Wow XenonS, that is quite the undertaking you are doing. I didn't think any of the tools would allow such things as adding new planets. Would you you existing assets or would you try to make the planets unique? Just fixing a lot of the missions and making it more challenging would be great, I know I have held off on buying the game because it wasn't 'officially' ported over to english with voice-overs and such. If we got a script could english voice overs be created?

Hi DarkOne,

well, I'm starting to analyze all the SDK tools, the mission editor, a localisation tool and the possibility to mod the textures. These tools are very well documented, there are even help files present. It's all in russian, so I will pass all in Google Translate and re-edit the most important things.

My list above is roughly ranked from the easiest things towads the most hard ones to achieve, reasonably - in the best of cases -  I don't think that all of this can be done without eliminating original content. Also I have no idea how the executables will react after such changes. There is a long testing work to be done first.

Planets can not be added (unlandable yes, but that's pointless), but it seems there is an access to 2 of them that were taken out prior release. The question is: are the corresponding 3D worlds also present? If not, then these planet activations would be futile. I would be astonished if I find them, they take a lot of HD memory, so they sureley have been removed. Terrain can probably be created, but then, hey, I'd better occupy a whole crew of artists for several monthes...Now I realize why such games hit the 6-figures pre-budget 🙂

On planets, any objects, persons, etc. can however be changed, removed, added etc and new mission "waypoints" and "conditional events" can be created or modified in order to create new missions for the player. Then, the UI can be adapted (English dialogs and mission descriptions as subtitles or descriptive pop-ups.)

I have some professional localisation and translation tools (I'm am a translator myself), so the text language part is not the problem, rather: how many objects can be maximally added, what is the maximal number of spacecrafts before the system slows down to a crawl etc. etc.

And, alas, I can not do any C / C++ re-compiling, sorry, I don't have that knowledge.

All that is just plain theory for now. I must go through the russian descriptions first to see more clear.

Voice overs could technically be implemented, that's not the problem (the cutscenes in English have been created), but here you would need a crew of  mature, native English speakers also able to use some rough language that is adapted to such scenarios. Only pros would give satisfying results, no, that's out of reach. Also your "script" would be very long, the job would take days, not hours...We are back to the budget question that for me will be 0 🙂

Also, I will have to use the russian sounds and voices which will be wrong for sure, sorry for that, but it will not disturb non-russian players, it's only good to hear some blablabla instead of nothing 🙂

Ok, that's it for the moment.

XenonS

I have just an idea for the voice-overs.

I noticed some robots on space stations. If I use them as commanding officers for the missions, at least I could use my automatic voice-over audio system to create "robotic" voice effects.

But try that with a female on Goldin

XenonS 's robot armies are comming soon...

XS

Great idea XenonS there are some suggestion which were posted another thread http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/1562-if-mods-were-possible-with-this-game/

Also have you looked the mod for Precursors if it still available  http://spacesimcentral.com/ssc/topic/965-hints-tip-cheats-and-mods/

One thing I would suggest is using A-Z the ships AI for adding some mission and seeing if the alien space station can be opened so you can dock at them, even if they just use the same art assets as the human ones.

Hi Rocketeer,

thanks for the kind words. This is a hypothetical project as for giving results, but I wanted to outline my plan to get comments, which all will be welcome.

Thanks,

XenonS

Hi Pinback,

your idea to use A-Z is great. 😎

There is an unused slot in the dialogue, probably I can activate that. So, if I can achieve the 2 first outlined additions, there will at least be some variety.

Still I must check 100% the most important thing: while 3D action on planets can be edited with missions, I really hope the same goes with the space part.

Thanks for the links, yes, I'm aware of a single russian mod that does a lot of things. I will surely take a look.

XenonS