Only 2 last modding questions unanswered

You can do the first one simly by expanding a stars gravity well to huge proportions. There would still be fase lanes but you wouldnt be able to use them anymore and battles could take place anywhere. You can also expand the planet and asteroid gravity wells and make the build zones bigger or smaller too.

Nah, doesn't work. I've tried it. Every grav well is an entity for itself, you still need to use the phaselanes to go to other grav wells, i.e. you need to use phaselanes to go from one planet to the other, even when grav wells overlap each other.

Okay, so simply expanding all the planets/stars gravity wells isn't going to do the trick.

So would it be possible then to make a custom map where you make a single huge gravity well around each planet, and then dump a few other planets into the same gravity well?

I just had an idea that might work. Maby we could mod the resource asteroids around the planets to have population and such. Then you can add as many as we want to a gravity well. We could replace most or all of the asteroids info file with a planets info. Has anyone tried this? We would also have to mod it so all planets gave a steady trickle of Crystal and Metal, or simply get rid of the crystal and metal costs on everything and adjust the money cost acordingly.

If this is possible it still might not be possible to give them their own build radius but this is all still to be seen.

Ok I just got done going all through the Game Info looking for the crystal and metal asteroids with no luck. I next went into the mesh and found them. There are 6 of them 2 of wich are, Metal Depleeted, and Crystal Depleeted. I would use these ones. I dont see why we couldnt mess around with making copies of the planet meshes and renaming them so they are mapped to the resource asteroids then deleeting the originals. Of course make a copy of the unaltered mesh and tuck it away somelace safe first hahaha. We currently dont have the tools, at least that I know of, to mess with the mesh but I am going to try it this way. It might take some tinkering to get it to work if it works at all under any circumstances.

Of course without being able to mess with the nuts and bolts in the mesh yet we cant change the basic planet mesh that we copy so it might cause the game to go haywire. We cant change the gravity well to 0 on them and give them a normal build radius wich is where I see the problems arising from.

The only way i can see the multiple planets in a single gravity well happening is to create a fixed map that loads the same pattern of planets at the same locations each, and every time instead of the random maps that load now. I am all for a load custom map option in sins. Many mods will depend on sins being able to use custom maps (including my Star Trek mod). The only way i see custom maps happening is with the forge tools. We will have to wait for the games final release before that happens.

Im not sure about the fog of war question. I like the current system the way it is. it fits with the fact most sensors can see the whole solar system, but not into other star systems. The "solar system" as sins displays it is not really a solar system if you think about it. It is a galaxy with the star being the center of the galaxy, and the fact that ice worlds can be close to the sun but terran worlds are at the far edge prove this. The center of the galaxy is the light source but not necessarily that planets star. Like in master of orion the planets found are the most viable for colonization. It doesnt mean it is the only planet in that system. However i do see what you are thinking, and i like the idea of making actual solar systems with a star, and planets in a single grav well.

While it is possible to do many things in notepad. Editing maps is not one of them that i am aware of.

Okay, here is where we are at with these 2 questions (If you can think of another way, please feel free to share):

1. It seems possible to alter the resource asteroid meshes so they look like planets/moons....but they will still just be resource asteroids. While certainly cool, it really doesn't allow us to have multiple real planets in the same gravity well.

2. So far, it seems like any type of moddable fog of war is out of the question. Perhaps some type of stealth tech might be possible, but even this is in serious doubt.

Hey Major Stress, I understand what you are saying about the stars being the center of individual galaxies and that story concept will work alright for our mods. Hehe, if I were Schem, I would start going on about the center of galaxies only being black holes.

Hmmm, nothing stopping us from changing our star meshes into black hole meshes. Now if we would could just make 'black holes' dangerous to ships

Hi guys - I'm looking into the above for you with Ironclad.

Love you!


Seriously, would be great if we could get this to work.

Here's the official word:

Question 1)  Ironclad may include this functionality when they make their environment content pass, but they can't guarantee it as they haven't finalized the list.

Question 2) The Sins fog-of-war is macro (i.e., between planets) and not local (i.e., within a planet's gravity well). Ironclad may add local fog-of-war as a purely non-supported modding feature, but it's too early to tell.

So to sum up - maybe on both, but no guarantees.   As we get closer to release, we'll be able to tie down these types of questions more. Right now it's still too early in the process.

That's not so hard. The area around a star already has a constant effect on ships: +5 antimatter/second. It's trivially easy to change that to -50 hull/second, and call it "tidal forces buckling the hull."

If a ship is that close to a star, or black hole it should take damage over time (thermal for stars, and gravity wave for black holes). This will make camping there a very risky thing to do I wasn't aware of the antimatter loss at a star. Thanks for pointing that out.

If we can pull off entire solar systems in a single grav well the same should be true for that solar systems star. If you get too close you take DoT. Im not sure how to pull that off, but as we learn more im sure it is possible.

Gain, not loss. And it also makes ships "more difficult to detect" when jumping out.

Thank you for the info Yarlen. We appreciate the time you took. Maybe sounds good to me right now.

Hmmm I wonder if there is a way to block a fase lane until a specific objective is finished. This realy should be a seperate thread since it is off topic but the multiple panets in a gravity well made me think of a cool campain mod for single player or co op.