I and my brother just started modding ES to introduce the Star Trek universe. We have successfully set up a basic mod setup including factions and ships, but from this on, we don't really make any progress anymore. As the title says, we have four issues we'd like to solve. My description will use some Star Trek terminology though.



1) We don't get the star ships to their appropriate size. We tested this with Cardassians, so my example will be based on them. As a scout, we use Hideki, next is Brinok, then Galor, Keldon and finally Hutet class. By default, there is no difference between the Hidekis and the Brinoks size, Galor is a bit larger then Keldon, difference between those two groups appears to be too small. No matter how much I scale the ships in Blender, the relative size is not affected. I could influence the sizes using the Size attribute in the index.xml for the templates, but this approach would be far too less accurate for this case. Also, our experiences seem to contradict what we read about the ships scale: that they should be similar in size than their vanilla ES counterparts. Yet the scale within Blender doesn't seem to influence anything.



2) Our ships hologram on the galaxy view did change (something roughly triangular), now we don't know how we did this. I suppose the triangular shape comes with ES itself and is used as a fallback for custom factions - am I right? Could it be set to something user made?



3) While we managed to replace the vanilla colony ship with Hidekis art, we'd like to have it different from the scouts art, which is currently not the case. We followed the instruction of the candy and the Ships and Planets tutorial mod as well as the modding guide about ship modding, but we actually don't get how we replaced the colony ship, nor do we know how to do just that using a different model. Having modded civ4 for years and have some experiences regarding civ5, I have to say that ES' xmls are a mess compared to them as it is not obvious to us how ships are actually linked to the affinities / factions. Seems like the link is implicit, which would be bad. The guides don't really explain that part, they just say 'do that and then this' - that's bad again. - SOLVED



4) We'd like to rename the home system of each faction to something fixed. We could imagine two ways: a) by a starting trait similar to how you add default fleets or b) by the Galaxy generator. Still, we could not yet find a method to do this. Any help would be appreciated.

You can use the Savegame editor for #4, but obviously would have to do it each time you start a game.

Thank you for the hint. Still, it seems to be a suboptimal solution for obvious reasons. If there shouldn't be anything like that yet, it would be nice by the devs if they'd introduce something simi9lar to how you set up a factions home planets type etc. Shouldn't be too hard to introduce a command to rename the system...

brother_of_zolsk82 : Do you mod in standalone or not? If your mod isn't set as standalone, you run a high risk that some of your changes won't stick due to conflict with the stock files. Running it in standalone means you have to put almost all the files in, but at least you are sure that all the changes made will work (assuming no Hardcoded limitations).

Thank you, too, Foraven, for your help. The truth is that I don't know exactly whether the mod is standalone or not as my brother did the xml modding (while I was working on converting the 3d models), but I will check this asap. I suppose you were thinking about the ships sizes. If that is the case, I don't see how these two things fit together. Just for the case I was unclear: the ships show up and can be influenced through the index file, but there are only three different sizes: small, medium and large. These are too rough for my purposes. Having said this, I could imagine that the ship would not load at all, but it seems unlogical to me that only the sizes are loading incorrectly. But of course, I'll give your advice a shot. BTW: I just converted another Galaxy class for the Federation from a different nif file than the previous version (which was a bit too high poly) and this one was different in size. I was thinking that the ships may be rescaled automatically to fit into the ship design window, but in this case, both Galaxys should have been in a similar size. I'm really confused. Well, I just discovered that there is a free version of unity. Trying to load my obj files into unity and see what's going on there will be another approach I'll check.

So we gave your suggestion a shot, but without any success. To illustrate the issue, I took a couple of screenshots (hope you can see them) of the cube and the tactical cube of the Borg. The tactical cube was made out of the same cube as the normal cube, I just added an additional part to it. Both cubes templates are set to medium within the index file. So, the actual cubic parts should be equal in size, the entire tactical cube should have been smaller than the ordinary cube. Still, the tactical cube is smaller than the cube, which seems to support my theory that the game automatically scales the models. I have to say that I don't understand why this is the case. It would have been a better design to provide an entry to the templates to adjust the size, maybe even two (one for the ship design screen and one for the battles). As scaling is done already, this shouldn't be a problem.



I provided a third screenshot to show that the two cubes are identical in size. It shows the two models in Blender. As the two cubes are the same, you'll see them as one, plus the additional part of the tactical cube. There's a list on the right, showing that there are actually two models.

Nice models . I wish i could do modeling, but my gift seem to play with data instead...

Thank you, but to be honest: I didn't model them. I'm not a good artist either, I just converted these ships from a page about modding Star Trek Bridge Commander. They are already user-made, there is a lot of user-made content about Star Trek and if I add a disclaimer to the mod, Paramount certainly will be fine with this, I suppose. Anyways, converting these nif files with nifskope wasn't a problem. Besides of that page, there is also a Civ4 mod about Star Trek also containing nif files. We don't have any models from there in use yet anymore. If there is someone interested in creating some 2d art to Trekify the GUI - of course only, if that is moddable (I think it is) - we'd gladly accept help.

Please, oh please, keep up the good work. I have been hoping for a star trek mod for this game, just feels like it could fit into endless space so well.

Thank you for your support. I have to say that Star Trek doesn't fit into ES perfectly. For example there is no espionage system at the moment which would be necessary for Dominion, Romulans and Cardassians. So there will be limitations, at least for now.



I am glad to announce that we managed it to replace the colony ships art without touching the other ships, so one of the issues is solved (and is marked as such in post 1). Although we found out how the game loads the holograms for the diplomacy screen and the ships, we could still not replace them. What we tried is basically adding templates for them just how it's done with ships while renaming the elements and adjusting the path to fit what we found out. As we had no luck with that, I assume that either some attribute is missing or that the game cannot load these type of template, at least at this point.



We had some test games and after some initial difficulties (way too strong Borg and weak Klingons), things seem to work at least roughly. Borg were pretty strong although using the sowers affinity - they wiped out the Federation (sophons) and Dominion (Horatio) and caused some trouble to beat even though we were two fighting them. I played Klingons and it was great fun to be the bad ass building ships all the time and invade my neighbours. Hope that will work for the AI as well.



GUI doesn't seem to be as moddable as I hoped it. I had the idea of getting an UTF-8 capable Star Trek font from somewhere and mod that in. Doesn't seem like that could be done.

I have been trying to add a 7th ship selection to the menu I have had no luck so far, does anyone now how to add a 7th selection?



For the Design view have you edited the view form camera? for medium ships it's 400 and for large ships it's 700 that might make the one cube look bigger then the other?

Oh on top of that I found all star system names under localization\english\Localization_Locales.xml form there you can edit all star names etc

Thank you for your comment, Prism_Black. I don't think that you can add a 7th ship at the moment. There is an xml file that controls how a ships internal name (so that it can be found be the game) has to be built up. This file is stored in the assets, so to mod it, you'd have to edit it right there, not in a mods directory on your c drive. That seems to be a complicated thing (you can't edit it just like that). The pattern looks like that: Prefabs/Spaceships/$(AffinityMapping)/SS_$(AffinityMapping)_$(ShipSize)_$(Variation). You might be able to mod another variation and ship size, but I I doubt this would work as the game seems to be configured to expect only six ships as the six slots suggest.



I did not edit any camera for the design view and I made both ships medium in size (although the tactical cube is meant to be large in the final version) just for the test. So, both ships should have turned out equally in size. Still, thank you for the hint, it might be of use later. As of the star names, I know that, but the problem is that you can't (or at least I don't know how) affect which one will be the home systems. So, I could name a system Qonos, but I couldn't specify it to be the Klingons home system.

Thank you for the help on where I might start



But when I posted I forgot where the info was lol it's in Registry.xml at the bottom





350.0

500.0

700.0

800.0





as you can see I have already been playing with it lol

This looks nice, do you have your own thread advertising your mod in the making to the community? If not then you should make one to draw in interested members!



Keep it up!

Thank you for your support guys. No, there is no other thread about this mod than this. For the moment, this one will do it till we are ready with the initial version. Please, don't expect too much from the first version. At the moment, we are working on the factions traits. For now, we are just reusing the affinities of the default species of Endless Space. Most of them already reflect Star Trek races more or less fairly - like Hissho does for Klingons. Keeping the affinities as they are (without renaming them) will cause the loading screens of the new races not to show up. So we started to rename the traits which led to a mess as a couple of unique techs don't show up properly and we'll have to check each affinity. Once the affinities work again, we'll rename a couple of resources, yet some of them will also remain as they are for now. If that's done, we'll likely release the initial version. To complete the information given by this post, I'll give you a list of races added and which default ES race they are based on:

- Federation (Sophon)

- Ferengi (Amoeba)

- Cardassians (United Empire)

- Dominion (Horatio)

- Klingons (Hissho)

- Species 8472 (Cravers)

- Romulans (Automaton)

- Borg (Sower)



There are enough ships for Breen as well although I'll have to recheck them whether they are low poly enough. We would also have 5 ships for the Xindi, so would only need one more to have a complete set. These two species might be added with later versions of the mod.



As soon as the initial version is out, we'd need help with the localization as neither me nor my brother really feel attracted to that work. We are hoping to get help from the community.