Orion Skies

   TL;DR: The EV Tech Generator is now producing a full range of weapons in the style of EV Override! I need to do final checks to confirm that they're all working correctly, then I'll move on to generating outfits. :) EV Tech Generator    A few weeks ago I went down a conceptual rabbit-hole in which I thought about using design concepts from Magic: the Gathering to guide the creation of weapons and outfits in Orion Skies. In this paradigm, each outfit would be roughly analogous being its own Magic card.    Magic cards have two properties that I felt were worth exploring further in connection to this idea: There are a lot of unique cards . Although each card is unique, they also follow well-defined rules governing how much each card costs & what it can do.    To pursue those properties in an EVx context, I began working on the EV Tech Generator : A procedural generator will be very helpful if I decide to include large quantities of weapons ...

   TL;DR: I’m planning to make Lua mods to bring a number of Ares features onto CFO. These mods will be usable with the Override scenario and will take on a life of their own beyond Ares.    With the new “Modbox” channel on the Evocation Games Discord server , discussion looks to start really heating up around modding for Cosmic Frontier . And although I’m intentionally keeping my plans for Orion Skies very flexible at this point, I do have specific plans to first create an adaptation of Ares for CFO, along with accompanying Lua-feature mods. I figured this is a good time to share more details of what the Ares adaptation and its Lua mods will entail. Ares    Ares is a 2D space action game, released by Ambrosia back when the EV series was current, with very similar overall physics to the EV series. The biggest gameplay difference is that, instead of making your way as a private citizen in the galaxy, you are leading military forces in a structured c...

   This month, I went down a rabbit hole of ideas based on Magic: the Gathering, which ultimately led me to start work on a weapons & outfits generator !    In last month's blog post, I wrote about designing "cubes" in Magic: the Gathering, and about how I felt in some ways cubes are analogous to TCs, and how some aspects of cube design can transfer to TC design; I also wrote about ideas for Orion Skies from the paradigm of cube design.   One set of concepts that I use when designing cubes, I call "MSCTT". That stands for "Mechanics, Synergies, Counters, Tradeoffs, and Tension". These ideas help me design interesting interactions between the cards in a cube so that the cards can be woven by players into interesting deck strategies & matchups.   The concepts of "MSCTT" are very heavily based on the specific ways in which Magic's strategy is designed. I ended last month's blog post with the idea that I would have to spend some...

   tl;dr: Building a "cube" in Magic: the Gathering is in many ways similar to building a TC plug-in for the EV/CF series. I've built a few cubes, and in the process I learned a lot about designing them well, and lately I've been thinking about how to adapt those design concepts to an EV/CF context and to Orion Skies specifically. Magic is one of the few other games that has truly stood the test of time, at least for me. I definitely recommend trying it if you can find someone to play with.    In addition to the EV series, one of the other handful of games I have enjoyed since childhood is Magic: the Gathering. For those unfamiliar, it's a strategy card game with (currently) about ~22,000 different cards , each of which has unique abilities. There are a few different ways to play, but it always involves choosing which cards to put in your deck such that the combination of cards will have a coherent strategy. Your opponent(s) have done the same with their deck(s)...

   This past month, life has gotten much busier for me. My social group is all fully vaccinated at this point, so we've been busy getting together in-person again and making up for lost time. Aside from that, I’ve had a number of other things going on in my personal life – some fun, and some practical. Overall life has been good, but I’ve had less time than before for things like daily 3D work.    With that said, I have made some progress on 3D work since my last update on that, and I've also continued to design the world and scenario for Orion Skies itself. 3D Clouds    My last update about my progress on 3D graphics was two months ago. After that post, I spent some time trying to learn how to do high-quality 3D clouds and skies.    As before, I started by following a “cloudscape” tutorial from Blender Guru, a 3D artist who has made a number of high-quality tutorials.    However, that cloudscape tutorial is several years old, and Bl...

   I’ve been making mods for Ares, Override, and other games since the mid-90s, and in that time I have learned many lessons “the hard way". Recently I got to thinking about what I’ve learned from all of this, and about what advice I would give someone today. This advice is primarily focused on creating and releasing large mods, though most of it can apply to mods of any sort. These concepts have been very helpful for me, and I hope they may benefit others as well. :) 🎨 Go for It!: Modding is fun and worthwhile in and of itself, even if you don't plan to release anything. If you feel like making a mod, or even just messing around with the tools to see what you can do, I'd encourage you to give it a try. As long as you're having fun, you're doing it right. :) ❤️ Love the Process: This is a video game. The point is to enjoy it. Creating a mod typically takes a long time. If modding is a chore for you, and you’re unhappy doing it, that'll drag you down fo...

   This month's 3D work has been entirely focused on oceans. Aside from being useful as a backdrop for the naval fighter plane I've been building for practice, oceans will also be used quite a lot in the planetary graphics for Orion Skies. As such, I wanted to take the time to really do them well. First Ocean   When it comes to oceans, Blender is really nice in that it has a built-in ocean simulation system; however, its default operation is very limited in scale.    Several months ago, I used it to create a basic ocean; that ocean worked well-enough to do some practice images, but it was also quite limited in a number of ways.    That ocean was a 1-kilometer-by-1-kilometer square, with "frozen" waves that can't move. In order to make it look halfway decent, I had to carefully position it in front of the camera for every image I rendered, being careful to rotate the ocean to line an edge up with the horizon. In this render, I forgot to manually rotat...