Yes it did turn out well. My first thought when I saw the model was "uh oh!, time to make the donuts"

It's an amazingly simple design that looks really good against the other structures in the game. Nice Job!

I think I have a look and feel now for the Nephilim structures that I need to apply to the others I have in game. I really like how this one turned out.

Okay Zombie since I got those last model batches to you what other models do you need for what else there is to fill in for the Nephilim? Should be fairly easy for me to get the rest of the models to you in the next few days. I know some more of the tactical structures come to mind, though I assume we can just keep the jump inhibitor structure as is. There is also the fact that we could also create a structure for each race that suits there needs and makes it sort of a racial tactical structure, not just like the super weapon structure but a smaller structure that benefits the race in question for any ship in the gravity well or any structure

Right, I'll start with the Starbase ability, which is suppose to be called HOLY LIGHT, it's an ability that affects all enemy ships in the vicinity of the Starbases area. It's a AOE ability, we weren't sure if it would be just a ability that would put some debuffs on the enemy ships and do damage or just some damage done to them. Think of it as something that could cleanse the enemy of sin. I think that is as far as I remember about it.

figured there be something needed for the trade vessel, I'll see what I can do, gunship model I might have already done, I just need to check my models again, refinery vessel I'll also look into. If you haven't already looked into the bomber and fighter models I can look into those more deeply and get you some, not that they don't need to be extremely high poly (one of the reasons why the game goes crazy and does a minidump)

Cool, I need to go through some of my old notes and see if anything jumps out at me too.

I'll take a look. I'll try and wire up the Nephilim super weapon this weekend too.

The Holy Shrine is really neat with the dual culture/trade (Nice idea!). I kind of like giving the constructor a different role for Nephilim, but we will probably need to beef up it's staying power to make it a little harder to take down.

Yep, I've noted exhaust trails need to be adjusted on the second iteration through the models. No worries on Plague. I've been focusing almost 90% on Nephilim. I'd like to have a complete race we could release for play testing.

Any order you suggest with the Optimization mod with this until you get around to merging?

Exactly what effect or effects are we talking about Syneptus?

Oh, I see well Zombie will get around to it I guess for the effects for the Nephilim unless he plans on using the base PSI effects for the Nephilim

[quote who="EternalRequiem" reply="109" id="2799368"]Any order you suggest with the Optimization mod with this until you get around to merging?
[/quote]

You need to list Sins of the Fallen first (i.e. on top) and then have the Sins optimization listed second. I've been running my testing this way and the memory usage is noticeably lower.

Got to playing a bit more and I noticed some of the polygons on some of my models sticking out more then others, did some of the polygons get moved around when you triangulated them? Some seem to stick out more then others and make the models look a little funny. I also noticed something odd. The order for which Capital ships and frigates and cruisers are set up in the empire tree is messed up. Capital ships should always show up first on the list not the frigates.

Capitals > then frigates

right now it's

frigates > capitals

another thing you might want to look into since it's the same way if they are fleeted, and if you click the group via the empire list you get the frigates being the one chosen instead of the highest level capital class ship

Edit: here's a bit more info on the polygon thing, it's only noticeable with the graphics set to medium or low on ships and structures

The models have mainly only gone through a polygon reduction. I've actually only modified a few to add some basic weapons. You can open any of the meshes through a free program called 3D Object Converter to check them out. As a lot of the models had pretty high final triangle counts, I tried to get them down closer to levels most people agree on such as 500 to 1k for strikecraft, 1k-3k for frigates and 4k-6k for capital ships. Some are still slightly higher than this as I did not want to lose to any detail so it was a balance between looks and final polygon count.

I believe some of the models have polygons that are more noticeable is due to either the uv map or tangents or a combination of both. For the more obvious models, I've been successful on some previous models reworking the uvmaps to reduce artifacts like this. I know for sure the battleship will need some rework on the uvmap due to this and I was planning on it being the first re-texture candidate as it's still my favorite ship.

What would be good feedback is if you could identify the ships that you notice with Medium settings on all three levels and prioritize which ones you think are more critical to fix (I'll do the same on my side too). I plan on playing with High settings but it will be good to use Medium settings on all three levels as a quality baseline and decide what is acceptable and what needs to be put in queue to fix.

This has been reported with other mods too. It is really frustrating and I don't see anyway to correct it through moddable files. I'm assuming ironclad broke something with the fleet tree with the diplomacy release and modded elements.

As always great feedback!

Right..., I'll look and see if what he had posted is different from what I am doing. Again, I believe the issue has more to do with uv-map and tangents than the model itself.

In XSI there is a tool called Polygon Reduction which I am using to reduce the overal triangle count on the models. It can be done on a sliding scale so if I notice the model is damaged during the reduction I can scale it back to a higher polygon count very easily. Again the goal is to keep the shape of the ship without noticeable defects or damage to the design.

There are also other techniques we can do to smooth out the ships using the normal map by burning the high poly original model to the low poly (reduced) model. This can also help with some of the loss in quality from the polygon reduction.

Additionally, in previous models I've done, modifying the uv-map to create a more uniform surface around the problem areas tends to resolve these issues.

Right, keep getting minidumps, usually happens around 30 mins into the game or a little over it

Do you have an auto-save for this you can send? I'm suspecting an issue with some mid-game tech popping up.

I'm assuming one of our custom races was controlled by the AI?