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[MOD WIP] Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels 2 (updated 01/10/09)

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[MOD WIP] Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels 2 (updated 01/10/09)

from Sins Forums

Featured (by a small mention) in the October edition of PC Gamer magazine

Candidate for Mod Database's 2008 Mod of the Year

This is the OLD "Work in Progress" thread for the Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels 2 mod.

The new WIP topic is here https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/342747

The "Release" topic can be found here https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/322473


The mod is intended to be a hommage, and tribute to the original Sacrifice of Angels mod for Homeworld. It will use many of the same models, and effects created for that mod by the Trekmods team. Like the original SoA mod SoA2 is set during the Dominion War era of Star Trek. Using both canon, and non-canon units to recreate those battles with Sins "empire building" mechanic added. Like in SoA you can fight battles in SoA2 using hundreds of starships. Sometimes thousands if your computer can handle it ;)

While the mod was not intended as a "Total Conversion". That is exactly what it is winding up being. There is much about the Sins engine, and mechanics that we still need to learn. There are some hard coded stumbling blocks we have to overcome.

The factions will be the Federation, Klingons, Romulan, and the Dominion (with Breen, and Cardassian ally units). The main factions seen in the Dominion War. With a "Surprise" as the Pirate faction.

Factions like the Borg "may" be added in the future. LokiGodofMischief is working on a very good 3rd party Borg add on for SoA 2. It is very possible his add on may be merged with SoA 2 at a much later time.

The current version of SoA 2 is  0.03b   "The Second Dominion War". Look for it here  https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/322473

0.03b only works with Sins versions 1.1, 1.11, and 1.12.

All previous versions of SoA 2 are obsolete, and will not be supported, or hosted anymore. All older version downloads will be removed.

We will NOT port SoA 2 over to Entrenchment until after Entrenchment is out of beta, and released. Along with proper forge tool updates.

I am working on the models mostly ALONE so it may take a while for any new ship model updates.

Darkshimmer is the Balancing guru, Code monkey, and Master at arms. We do have other contributers, and the best 3rd party work from the finest artists in the trek mod community to help make SoA 2 the best it can be.

Status of Demo 0.04  "The actors are in place" 

Will update when i have news.

General Changes:

Manshooters Volumetric Explosions mod will be included as of 0.03a

May include Sins Plus (planets), but ill need to see how much that mod needs changing to incorporate into SoA 2.

SoA 2 0.03 and above is now patch 1.1, and better compatable. Sins patches 1.11, and 1.12 only address balancing, and online exploits, and have no effect on the mod.

Ships will have some anti stike craft weaponry.

Ships are still being added and balanced accordingly.

More re-balancing so that one faction is not overpowered over the other.

The Federation:

Faction is complete. Only structures left

The Klingon Empire

Faction is complete. Only structures left.

The Romulan Star Empire:

Faction is complete. Only structures left

The Dominion:

Faction is complete. Still needs balancing work.

Pirates:

They were going to be the Borg, but that idea failed. So we are looking into Random multirace ship spawns.

Planetary Defenders

Basically "Ships of the week" like the Maquis, Sona, Ferrengi, Tammarian battle cruisers and the like.

Balancing:  Darkshimmer has the Federation, Romulan, and Klingon Empire, and Unified Dominion balanced.

Gameplay: We now have a working Cloaking Device! Check the ModDB page for the WIP video. Cloaking will not be fully implemented in the mod until version 0.04

Art: We are working on an LCARS style UI, adding proper icons, and pictures for all of the new units. The UI is going to take a while to do, because of all of the redundancy of the Sins UI. SoA 2 uses 2 sets of UI textures. Instead of the standard 4 textures for buttons, and 2 textures for icons. SoA 2 uses 8 textures for buttons, and 4 textures for icons which IMO is a major waste of resources, because sins loads all these textures at startup. Unfortunetly i dont see any other way to do it. What is kind of cool is that we dont have to use the same HUD for each faction. It is possible to have unique HUDs, but again the perfomance hit, because of the extra drain on resources could be big, and not worth it.

In Planning: (No promises, or guarentees, but we will try to add these if possible.)

Troop Transport effects.

Planetary invasion animations

Tractor beams. (need a code monkey for this)

Whatever else we can think of and are capable of doing.

Future Updates:

SoA 2 0.04 is now in planning, and will be focused primarily on Proper research trees, Ability's, and adding proper Structures. More than likely demo 0.04 will be the last demo. After that then the full mod should be ready.

SoA 2 0.05 will be the final spit, and polish of the mod. It will focus mainly on re-balancing if needed. Also final artwork changes will be made here. Which will include some ship model re-builds, and re-texturing.

The Full SoA 2 1.0 mod will be released "When it is Finished". We are doing this on our own free time. We aren't getting paid to do this. We have no set schedule. We have no time limit. I want this one to be good. So it wont go online until we feel it is ready.

*NOTE: Much about Sins as we are all now realizing is hardcoded. SoA 2 is going to be far from a perfect "trek" mod due to these hardcoded issues. However we will try to do the best we can with workarounds, and compromises to get it as close as possible. Like i said some things wont be perfect. Some things cannot be done at all. Enjoy the mod for what it is, and try not to be too "nit picky".

SoA2 will be hosted on Mod Database once it is ready http://www.moddb.com/mods/star-trek-sacrifice-of-angels-2

This main header will be updated when i have news to post.





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4,110,422 views 1,754 replies
Reply #451 from Sins Forums Top
 :SNIFF!: Could we have just 1 or 2 ships released as a taster?
Also, have you found a way to implement cloaking?
Beatiful pics  :CONGRAT: makes me cry X-( 
Reply #452 from Sins Forums Top
Having read that the team is having problems with Aft phasers, does this mean you are also having problems with ALL aft-firing weapons? I.e. torpedoes, because if you can have Aft torpedoes then I would assume that would be good enough, and realistic, since at least most of the Federation vessels I am aware of had aft torpedo launchers.

However now that I think about it, Cardassian ships are renowned for having 100% phaser coverage in their ship designs, so perhaps its best that a workaround is found, or better yet if Ironclad could update things like this into the mod tools for 1.1

All those ships look awesome btw, this is my most anticipated mod for Sins.
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Reply #453 from Sins Forums Top
nice pics, thanks for increased teasers, though i think the romulan BOP is a little big. Nice to see it not "if" but "when" the mod will be out.. i dont really play sins anymore just waiting for this mod befour i play again.
Reply #454 from Sins Forums Top
OMG I'm actually in love! Needed a star trek strategy fix for ages!

ahhh those days of Star Trek New Worlds are so far away.

Are the team going for the current "special powers" of ships, or for a more pragmatic approach? 'transferring energy to shields' or emergency power etc?
Reply #455 from Sins Forums Top
nice pics, thanks for increased teasers, though i think the romulan BOP is a little big.

Nope. The Warbird really is that big - though the big hollow area between the wings means it's not that much bigger than a Galaxy class, mass-wise.
Reply #456 from Sins Forums Top
  Could we have just 1 or 2 ships released as a taster?Also, have you found a way to implement cloaking?Beatiful pics   makes me cry  


no cloak yet, becuase i have not even looked at the code.
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Reply #458 from Sins Forums Top
Having read that the team is having problems with Aft phasers, does this mean you are also having problems with ALL aft-firing weapons? I.e. torpedoes, because if you can have Aft torpedoes then I would assume that would be good enough, and realistic, since at least most of the Federation vessels I am aware of had aft torpedo launchers.However now that I think about it, Cardassian ships are renowned for having 100% phaser coverage in their ship designs, so perhaps its best that a workaround is found, or better yet if Ironclad could update things like this into the mod tools for 1.1All those ships look awesome btw, this is my most anticipated mod for Sins.


actually the problem is that the aft phasers need to be assigned to another weapon port, unfortunately there is a 3 weapon cap. Sovy uses it up so its has a limitation. Aft firing torps are not affected by this at all, and i don't think pulse weapons will have too much of this issue (not tested completely yet) but beams definately have this problem. The worst part is that if all the weapons are assigned to Weapon-1 you have to tell them to fire forward, back, left, and right. This creates alot of funky things it shouldn't do. While the nulls are facing the correct way, the tangets assign the arcs which i hate becuase without direct control of arcs you can't make the ships fire properly. Also i have noticed that with multiple targets you will fire at multiple ships. I don't think anyone thought of this issue while it was in beta. Right now the sovy only fires forward, left, and right. You will see the sovy at times fire at 3 different targets at one time and alternate its beams onto those targets. Not decided if its a cool side affect to have or not.

right now i wouldn't worry about seeing 100% phaser coverage on cardie's or fed's. While there's only a handful of them unless ships are in constant motion tracking down ships and manuvering there's really no point in putting the weapons in place to do so. i think it would have been better to have a 6 weapon limit but when you have 2-300 ships i understand why they did it.

o and to answer why torps are not affected by this, they use the missle aspect, so they shoot out til they reach a designated distance then they track and move to the target, i still have to play with the settings some more to make them miss more, but its going to be interesting to see what the akira will turn out like. BTW the ships i'm adding in are just placeholders for the models that will replace them.
Reply #459 from Sins Forums Top
Cloaking needs to either be done RIGHT or not at all, sorry rommie fanboys, no BOTF cheese.


its not the rommie fanboys to worry about its the Klingons who had that cloak firing bop i would worry about!, besides if cloaking does not work properly we wouldn't add it anyways. We had to do that in Nexus when we modded it. Cloak didn't work properly so it was never added. Besides we don't plan on allowing anyone to have a ship cloaked forever, for the moment.
Reply #460 from Sins Forums Top
Klingons had 1 ship, all the rommies had it except colony and transport ships. You would go into a battle with klingons, at least you could target ANY other ships, you go into a battle with romulans and they could take half your fleet out without you even getting a shot in. No, more worried about the romulans.
Reply #461 from Sins Forums Top
You could use the Ferengi, Orion Crime Syndicate, Xindi, or even Borg could be "pirates"
Reply #462 from Sins Forums Top
I really wish people would read the forums, at the moment, Stress and his team decided that the Borg are too overpowered and will not be included in their initial release.
Reply #463 from Sins Forums Top
Cloaking needs to either be done RIGHT or not at all, sorry rommie fanboys, no BOTF cheese.its not the rommie fanboys to worry about its the Klingons who had that cloak firing bop i would worry about!, besides if cloaking does not work properly we wouldn't add it anyways. We had to do that in Nexus when we modded it. Cloak didn't work properly so it was never added. Besides we don't plan on allowing anyone to have a ship cloaked forever, for the moment.


So far, most of the people, myself included, working on the cloaking code have been unable to get it to work right. It seems that the buff modifier for cloaking brings along a whole bunch of extra, unwanted things like the ship being entirely disabled. So, for the moment, it seems cloaking at the same time as moving and attacking is out of the question.
Reply #464 from Sins Forums Top
Are you guys looking for help? I have an untextured USS Titan sitting on my hard drive. There might be more ships or things sitting around...I'm not really sure what's all there since it's been a while since I've done any modding.

I'm bored today so I'm going to look at texturing it and then I'll post some images of it later this evening. I'm kind of getting tired of modeling monsters and programming collision checking.
Reply #465 from Sins Forums Top
My friends and I helped with kinks on the BC Mods from the initial foundation technology on up providing QA feedback where applicable. This looks like another game that deserves a lot of star trek love. Anything you need help with let us know what stage you are in and we would be happy to help. Message me and let me know how we can help.
Reply #466 from Sins Forums Top
One thing I would really like to know is what kind of scale is this aiming for?
I mean in terms of what constitutes a 'big' fleet, because as far as I'm concerned 40 starships should be a massive fleet, taking the example of how many ships the Federation got together to try and fight the Borg at Wolf 359. Once again bringing the game BOTF as an example, 40 ships was about 4 full task forces, and that would be a huge number of ships.

In the DS9 episodes Sacrifice of Angels there were LOADS of ships, but there were 5 major players in the conflict - Cardassians, Dominion, Romulans, Federation and Klingons, so I would expect to have several hundreds of ships in a 5+ player game, as it would match the feel of the series.

Given how Sins itself works on the 'population' and supply research system to dictate how large fleets can be, is the system going to be retained or reworked for SoA?
If it were up to me I would again take a leaf out of BotF's book and implement a system where you need sufficient dilithium resources to maintain a certain fleet size, so you need to acquire planets with dilithium crystals (which is obviously a dead ringer to replace the crystals resource in vanilla sins) as well as have the raw materials to build ships, and sufficient crew and officers to run them.

In any case, I would imagine that 40 combat ships of destroyer level or greater (i.e. not scouts) would constitute a good fleet, and maybe double that would serve as an absolute maximum, as having one player possess hundreds of ships could easily get quite out of hand, considering how powerful most of the ships are on their own (which is one reason I dislike the nature of Star Trek Armada and its dozens of Sovereigns and Warbirds and Cubes).

So anyway, what kind of scale does the team have in mind so far? Also, will 3 K'vort class birds of prey outmatch a single galaxy class?
Reply #467 from Sins Forums Top
Ive Been lurking on this topic for quite some time now, I just wanted to say keep up the amazing work and I look forward to the release of this awesome Mod, no rush guys please take your time :D
Reply #468 from Sins Forums Top
Mozzer asks a good question, i have been wondering myself as the ships power of star trek is not the same as vanilla sins. In Sins you need over 100 ships late game just to count as a fleet, when really 100 ships in star trek is alot of firepower (ex. 5 Sovies, 5 Galaxies, 10 Nebula, 20 Excelsior, 20 Oberth, 20 Miranda... we still need 40 more ships to make a hundred i think we are already at the most we see in the shows.) i would like to see smaller fleet with more ship abilities.
Reply #469 from Sins Forums Top
I would prefer fleet size to be up to the player. Some may prefer smaller fleets, that's fine, but that is not everyone. I think artifically limiting the size would alienate some players.

And there is cannon supporting larger fleets so it's not like large fleet engagements never happened. The only fullscale war we ever witnessed during Star Trek was during DS9, which incidently this mod is modelled after. And personally, I thought it was absurd in TNG that a 150+ world federation, with thousands of colonies, could only muster 40 ships to defend its capital world.

That's just my $.02. I'll be thrilled to play this mod no matter what. :)
Reply #470 from Sins Forums Top
I agree with Mavirikk, I think it should definently be up to the player to determine the amount of ships... if someone doesn't want a big fleet, they don't have to have it, but if they do, they can have that as well...
Reply #471 from Sins Forums Top
One thing I would really like to know is what kind of scale is this aiming for?I mean in terms of what constitutes a 'big' fleet, because as far as I'm concerned 40 starships should be a massive fleet, taking the example of how many ships the Federation got together to try and fight the Borg at Wolf 359. Once again bringing the game BOTF as an example, 40 ships was about 4 full task forces, and that would be a huge number of ships.In the DS9 episodes Sacrifice of Angels there were LOADS of ships, but there were 5 major players in the conflict - Cardassians, Dominion, Romulans, Federation and Klingons, so I would expect to have several hundreds of ships in a 5+ player game, as it would match the feel of the series.Given how Sins itself works on the 'population' and supply research system to dictate how large fleets can be, is the system going to be retained or reworked for SoA?If it were up to me I would again take a leaf out of BotF's book and implement a system where you need sufficient dilithium resources to maintain a certain fleet size, so you need to acquire planets with dilithium crystals (which is obviously a dead ringer to replace the crystals resource in vanilla sins) as well as have the raw materials to build ships, and sufficient crew and officers to run them.In any case, I would imagine that 40 combat ships of destroyer level or greater (i.e. not scouts) would constitute a good fleet, and maybe double that would serve as an absolute maximum, as having one player possess hundreds of ships could easily get quite out of hand, considering how powerful most of the ships are on their own (which is one reason I dislike the nature of Star Trek Armada and its dozens of Sovereigns and Warbirds and Cubes).So anyway, what kind of scale does the team have in mind so far? Also, will 3 K'vort class birds of prey outmatch a single galaxy class?


first of all excellent questions, i'll get to them here one by one. In a normal Star Trek Fleet yes 10 ships normally is a task force. i think we are going to aim a bit higher though so its more like 20 ships, however, there isn't really going to be alot of capital ships buildable. We're planning on capping that so you won't have an armada of sovy's. We haven't worked out the details ont hat yet, but it was a concern of mine when i talked to stress. In favor the bold there were 4 task force assigned but there were about 100 ships, so we went with that.

I haven't looked at how the population works yet, we will address that issue when the time comes after we have the ships we want in game and the balancing begins. We are going to work up a research tree for this mod. Quantums will be one of the last research items you will need to research before you can unlock the defiant and the sovy, Even the Pulse weapons on the defiant will have to be researched in order to unlock the ship. Most likely on small to medium maps you won't be able to get high enough to unlock them, but we'll see how it goes.

In Trek universe 3 K'vort class Bop's are a close match to the Galaxy class, in sins, its going to be close. Depending on there line up and who gets off the first volley's of torps and concentrated fire on, will most likely determine that.

Reply #472 from Sins Forums Top
I would prefer fleet size to be up to the player. Some may prefer smaller fleets, that's fine, but that is not everyone. I think artifically limiting the size would alienate some players. And there is cannon supporting larger fleets so it's not like large fleet engagements never happened. The only fullscale war we ever witnessed during Star Trek was during DS9, which incidently this mod is modelled after. And personally, I thought it was absurd in TNG that a 150+ world federation, with thousands of colonies, could only muster 40 ships to defend its capital world. That's just my $.02. I'll be thrilled to play this mod no matter what.


lol you noticed that too huh!
Reply #473 from Sins Forums Top
ok more E Y E C A N D Y.

this ship is exactly why ships in trek are only rated by its phaser/disruptor power, they always forget to add the damn torps into the equation.

o something i forgot to mention in my reply post. I started to put a scale in lace to convert the ship stats from. I did the same thing in BC and in the Nexus mod we did, it really works out well. But like i said this ship usually disrupts those numbers but i can't leave it out, people would never forgive me, and no its not completely to scale yet and some texture updates are going to be made after the last run i made







the Orginal First release stats of this ship was what i put on it, its not going to work! too UBER!
Reply #474 from Sins Forums Top



sorry for the double pic post, it didn't save the link when i uploaded and it won't let me edit