Most of you have probably forgotten me. I started modding this game over 15 months ago, planning and executing the first in a series of mods intended to make the game's galaxies a little more realistic. In the middle of that process, I discovered that the game had been changed such that many of my planned improvements were impossible. On the advice of Gauntlet, I chose to put those projects on hold and do something else for a while. The past six months have consisted of constant turmoil in my life, and my escape has been laying the groundwork for a new mod. Since he was so kind to suggest it, I have decided to pee in Gauntlet's pool:
"THE DEATH LIST"
General Pants' Civilization Pack/ Expansion for Gauntlet's Race Mod
There are lots of civs out there on Steam. Many are pretty lackluster. You cannot post civs that are compatible with the GRM, because it "cheats," and gives civs four abilities. So I decided to populate your GRM world with quality new civs. Each civ has:
- A full-res foreground, many of them not seen before in a GCIII race; AFAIK, none used by Gauntlet.
- A full-res background... yawn.
- An average of 30-odd citizens, enough that you won't get too many repeats. Yes, many are just color variations, and all are left-right twins, but some races get male and female citizens, there are several civs with multiple races. A few have only 6-12 individual pictures (what can you do with a worm?), but the most has 300! These are low-rez, as there are over 5,000 of them, and anything more than 128x128 would be hell to download.
- A leader portrait... as with the citizens.
- Citizen names, enough that you won't get too many repeats (I hate repeats).
- Logical, sciency descriptions that match everything else about the civ (pics, number of genders/ species, abilities, etc.).
- Weird, sometimes creepy new "kinds" of civs, so they all don't look like people in rubber masks or death robots (there are still lots of those).
- Logos... none original. Sorry, I had a lot to do.
- Civs that use all current ship sets (Korx, Drath, the non-Gauntlet pirates, universal)
- Civs for the ship sets that aren't logical if used together (e.g., the three Earth shipsets).
In addition, as the mod is developed, some (at most 10-30) civs will also get:
- Their own dialogue.
- Their own home systems (have to coordinate with Gauntlet).
- Their own ship FULL ship styles (i.e., not the half-done Steam ones). Many currently use Gauntlet's styles.
- Their own color schemes, patterns, and other distinctive decorative elements.
Others will be invited to fill in the elements for the civs I care less about (about 30 are "my babies," with ship styles already begun).
Sounds like just another civ pack. Yawn. What is the catch?
THERE ARE 135 OF THEM!
Right now, all the graphics are done, about 40 of the civs have full descriptions, and I am in filling out the rest, programming in the citizens (I'm not going to do it with the internal system, that would take forever), and packaging everything. It may take a couple months or so, depending on how much real science I have to do at the same time, and how long the citizen names take. Really, the damned citizen pictures were the hard part, and took from June to a couple days ago!
I will fill your GRM universe. Oh yes, I will...
