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Get a sneak peek at the huge amount of modification and customization available in Distant Worlds

Matrix Games and Code Force (www.codeforce.co.nz) are proud to release a preview of the customization guide for the hotly awaited 4X real time space strategy game, Distant Worlds! The several page PDF document is available for download from the Distant Worlds downloads page.

Distant Worlds is a vast, real-time, 4X space strategy game. Experience the full depth and detail of large turn-based strategy games, but with the simplicity and ease of real-time, and on the scale of a massively-multiplayer online game.

Vast galaxies are made to order: up to 1400 star systems, with up to 50,000 planets, moons and asteroids. Galaxies are so deep, fun and immersive that you won’t want to finish the game... Build, expand and improve your empire endlessly. The galaxy is packed with life and activity. Encounter other empires, independent alien colonies, traders, pirates and space monsters. Explore star systems, asteroid fields, gas clouds, supernovae, galactic storms and black holes. Discover evidence of civilizations long since past, uncovering secrets about the galaxy's troubled history...

Best of all, you can play the game your way: enjoy a quick, intense game in a crowded galaxy or take your time in an epic game spread across a vast galaxy!

Get more information on Distant Worlds from its official product page and be sure to check out the new preview of the customization guide!

SWEET!! Can't wait for first week of March. [:'(]

Does a 100 in ship maintenance mean all ships are maintenance free, half as much, or twice as much?

Can you customize your own race in game?

I like the super goodies your race can have access too.

Also like that caution and aggression are two seperate values.

I look forward to the release.

Very nice guide! - the possibilities seems almost endless

Look great.I must say that I am impresed by this.
Hopes for the best.

Was reading this today and I have a question.
 
I see the ship images have to be square and no more that 200x200 pixels. Obviously the ships themselves will be all sorts of shapes within this 200x200 pixel square. What colour would the transparancy part of the image have to be.

ORIGINAL: Xmudder
Does a 100 in ship maintenance mean all ships are maintenance free, half as much, or twice as much?

When Ship Maintenance Savings are 0 you have no savings over the normal maintenance costs. When it is 100 you then save all the maintenance costs, i.e. you pay NO ship maintenance.

Can you customize your own race in game?

Yes, all races are customizable and playable - you can choose whichever race you want to play.

ORIGINAL: drillerman
I see the ship images have to be square and no more that 200x200 pixels. Obviously the ships themselves will be all sorts of shapes within this 200x200 pixel square. What colour would the transparancy part of the image have to be.

The transparent part is transparent [:)]

With PNG image files you can have full transparency, i.e. alpha channel level is zero.

If you don't have a paint program that supports transparent PNG files, take a look at Paint.Net. It's free and fully featured.

This game could use the graphics mods already used for SpaceEmpiresIV.I think Babylon5 and StarTrek would be awesome in this engine with the scale.

Thanks for the reply. I have been mucking around with some spaceship pictures from Gratuitous Space battles. They are .dds files which I read in IRFANVIEW. I then resizes them to 200x200 pixels and saved them as .PNG files. When I looked at them in Paint shop pro they had a black background. Is this correct or should they have NO background?
 
BTW, Elliotg, while we are on this thread and no one is listening quickly tell me when the game will be released. Feb or March, come on tell me, go on, promise I won't tell anyone else!!!!!

ORIGINAL: drillerman
Thanks for the reply. I have been mucking around with some spaceship pictures from Gratuitous Space battles. They are .dds files which I read in IRFANVIEW. I then resizes them to 200x200 pixels and saved them as .PNG files. When I looked at them in Paint shop pro they had a black background. Is this correct or should they have NO background?

I don't know the details of all of those programs, but PNG files have a 32-bit image depth, 8 bits each for red, green, blue and alpha components. The paint program needs to set the alpha component to zero to have full transparency. Paint.Net (and Photoshop, etc) will display this properly, with the transparent background overlaid on top of a checkered background.

In your case it sounds like one of the steps in the process didn't capture the transparency properly. Sometimes you need to specifically set the background to transparent when saving PNG files. Maybe IRFANVIEW has some settings for this?

BTW, Elliotg, while we are on this thread and no one is listening quickly tell me when the game will be released. Feb or March, come on tell me, go on, promise I won't tell anyone else!!!!!

"Soon" [:)]

I just d/l and installed Paint.net. WOW what a great app. It does everything. reads .dds files and saves them as transparent PNG files. good stuff!
 
Ok, smarty pants, Less of the soon and more of the "oh yeah, no problem, it's out this Friday". [:'(]
 
 

ORIGINAL: drillerman
I just d/l and installed Paint.net. WOW what a great app. It does everything. reads .dds files and saves them as transparent PNG files. good stuff!

That's cool, didn't realize it could do that.

I see there's a 20 race limit which is fine but is the race family also limited?  What if I wanted to create an avian species or mechanical species or anything else?  Is that possible?

ORIGINAL: Joram
I see there's a 20 race limit which is fine but is the race family also limited?  What if I wanted to create an avian species or mechanical species or anything else?  Is that possible?

You cannot currently create new race families. But, in theory the game could handle this change.

After release there will probably be lots of different things that players want to mod that are not currently exposed as moddable. Once there's some comprehensive feedback on what everyone wants to mod - a big list no doubt - we'll go through and evaluate the settings that can be exposed in a text file or the like. Most things are probably doable, but we'll have to see on some of the more involved things.

Right here is an example of why I have so many hopes for this game. It's not as much what's in the Customization Guide that impresses me so much, it's that there IS a Customization Guide. You look at the Guide being released before the game, the excellent preview videos, and so on, and it's very evident that the Code Force people have their act together. Go team go! [:)]

As...

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

This game could use the graphics mods already used for SpaceEmpiresIV.I think Babylon5 and StarTrek would be awesome in this engine with the scale.

I think... in no time we can use a huge mass of ships,races.
Maybe most of the current png files are too small... to be "neat" in game...
but with little effert with 3DS MAX & c.o. (using the p.d. mesh) we can have as many
MOD as "the stars" [:D] [:D] [:D]

Any know where we can find 2D top down spaceships. I have been resizing the Gratuitous Space battles ships and they look really very good.

ORIGINAL: eltharion

As...

ORIGINAL: ASHBERY76

This game could use the graphics mods already used for SpaceEmpiresIV.I think Babylon5 and StarTrek would be awesome in this engine with the scale.

I think... in no time we can use a huge mass of ships,races.
Maybe most of the current png files are too small... to be "neat" in game...
but with little effert with 3DS MAX & c.o. (using the p.d. mesh) we can have as many
MOD as "the stars" [:D] [:D] [:D]

I have never seen a Farscape mod.

What about weapon nodes? Are they also dots of some pure color? On one of the videos i noticed that a ship fired its weapons from two specific points on ship image.

Is there any kind of 'ship type-image size' connection? I noticed that you can pick any picture for any class of a ship. Will an image that was designed to represent a destroyer scale up on larger ship classes?