've ported, and they're likely to stay that way, so I'm hoping that day never comes.

community created content isn't the responsibility of the game owners, only the modder, if they send a cease and desist letter take the mod down lol.

Love it dude that's so cool !

had to paste 2 comments... turns out character limit... oops lol.

your fine im sure im still curious why he removed them lol so maybe he was just worried... i guess i could always ask but i only come here and comment before bed so ill just forget anyway lol. no worries keep up the good work. if i ever get the game ill have to be sure to pick this mod up i really loved playing as the tec and then i can play the nice tec ships with my favriot mode of ftl lol

i dont think it would bother them. im pretty sure its technicly possible since they created the tec so they probably own the rights to the ship designs and stuff so they most likely have all legal rights to do something. but people make star trek, star wars, halo, mass effect, star craft, ect of scifi ships into shipsets and as far as ik no ones ever really came to them and said hey u better cut that out or we will sue. you shouldnt catch any flakk for it no one else seems to ever if anything if i was the sins people i would see it as an honor that someone wanted to use our ships even in another game. it means they are most likely fans of our game and wanted the ships in their other games. or something like that lol.

Eh, what you say isn't impossible. I hope not, though; these sets are probably among the best I've ported (though I may need to work on the scaling a bit) so far.

ik i read that lol. i thought maybe he didnt have a payed for membership there so maybe they only let you store files there temporarily. so he was like get it now before the time runs out. he could just reupload them tho but didnt think of it at that time. or maybe he accendtly deleted them idk what happend lol.

am curious as to why now tho lol. my guess is worried for copywrite infringment maybe idk.

Actually, sithalo, they weren't auto-removed by the site. Prometeu himself announced even before he uploaded them that they'd only be up for about a week or so.

i thought they maybe went down like only lasted so long before the site auto removed them lol. i wouldnt really use them anyway probably but i like having mod files becuase they might get removed and ull never see them again. Like the HW2 Engine Trail mod. looked really cool but only found it after all the links where down... luckily someone longer after i commented there said they had the files from when they dled and would email them to me. but i sorta learned then that mods can go away and you wont beable to get them back. same thing happend with skyrim mod. uninstalled and deleted all my mods to reinstall them from scratch with their updates and a few of them where removed from the nexus.

sorry lol

Advent shipset incoming within the next 60-70 minutes!

Yeah, being the first person to port shipsets from other games was not a wise idea. xD

You have created Monsters it seems. Haha

Heh, I was afraid you'd take it like them. I fully support your decision, though. :)