Orion Skies

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Showing posts from August, 2022

Using & Improving the Tech Generator

- August 20, 2022

TL;DR: Exciting progress is happening on the "expanded outfits" plug-ins! The upcoming "modifiers" feature will open up a lot of great options. "Expanded Outfits" Plug-Ins Now that the Tech Generator is producing output that can be directly imported into ResForge or EVNEW, the process of using it to create plug-ins feels very different than the "traditional" plug-in development approach. It is a repeating process of defining what the Generator should produce, having it generate a plug-in based on those definitions, testing that plug-in, and then going back to revise the definitions for the next generation of the plug-in. In the time since last month's blog post, I've been working on three outfit expansion plug-ins– one each for EVC, EVO, and EVN. These plug-ins are currently on their 26th generation, with each generation incorporating new updates and improvements. These plug-ins have the same goals as the outfit changes I made ...

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"