4/21/2015

Cities: Skylines Grain Elevator Building Mod

So my modding buddy has gotten sucked into Cities: Skylines, and talked me into modeling a grain elevator for him. Its a nice change of pace to have a different set of challenges present in modding Space Engineers, but not at the same time since I finally got my pipeline nailed down. XD


First iteration, after about half an hour. A nice quaint, fun little grain elevator.


Finished the details, unwrapped and textured with LOD stages all about 2 hours later.


And Published. The texture sill feels pretty flat to me, but for the first time making a building, a quick project and a new pipeline I thinks its turned out all right.

4/12/2015

Armored Decoy Block

So after our last three mods turned into huge undertakings with large packs ranging from 30-80 individual entities, we found ourselves wanting to tackle something fun, simple, and preferably a single block mod. We tossed around a few gimmicky ideas and identified a remaining unfulfilled need (the mod community is really good at filling these rather quickly).

The Decoy Block in Space Engineers draws fire from enemy ships, allowing you to maneuver fighters or torpedoes, or whatever through their defenses. A common complaint stems from the durability of the decoy, which typically can only take a singe hit. Not terribly useful when up against heavy fire, especially when they also require complicated systems to deploy reliably, and cost materials that can be otherwise spent on armor or weapons.

Not to mention the original model, while a fun shape, still leaves a little something to be desired.


So we came up with an Armored Decoy. While maintaining the exact same functionality, we significantly upgraded the durability by adding a hefty stack of steel plates and other materials to the component list.


The added material cost, weight, and extended build time should add some balance for the trade up.



This one utilities the full range of standard materials available in Space Engineers (no Transparent or Emissive materials today).




By going back and taking a closer look at how some of the vanilla blocks were textured, I got a better understanding on how the in-game color-mask functions, and learned a few tricks on making more convincing color-able textures. (Before I was trying to make make paint chips with the mask, but removing the color information from the diffuse is the way to go apparently)

The art side, from start to finish took me roughly 4 hours.

4/08/2015

Grav-Tubes finished

So here are the GravCaps and Transition tube pieces all finished up and in game, and with that I believe we are pretty much done with the GravTubes (pending any bug fixes or popular requests).



Currently weighing our options on what to do next.

4/04/2015

Expanding the Grav-Tube Mod





Since the Grav-Tubes mod was so well received, we decided it would be fun to make a few additions.

First up we have a solid block, transition piece. Since the game Developers just added Oxygen and pressurized spaces, we needed a piece that wasn't going to vent air. The force field textile is just a place-holder till we can test it out in game.



Geeking out over the possibilities for gravity cannons (a Space Engineers personal favorite super weapon), I came up with GravCaps. It's just a supplementary piece to add onto the tube system and boost the gravity fields strength.


We also have some non gravity generating tube pieces on the way by popular request. All in all were having a blast, and its great to get something working in game (especially something people really seem to like!)

Grav-Tube Published!

So its been up for a few days now and has since been seeing around 2,000 new subscribers a day since.  Super happy with the reception so far!