SOGE
quick update on the status of the mod
if all goes well by the end of the week the first release version will be posted. It looks like it will be around 70mb (mostly texture data for the ships) there are some definite graphical issues because of both the art pipeline and lack of knowledge about the engine.
it will be empire ONLY and missing a few ships, but have the majority hard pointed and for the most part playable with weapons and stats. the main sins races are untouched and I do not plan on ‘updating’ the stock races myself.
icons, UI images, research, abilities WILL NOT be present in this version.
what I want people to evaluate is the game pacing and combat pacing as well as general balance of ships vs cost and vs each other. (shield mitigation and armor really are not easy to compensate for because of how they work.)
there have been two primary sources of delay in getting this out. 1) documentation on the model pipeline and how to successfully export ships from XSI (this is mostly solved or at least to a acceptable level) This resulted in a delay from release until mid april
2) the tremendous difficutly in finding crash bugs that don’t have logs. I have had to add one item at a time using an 8 player AI free for all test and run it for 20 minutes to verify that it doesn’t crash and properly uses the units.
both of these things have been very frustrating (and I still have a few outstanding issues)
GALSIM
I’m pleased to announce that the EvR sim is being reconstructed by the original author with a new front end as GalSim. check out the forum for it here and the game download here (it’s in an early beta, but if you are into turn based management games the original EvR was great.) SWR is going to put some server resources behind it as well.