Star Wars - The Evacuation of Yavin (in beta development)

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Tue Dec 12, 2017 8:32 pm

Ahead of the mod release tomorrow, a new banner has been added to the opening post on page 1.
This is where you will find the download link tomorrow.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Tue Dec 12, 2017 8:59 pm

Have made changes to the mod where hopefully Emperor Palpatine and Princess Leia are not going to be replaced as leaders for a long time. These 2 characters need to be leaders for a long time. Same changes applied to the characters Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca so they are not killed off early.

The preview alpha version of the mod is expected to go live on Wednesday 6am America Central Time.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 12:53 pm

We are minutes away from the mod link going active. Apologies for the delay in getting this out this morning as I was trying to use mediafire to host the file but after 3 hours uploading to mediafire it came up with an error message and aborted the upload.

Am using another option which will be a lot quicker for me to upload to in the future.

I am working on the first update which should be ready to download later today.

Shipsets are not as I had hoped so I am going back to the topdown view of the ships...... this will allow me to get the ships down for all 51 races a lot quicker.

Check back later today for the first update which will be the ship image folder only.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 1:01 pm

Mod is released and now available to download as a preview version.
There are many updates to the mod over the coming weeks with the first update available later today.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 3:37 pm

The first patch has been added to the opening post on page 1.
The patch takes the mod to alpha version 0.02 and updates the Rebel Alliance ships.
After installing the main mod files you only need to download each patch as they appear and extract the zip file into the the Customization folder.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 4:05 pm

Have picked up a bug that seems to have come out of nowhere where the characteristics of the races are wrong.

For example the Sullustan below is classified incorrectly as belonging to a semi-insectoid family and living on an iceworld where it should belong to the humanoid family and living on a planet more of volcanic appearance.

Will add this to page 1 as a required patch to get out asap to fix this issue.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 5:43 pm

A second patch has been added to the opening post on page 1 to fix a problem where the planet types and family type were incorrect.
For example the Wookie race were incorrectly given a home planet being a lava planet.

This is an important update and recommended along with other patches to be downloaded.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 7:19 pm

Patch #3 has been added to the first post page one and this now has random bias between the 51 races in the mod.
This is purely random and I have no say on how one race will feel about another or how much they hate or like each other.

That is except for the bias between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance.
At no stage should they have positive feelings towards each other.

Vanilla Distant Worlds Universe allows bias between races to be between -50 and +50, minus of course being negative bias, and the values are always as numbers 5, 10 or 15 plus or minus. My mod has any value between -50 and +50.

I have coded my bias generator to have bias between the Empire and Rebellion to be somewhere between -30 and -50,meaning they will hate each other.

If you look at the picture below, the line 0,Rebel Alliance shows -33 in the 2nd position which is the Rebel bias towards the Empire.
The line below 1, Galactic Empire has a -36 in position 1 which is the negative bias towards the Rebels.

Looking at this random bias I created in this example the Rebellion has negative views towards the Empire, the Zabrak, the Hutt, the Togruta, Roadians and the Mon Calamari for example.

My plan is to have random bias files available for you to download if you want a change in gameplay.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 9:22 pm

As well as random biases between races there is also now a random bias file created between race families. This will make game play interesting because Wookies for example may get on with the Hutt but may not like slug-type races at all....which include the Hutt.

The family bias file is in patch #4 post 1 page 1.

Along with the other race bias files I am looking at having random family bias files here to download

In the bias family file created below the Changling family does not get on with 11 other families in the galaxy..... which would make the game difficult for the Clawdites.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 10:48 pm

The planet Endor does make an appearance in the mod however the Ewoks are not included as a playable race as they by Episode VI had not achieved a technological status of being able to build spaceships.

Ewoks were not the only ones whose home world was Endor.

The Yazzum who were seen on Tatooine in Episode VI also have Endor as their home world and they were advanced and ravelled to other planets. Hence I have added them to the mod in Patch #5 on post 1 page 1.

Extract the zip file into the Customize folder and all the image and text files for the Yazzum will add to the mod.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Wed Dec 13, 2017 10:58 pm

The start of work on creating the background map image for the mod.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Thu Dec 14, 2017 2:48 am

With the leaders such as Palpatine and Leia Organa I am making changes to the mod in order that the leaders dont get killed off quickly.

I notice in the policy file that there is a Yes/No option for ProtectLeaderAtAllCosts ;N
I have changed that to Y

There is also a line HomeworldDefensePriority ;1
I am changing this to 4.0 to ensure the races do protect their homeworlds with more priority.

I am also looking at the line UseExplorationShipsToScoutEnemySystems ;Y
With this set to Y there is an increased chance that explorer ships would be destroyed.
Setting this to N for gameplay trials

In the policy file there is also a line ConstructionSpaceportMinimumDistance ;700
I am doubling this value to 1400 so that no spaceports build closer to each other than 1,400 thousand units distance.

In the design template files the attribute for the size of the ship graphics is not there by default and the line needs to be added. I am scaling the ships up by 150 to 200% and larger ships a little more than that.

ImageScaling Absolute 300 must be scaled between 10 and 1000

or, with the one I will use
ImageScaling Scaled 2.5 must be scaled between 0.05 and 10.0... the 10 possibly being the size of the Death Star.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Thu Dec 14, 2017 3:35 pm

My gameplay test this morning.....

The Rebel Alliance concentrated their efforts on building their starfighter squadron of X-wing starfighters and after 10 minutes the first fleet of X-Wings known as Red Squadron, or Red Group, was patrolling the system under the command of Red Leader.

The 14 X-Wings of Red Group patrolled the system looking for Tie-Fighter patrols which might detect the location of the Rebels and inform the Empire of where the Rebel Base was.

This mod is heavily focused on battles between X-Wings and the Empire's Tie Fighters and Star Destroyers. The bad news for the Rebel Alliance is when a Star Destroyer appears. I am trying to focus the mod on limiting Star Destroyers to small numbers as they will be hard to take down.

All starships in the Rebel Alliance have being scaled up in size.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Thu Dec 14, 2017 8:08 pm

While testing some additions to the mod yesterday I soon became irritated by the music when talking to other races.

On its own I liked that music but I soon realized that it sounded different from the rest of the music in the mod and was starting to sound a little irritating.

I have now replaced the music with something a lot more likable and added it as patch #7 on page 1

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:32 am

I have added a new patch file to page 1 which adds 84 Imperial characters to the mod.
Emperor Palpatine is the ruler but if he does somehow die during the game the 3 characters that ruled after Palpatine have been added to the mod.

We saw Grand Moff Tarkin in Episode III, IV and Rogue One...... there are a total of 20 Grand Moffs included in the mod.

Characters included here are from the movies, novels and comics.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:36 am

I am hoping to have the new Imperial ships ,profiles and design templates ready to download tomorrow.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Fri Dec 15, 2017 12:40 pm

Testing the new Empire shipsets as well as the larger Death Star size.
If all works well the ship patch file will be ready to download in next few hours.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Fri Dec 15, 2017 4:14 pm

Patch number 8 on the first page includes my customized sounds for construction.
The sound files are a little softer and I have also reduced the volume so that the music can be heard instead of only the construction work.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Fri Dec 15, 2017 4:49 pm

The picture below shows the new look graphics for the Empire's Tie Fighter. The yellow box had the old looking fighters in the first version of the mod and I was not happy with how they looked.

So all ships are getting a makeover to look of similar quality to the Tie Fighter below miffle bottom of the picture.

rjord2021 · Post by **rjord2021** » Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:39 pm

This is where mod development slows down...... the creation of this Star Destroyer is a slow process as I work out it's size...make adjustments and try loading the mod again.

Of course a Star Destroyer this size means rethinking what I do with the Death Star.