Orion Skies

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Showing posts from April, 2022

History & Lore... in Song Form!

- April 21, 2022

TL;DR : A big lore dump. Also, I sing (sorry) an Orion Skies version of Billy Joel's song " We Didn't Start the Fire ". Life has been extra busy for me lately: my wife and I bought a home, which is tremendously exciting, but it's also time-consuming to move, make repairs, get services set up, repaint some rooms, unpack everything and decide where it all should go, buy additional furniture, etc etc... What that means is, I haven't had many open blocks of time to finish up the Tech Generator this month– however, I still have a rather long commute to and from work each day, and I usually spend it thinking about Orion Skies! This month, I've been thinking about worldbuilding & lore, and have actually made some great headway on that front. :) To celebrate this progress, I created an Orion Skies version of the history-laden rock song " We Didn't Start the Fire " , describing the history behind OS's setting. Then I went ahead and

Welcome!

Hi! My name is Chris, though my EV-community Discord handle is "Mag Steelglass". I created this site to share information about my Cosmic Frontier plug-in projects with the community, and also to share tools & resources for other plug-in developers.

My goal is to develop three interconnected plug-ins:

1) The Expanded Suite, a collection of game-feature mods aiming to expand on Cosmic Frontier’s strengths.

2) Ares Forever, adapting the excellent 2D space game Ares, and its innovative features, to the Cosmic Frontier engine.

3) Orion Skies, a Total Conversion plug-in that takes place entirely within a nebula. As such, ships are able to hide in the nebula fog and use submarine-like tactics, etc – and there is also space weather such as electrical storms and turbulence, and different regions of the nebula have different physical properties. Orion Skies will be using all of the game features developed for The Expanded Suite and the Ares adaptation.

Given that Cosmic Frontier is not yet available for building plug-ins, I’m currently focused on preparatory work – developing tools, learning about 3D graphics, doing design and worldbuilding work, etc. When Cosmic Frontier comes out, my focus will shift to building these plug-ins, aiming for small initial releases early on followed by periodic updates until they are complete.

I previously created a large-scale plug-in for EVO-on-Nova called EVO: Expanded, to which The Expanded Suite is a successor. Before that, I created several plug-ins for Ares. I've also created a few themed "cubes" for Magic: the Gathering.

In any case, I hope visitors to this site will enjoy hearing about these projects, and of course to also enjoy playing them when they’re ready. :)

-- Chris Paff, a.k.a. "Mag Steelglass"