Florian is also known as Ravine (we have another Florian, but that’s Thortillas). He has recently joined Amplitude Studios: he is our Tools Programmer, his favourite colour seems to be pink (you will find out why in a bit) and actually has a pretty cool “Charlie the Unicorn” coffee mug. You have probably seen him posting on the Modding Forums, advising people and trying to help them out. He is going to tell you about the recent Modding improvements which would be included in the Add-On.
Can you please describe the work that you do at Amplitude Studios?
Hi! For the past 2 month, my work mainly consisted in trying to understand the huge codebase of Endless Space, and trying to not introduce too many bugs while adding more and more access to the game for modders.
Previously, I’ve worked on the Galaxy Generator (the whole open sourcing, documentation, and refactoring for example). Lately, I worked on the upcoming planet and ship modding, and I have to admit that it was not an easy task (some of my shirts are still soaked of tears of despair and frustration).
Also, I stop from time to time by the Modding Forum, to give hints when I feel I can answer. Our modders and VIPs did a really amazing work so far, and I hope they will like what’s coming.
What is coming?
Winter is coming. And more ways to customize planets and ships. Indeed, modders will be able specify custom models for an Affinity, and thus, change the aspect of a race. They will be able to add new types of planets, and give them a whole new appearance if they want to. I’ve made a mod to show the players how they can mod those parts. They will be able to see the gorgeous Pinky type of planet (a strange world which holds more people the smaller they are, and yields happiness and science), and a custom model from SolCommand (you can see his work here). I also worked with Pleasure’s first model for the upcoming BSG mod for early testing.
It’s only a first step though. Modders can only modify the planet textures and colors, and load custom models. But they are still based on existing material inside the game, so we plan to give more control on ship customization (for FX spawning like exhausts, weapons, etc), and enhance the shader support to allow better looking ships in game.
Can you show us some screenshots?
Sure! First, let’s have a look at our new type of Planet. The pinky ones. Modders can change the textures of the planets. They can also change the overall halo color of the planet, so it fits better with the textures they’ll chose to have.
The second part is what people were waiting for: new ship models!
Here's an example from the ship design panel.
What’s next?
More control over ship modding. It’s a first step, but I’ll continue to add features to that part of modding, because I know people will quickly want more stuff. It’s not perfect right now, but it’s good enough to allow people to play with custom ships, and new planets. I’ll keep you posted about that.
Ravine working and crying
In the meantime, do not hesitate to stop by the forums and check the tutorial, guidelines, and the almost-full-mod-for-custom-planets-and-ships that I used during my tests.