Enter Entralla

[Corey]

For the past few versions, we've been using Bastion as the de facto capital of the Pentastar Alignment. This is not entirely accurate, so in 2.2, we've added the actual capital of the Alignment, Entralla.

[Delta]

Oh nice the Pentastar capital! Sariss also new? Or was she in a past post? Either way nice seeing both additions.

[kucsidave]

Nice. So we get Entralla, a planet with 50 income and can be built up to Heavy Frigate yard, able to house at least 2 Golan Is, and a new ground hero in the face of Sariss.
Oh, how I love the JK series.

[Corey]

This is the first time we've posted anything Sariss-related. Right now, she's a reskinned Mara, but I'm going to do some model edits and maybe even try to reanimate her later on (Mara's animations are ass), which is why we haven't actually shown her ingame.

[Delta]

Fair enough, now I really look forward to seeing her ingame. I always respect a good model edit and new animations. I've only played around with infantry models briefly, but do they require a lot of weighting like in other games? Also basic edits like changing a head do they take a lot of work? Haha sorry for putting some questions in my response, I'm always fascinated learning about EaW modding.

[tlmiller]

I'm actually getting excited to play this again now....Been quite some time since I played it in any form, look forward to the changes in 2.2.

[Corey]

Fair enough, now I really look forward to seeing her ingame. I always respect a good model edit and new animations. I've only played around with infantry models briefly, but do they require a lot of weighting like in other games? Also basic edits like changing a head do they take a lot of work? Haha sorry for putting some questions in my response, I'm always fascinated learning about EaW modding.

No problem, that's pretty much what the forums are for. It would basically be the same process as in other games, really. Set up the bones, skin/weight them, and go from there. Models are fairly low poly in EaW, so there's not too much complexity in how you weight them. As for edits, that really does depend on the kind of edit you're making. If you're changing out something that's a separate mesh and not attached (ie, a new gun model or lightsaber hilt/blade that doesn't require a new stance) then it's pretty simple, just swap out the mesh and attach it to the same bone as the object you're replacing. Same goes for something like a head, except you'll usually have to work it into the neck of whatever you're putting it on and do a bit more weighting (aka skinning). If you look at RI_Cilghal, NI_Duros, or ZJ_Biker/ZJ_Raptor, those were all just reskins where I replaced the heads (with Cilghal and the Duros being much, much better than the Raptors). Same with Talon Karrde, the Yevetha, and all the models I used for the Leader animations, some of which (Daala and Isard) are much better than the others (Zsinj, Pellaeon).

EDIT:
Since there's nowhere ingame you can see them as well.

[Guderian]

This looks really cool.
Can't wait to play 2.2!

[Delta]

Thanks for the very detailed reply Corey! I'll definitely be experimenting with this a lot more now that I have a considerable amount of free time. I've seen some of those models before when I was examining some of them in the ALO viewer. I have to say Daala and Isard, and to some extent Zsinj could easily be ground heroes with the quality they all have now. I'm guessing if I wanted to do that, I'd just have to attach a new mesh and attach it to the right bone. Once I get the older version of max to work on my other PC I'll hopefully be able to actually get to test some of this stuff, as I'll finally be able to export as .alo. Till then I'll just do all I can on the newer max version, and hopefully find someone to help for the alo exports/imports.

[Corey]

There's next to nothing that you can do in a newer version of Max for EaW.

[Lord Xizer]

Finally! Sariss my sweet Sariss! I plan to scheme up ways for each of the Seven Dark Jedi(mainly because I want to watch Maw spin like crazy again lol)
I'll have my voice actress record for her(she looks just like Sariss ironically)

As to Entralla, very happy to see it. Will it have its own map or be a copy of an existing one?
As always great work guys I hope to be more useful once I get settled in my new base.

[Corey]

We're never making any new maps.

[kucsidave]

We're never making any new maps.

I don't blame you. I once asked my friend who is known between our friends as "the mapmaker" since he made maps for almost every game he played, just for fun.
He is also the calmest person I know. But when I asked him to make a map for this game, he called me two weeks later that he eiter abandon this or pushes his keyboard trough his monitor, because the whole map creator pissed him of to no end. Glitching objects, bad design choices... do I really have to continue?

[Lord Xizer]

Understandable. Just thought I'd ask. Still so stoked for Sariss! Gonna scour the galaxy to find Katarn with her and Jerec! Rematch!

[Delta]

There's next to nothing that you can do in a newer version of Max for EaW.

I'm guessing hardpoints and skinning are both handled through the plug-in too? I guess that just leaves UV mapping and making an actual model to newer versions of Max.

[Corey]

I don't blame you. I once asked my friend who is known between our friends as "the mapmaker" since he made maps for almost every game he played, just for fun.
He is also the calmest person I know. But when I asked him to make a map for this game, he called me two weeks later that he eiter abandon this or pushes his keyboard trough his monitor, because the whole map creator pissed him of to no end. Glitching objects, bad design choices... do I really have to continue?

Well from our end, it's easily the most time consuming thing for the least reward. If you want to make a good map, you're looking at 20-40 hours minimum for something that very few people are ever going to see, for part of the game that inherently sucks. Plus it's easy to make one that looks good at first but ends up being bad for gameplay. Any major changes we'd want to make for ground combat would require overhauling those maps to some extent too, which is honestly the biggest reason not to attempt that (along with the inherently shitty map editor and ground battle mechanics of the game). To go off on a tangent, that's why one of the most frustrating (albeit rare) complaints we get is about reuse of ground maps in some locations. There's ~174 planets in the mod at the time I'm writing this, and making a unique map for each of them would take, using my estimates above (we'll say average of 30 hours), 5220 hours total. Assuming a 37.5 hour standard work week (accounting for breaks) even treating this like a full time job where you ONLY make maps, that's two and a half years straight for one person. That's also not including any new props or textures you need to make, or any maps that go over that time (ie Coruscant, which took easily 60 hours from Qui0Jinn and me taking over and shittily finishing it). Realistically, mapping is the major area where we'll never be able to top what PG was able to do; they had better tools and resources, and people whoa re just plain better able to do environment design than I am. One of the biggest mistakes we've made was increasing map sizes the way we did on some maps, so in 2.2 you'll be seeing a lot more vanilla maps popping up to the exclusion of some of our own.

I'm guessing hardpoints and skinning are both handled through the plug-in too? I guess that just leaves UV mapping and making an actual model to newer versions of Max.

Pretty much. Bones can probably be set up in newer versions of max, but part of the issue is a format that can get from newer versions to older ones without it just turning rig information into mesh information (ie bones becoming just straight up meshes) or deleting it outright because the format doesn't support it, since not all .max formats are the same. You can't open a 2015 .max with Max 9.

Typically what we end up doing is model and UV in our choice of program (Maya or Max 2015), skin in Phooshop or, increasingly, Substance painter. Set up smoothing in our original choice of program, then export to OBJ or FBX. After that it gets rigged for Sins in XSI and EaW in Max 9. None of the rigging is done at all in the original modelling program. If you have any more questions, Delta, feel free to add me on Skype. My account info is on my profile here.

[Lord Xizer]

So what you are telling me is we need more slave labor...say no more! I shall fetch some thralls!

What about some of the maps from the ZC campaign? Those were pretty decent.

[Corey]

The thing with mappers in particular is it's not something you can just throw people at, even if we ended up on the front page of every gaming website and pulled people in from every community ever. You could potentially pull environment artists from other games in with experience with their own mapping stuff, but it's not quite the same. Even at the absolute height of EaW I could count on one, maybe two ahnds the number of people who made good maps. To anme the majority, Qui0Jinn, Enceladus and Med8r, who were on TR, and Z3r0x, who frankly,you couldn't pay me to work with, plus a handful of others. It has to be worth replacing original maps with.

Stuff like modellers and texture artists? That's a much more transferable skill, that people can learn for other mods/games (or get professionally trained in) and then transfer over here without ever even touching the specifics of the game. Me and DrKnickers learned from working specifically on EaW and Sins, but Robin, Davis and Slevered all went to school for it. Davis also did some Oblivion/Other modding, and Robin has done work for Renegade X. That's why we're always actively searching out new modellers and texture artists, and even concept artists; the more we have, the more I can personally focus on getting other stuff in-game done, and the more old content we can comfortably redo, or niche features we could get into. I'd gladly double the size of our art team in a second if we had the ability to do so. Hence the new subforum at the top.

As for FoC campaign maps, there's only really one that's better than the GC map for that planet PEtro already made, and that's Dathomir, which has already been converted. The rest aren't really suitable for use outside the campaign.

[Lord Xizer]

Dathomir was indeed the one I was hoping for.

So to be clear...that's a NO on the slave labor?
Because if so I have to return a lot of Chinese yeomen...