[MOD] The Crusaders! (wip...but pretty far along)

Gratuitous Forum Gratuitous Modding
1

Welcome to the new and improved Crusaders mod thread, my last one started off as an advice thread so i decided to make a newer thread that started from page one with the goodies instead of late page two XD

Cruisers Frigates Fighters (ships are top down order according to the pic below)
Shield , Leadership , Greed
Loyalty , Arrow , Coin
Sword , Helmet ,

The ships so far:

Things done:
1.) 3 cruisers, 3 frigates and 2 fighters
2.) Damage overlays and working damage in game for cruisers
3.) alpha’s properly deleted fully now (had some show through on the loyalty)
4.) Working text doc’s these ships are playable right now just as federation ships XD
5.) All ready have a back ground story line thought out :slight_smile:
Things to do:
1.) Repaint ships to white and red (Crusader colors)
2.) Damage overlays for Frigates (and fighters? is it even worth it?)
3.) Separate files to racial specific folders (I am sure there is more to it than that I mean it cant be that easy?)
4.) Work on text doc’s (idk what else there is to do i used the hull editor to place stuff so does it auto update the text doc?)
5.) Figure out how to repaint the damn ships!
6.) Fiddle with hulk .dds to have hulks properly represent the ships and not look so legoish XD

Anyone know an effective way to recolor these .dds i tried to paint them etc but lets say…yeah anyone ave any ways for me to repaint them i want them to be white/red, I mean blue/grey looks cool to but white/red is more fitting to their names and background story line.

Post your thoughts please be harsh i promise to only cry on the inside :stuck_out_tongue:

s.w.a.t.

2

Update:

Due to a problem with the recoloring and the damage overlays the recolored .dds have been scrapped sorry for those who liked them.

s.w.a.t

3

I never thought that with just mixing a couple of ships and erasing some parts it was possible to get so awesome ships… I’ll have to give it a try someday :smiley:

I don’t like much those new colours, more especificaly the tiny blue parts that are around there, but it’s better having ships with other colours from the original versions if you want a crusaders mod :wink:
I actually prefer the ship with the bright red, but it’s because I love colourful things not dark ones xP

Cool stuff you’ve done there gotswat :slight_smile:

4

Well then it’s your lucky day lol, i didnt actually recolor i just messed with the brightness/hue of the colors so the damage overlayed come out completely green, would be kinda weird if it turned blue when damaged XD

So the recolors have been scrapped for now until i can figure out how to properly recolor the .dds files (so far everyhting but the hue changing was turned out bad…and now the hue changing has it down sides =/ )

So here is a newer version with working damage overlays that actually match the ships :stuck_out_tongue:

image: I turned the brightness and lighting down a bit.

s.w.a.t

5

ok i have moved the hull text to a crusaders folder renamed the race name in the text to crusaders and moved the bitmaps ships .dds to a crusaders folder and now it tells me can not find ship hulls? The game recognizes the race as i can select crusaders on the battle deployment window what am i missing? Is it because i used old federation text files that i simply reworded?

Gives me a no ship hulls found error when ever i select ship design.

Any help would be appreciated! (runs off to search forums while waiting hehe)

s.w.a.t.

6

They look dark and evbil looking i like it ! ! !

I’m decently good with images let me give it a wake with paint.net once i get the eve-mod ballanced and beta ready agian and i’ll see what i can doooo. Maybe there is a image editor i can get thought the college that can do wonders with these.

Lone Starr

7

If you got any tips let me know I am using paint.net and i also have gimp installed.

Woot got the race to work separate from the others now (sense i used federation text file for the racial text file i simply made a crusaders turret bitmap and just copied the federation files into it and now it works :slight_smile: ) Can i just delete those lines from the racial text file and delete the crusaders turret bitmap folder?

Image: (back ground story will be more detailed later on)

So besides that little issue and some text lines changing so everything is more uniform they are now their own official race!

in game screens after i sharpened the image 100% and added AA looks much crisper now

s.w.a.t.

8

it looks like you took the feds and the reblels and made them breed. not that thats a bad thing i like the style

9

Hello, gotswat, and welcome to the Modding forum. I’m pleased to see that you’ve gotten off to a lightspeed start into modding GSB. Cool! Don’t hesitate to ask questions of us, please.

You asked for feedback. I think this item might surprise you, but I’ll try not to be overly harsh: you are crushing my web browser with a hair over [size=150]27 megs[/size] worth of .png images in this thread. Only one image is less than one megabyte; most are over three and a half and one of them is nearly five megs!

I can’t even get a single one of them to load on my computer before your Imageshack service completely times-out and all the image downloads freeze and crash. :frowning:

Not everyone has access to a highspeed web connection. I’m asking you to show some mercy by saving these unnecessarily huge files as .jpeg files instead of .png and compressing them a good bit. From what I’ve read so far, your Crusaders sound interesting. I’d like to see for myself so I can offer some insight, but until you down-res them to a friendly size, I can’t. I’ll wager that I’m not the only one who’d like to see what the sizzle is about concerning this cool new mod, but can’t without some help from you. I can’t imagine that any of the images need to have a total size greater than 200 KB, each.

Yes, I know I sound like Tom Cruise in ‘Jerry Maguire’, lol…“help me to help you!” How about it? :smiley:

10

Ah sorry about that i did resize them at imageshack XD

I will delete some of he recolor one as they are no longer being used and will just misslead the readers of the thread, and i will resize the rest so you can see them :slight_smile:

s.w.a.t.

p.s they are all in message board size now best i could do while still allowing for detail to be seen about 1000 kb’s each so it should be substantially less then my previous 2mb and 5 mb screens and i also delete the 4 recolor screen because i am no longer developing those any ways so wasted space i guess :slight_smile: Hope this helps out :slight_smile:

11

Update: Last cruiser is in the horse hull!

I decided that sense the shield/loyalty and sword hulls were gonna be more tank like than destructomatic fire platforms that the crusades needed a fire platform!

I give you the horse it will have 8 hard points as opposed to 5 or 6 like the others, but it will get a negative armor bonus and shield bonus and a minor hull int’ bonus so it is much much much! more fragile that the others do not send this in first! Lose it and your damage will suffer greatly!

I also wanted to go for a slightly different look seeing as how it wasn’t all take damage and live through the battle like the others :slight_smile:

screenies!

p.s i re saved em in jpeg before uploading…the quality is worse sorry but as long as people can see em :slight_smile:

s.w.a.t

So any thoughts should the horse stay or go? Honestly i like the look of it XD

p.s all hard points are not placed yet hence why screens only have 6 and i have to place engine glows etc etc these are just so you get the eye candy of the hull in general :stuck_out_tongue:

12

Update:

Got the fleet armored up and ready for a crusade against the insect heathens! The only problem is that there was an insider group being manipulated by a heathen! We could not allow this so we sent 4 of our finest horse class cruiser and the mighty Contingency Plan shield class cruiser escorted by 1 rookie sword class and 1 rookie loyalty class…

The fighting was fierce both the sword and loyalty classes fell fairly quickly their captains got over zealous and decided they were actually shield class cruisers…many brave people lost their lives.

After they fell the Contingency plan ran to the front lines and taking direct fire from 4 enemy rebel cruisers had all but one of its weapon systems blow to pieces and its armor reduced to a paper thin material even space dust would laugh at all seemed lost for the mighty and well known Contingency Plan. The rebels thought this a victory and moved in fo the kill, how ever the crusades recent add-ons the horse class ships warped in to the rescue “Hell if im gonna let some insect loving freaks take down the Contingency plan!!” and they opened up with their mighty arsenal of 4 missel placements and 4 forward laser positions…the rebels ran in fear as their ranks were cut down and the Contingency plan was saved!

King J’tanco V on the Crusade wide broadcast network:
“In the end the rebellion was cut down and crushed beneath the war tracks of the Crusades! We lost many brave people and some fine ships today but for a worthy cause! We must learn from our mistakes and march upon the heathen home worlds one by one and crush this evil once and for all!”

The people rally and the Contingency Plan is patched back up and rushed to the front of the fleet (Contingency Plan Captain) “To hell with letting these rookies get more people killed let em watch and learn”

to be continued…

Hope you liked the read XD

s.w.a.t

13

What are the cruisers’ special stats? It seems that with the theme you have here the “Sword” cruiser would make sense to have more hardpoints and less utility with a boost to power output or speed; and the “Shield” cruiser cold have fewer hardpoints but more utilities with a bonus to sheilding, armor, or hull integrity.

14

Greetings,

first of all, where are the red ships gone? They looked freaking awesome! Did you scrap them? What a shame ^^
Yeah and well, keep the great work up, I’m looking forward for more of your creations… A little competition spices… something… damn proverbs… well I think you know what I mean :wink:
If you have any questions regarding the structure of a mod you should just download one of the existing ones. I think this should supply you with the general picture of what you have to put in which folder. But I think you managed to solve your earlier problems? Regarding the recolouring, if you should use Photoshop in the near future you could use one of its functions to replace colours with each other. Although this is kind of inaccurate it’s fast. Otherwise you will have to do it with your hands… pain in the ass but you will get great results (or better said you have the freedom to colour how you like it).

15

The shield will be getting a 50% boost to both armor and hull hit points and will only have 4 hard points and surplus regualr points, so it is the sheild of the crusaders always send it in first as it does not do much damage but it can take a massive amount of damage!

The sword and loyalty classes will be receiving smaller armor boost and a small hull boost as well as a speed boost they will not be as sturdy but they can hold their own for the most part, the sword has 6 hard points and the loyalty has 5.

The horse on the other hand will be receiving a negative bonus to armor and a positive bonus to hull (not a lot) and it sports 8 hard points (might change to 10 and increase cost so the hull can not be spammed to death).

All crusader ships recieve a -50% to sheild bonus and a 4% increase to cost bonus (they are fairly loaded with modules and the sheild alone can tank 4-5 cruisers easy, though if you horse classes fall…the sheild doesnt pack enough to win the fight solo)

Essentially send a wave of sheild in first followed by horse crusiers (that way enemy targets sheild classess first) and support them with sword and loyalty classess on the planxs to protect horse hulls from direct fire.

Hope this explains the basic roles of the classes (and yes i am thinking of renaming the sword and horse classes…well not rename but switching names)

The friggs are you basic support vessels set up more to take down fighters and disrupt in coming missles.(or make cannon fodder late game when it is only crusiers left)

The fighters are currently giving me issues in game but they are also a basic fighter set up the coin is more of an anti fighter role and the greed (sporting more hardpoints) is more of an anti frigate role and late game cruiser bomber (if still alive of course)

I plan on adding (once i figure out how) a specialty crusader beam laser and missle launcher for cruisers, and a special anti-fighter missle system for the friggs, and a torpedo system for fighters (weighs less does more dmg but cost more)

They will all be more powerfull versions (not massively more powerfull just more powerfull), they will require more power and crew and cost more, as to keep the spammage of more powerfull system down, i.e 1-2 per a crusier 1 for a frig or fighter.

Their ships are powerfull for their roles, the horse is an excellent fire platform, the sheild is a damn good tank, and the sword/loyalty classes are good jack of all trades but not really masters of anything crusiers. They will how ever be more costly then stock ships and i am gonna try my best to make fleet lay out a huge factor in the play stly of the crusades!

s.w.a.t.

p.s i will also be adding a new list of ship names for the crusades…the contingency plan is funny and all but doesnt really fit with the theme :slight_smile:

16

any plan on making a dreadnought for your race?

17

Nope

Also with school starting up updates will be few and far between sorry.

s.w.a.t.