Orion Skies

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Showing posts from December, 2022

2022 Review, and a Look Forward

- December 20, 2022

TL;DR: Lots of accomplishments this year, with many more planned for the future. :) Progress in 2022 This year, a number of major milestones were hit, and a lot of technical progress was accomplished "behind the scenes" to enable Orion Skies to live up to my vision of its ideal form. Full Design In 2022 I was able to finish a complete design of Orion Skies’s world & history , and an outline of the major story elements that will unfold in-game. I also finished the technical/gameplay design, and even created a specific plan to release Orion Skies in parts (first a small-but-meaningful initial release, and then adding expansions to fill it out). Tech Generator The Tech Generator implements user-guided procedural techniques to produce data for weapons and outfits for an EV scenario, while ensuring they all fit specific balance targets. This year, the Tech Generator reached Version 1.0, giving the user control over all of the data fields that go into the outf

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"