Orion Skies

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Showing posts from October, 2022

Spacecraft of Orion Skies

- October 15, 2022

TL;DR: A rundown of spacecraft types in Orion Skies, and incredible found artwork to help imagine them. Over the past couple of weeks I've been taking a break from Tech Generator work do some "visual worldbuilding"– I'm a very visual thinker, but simultaneously am not very good at picturing things clearly in my head! So, I've been scouring the internet for sci-fi artwork that looks like it could fit into my imagined vision for Orion Skies's universe, and then using that imagery to strengthen my imagined vision, and to conceptually explore design details that I hadn't considered before. Based on this work, I feel like I have a much more solid plan now of what types of spacecraft will be featured in Orion Skies and how they all fit in to that universe. So I wanted to make a blog post about them, featuring some of the artwork I've found. Please note that none of this art is mine and none of it was created for Orion Skies; when I get to the phase

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"