Oh you know, a little of this, a little of that.

Dawn of Victory (DoV) is a modification currently under development by Slipstream Productions for the RTS Sins of a Solar Empire. Dawn of Victory is a total conversion, replacing the game's original assets with completely new and diverse ships, structures, and gameplay elements. Dawn of Victory pits players as one of 3 intergalactic superpowers: the Democratic Federation, Greater German Reich, and the Soviet Union. These three factions wage war amongst themselves even as a greater threat, the Scinfaxi, threaten them all.

Story

While Dawn of Victory started out loosely based on Harry Turtledove’s “Worldwar” and “Colonization” book series, since then, the backstory has expanded to the point where it has taken on a life of its own.

For centuries an alien race known as the Scinfaxi had been the dominant power in the Orion region of space, their slow but steady expansion brought them into contact with dozens of other races, each one conquered and exterminated to provide the resources and material necessary to support the continually expanding empire.

 

In the 14th century, the first Scinfaxi probes reached Earth: it was surveyed, catalogued, and the plans were meticulously laid for its capture and assimilation. However, the Scinfaxi concept of time was very different from humanity's, and so when the first ships of the conquest fleet arrived in 1943, they were stunned to see Terran society had progressed to an industrial state in an unimaginable sliver of time. The initial landings took humanity by surprise, as the Scinfaxi advanced upon every continent.

It was in this darkest hour that what once divided humanity now brought it together, as the old prejudices were put aside and every free nation on Earth united against the alien aggressors. The tide turned in 1945 when the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb on its own soil, destroying a Scinfaxi landing site.

 

With the total conquest of Earth impossible without destroying everything of value, the Scinfaxi retreated to the Southern hemisphere, content with half the planet. Decades went by with no contact from the Scinfaxi, but as humanity grew bolder, the aliens' plans accelerated. As spacecraft from the last free nations made landfall, and eventually colonized new worlds, the Scinfaxi slowly began to advance. City after city was lost until, in a final act of desperation, the various Terran factions agreed to pursue a literal "scorched earth" policy, sacrificing their remaining positions to nuclear bombardment and quarantining the planet.

 

Humanity has expanded to the stars, and dozens of planets and moons now belong to the remaining Terran nations. There has been almost no contact with the Scinfaxi, and the former nations of Earth have become so complacent with their apparent safety that the old prejudices have returned and they once again war amongst themselves. The Scinfaxi are still expanding however, and it is only a matter of time before they decide to stamp out the potential usurpers; if humanity is allowed to advance another hundred years, it may be human soldiers landing on Scinfaxi worlds. The dawn of victory is approaching: the only question is which side will claim it.


Features

 

  • 3 unique sides: The Soviet Union, Greater German Reich, and Democratic Federation.
  • Completely reworked combat model, with each ship possessing dozens of weapons and defenses.
  • Military Based Expansion, with research and economic aspects reshaped to support combat.
  • New particle effects, skyboxes, and planets.
  • Diverse environments ranging from open space to clouded nebulae.
  • Several unique ship classes like corvettes and interceptors
  • New planetary defenses like minefields, missile arrays, and defense bases
  • Nine new levels, ranging from two player deathmatch to heated ten player battles
  • New invasion mechanics, with troopships that can invade and colonize planets simultaneously
  • Customizable cruisers and capital ships

Past Updates



 

 


Comments (Page 11)
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on Mar 28, 2008
i had an idea (amazing!) in the space junk planets leave neutral ships from random factions to be boarded, you can make it so you can maby find artifacts on ships (liek anchient chips from unknown places) or maby on neutral mining asteroids, then just for a little thing you should be able to add a thing so your can get those neutral colonies to allie with you, they wont give you anything but support in a battle maby in the first version, and will do other stuff later.

also i have a question, what are the super weapons going to be like? no ones said anything read entire thread today in 2 hours...
on Mar 28, 2008
Its very easy to promise tons of new races and ships, buts its somewhat more difficult to find people to model them, skin them, and get them working ingame. Having Japan as a playable side, lots of minor races, etc, would be awesome. But for now were going to concentrate on our first release.

edit: as for Superweapons, there still in development. But the Soviet one isn't so much a weapon as a massive ships with lots of weapons on it.
on Mar 28, 2008
thats nice and all exept what i said didnt require any new meshes, the neutral ships would be liek drifting abandonded germeny or russian, the mysterius ship, might require one >.>, or it could just be a reg ship with a weird glow....

the colony thing doesnt require any at all, unless your blowing up the whole neutral colony system from SoaSE, just have a cap ship that has a dimplomacy thing, or the colony ship.

and if its a ship is more like the super unit not the super weapon, some games have 1 of both for each side, some have only units, some only the weapons.
on Mar 28, 2008
when you say 40% completed, you mean 40% to the beta or 40% to total completion
on Mar 29, 2008
Swiss meant to the first release.

I would take percentages with a grain of salt though - not that the figure is wrong, but that judging a mod's progress by a arbitrary number is the wrong way to go about predicting release times. It will be done when it's done.
on Mar 29, 2008
what made you guys realize that sins had a superior engine rather then EaW for this mod?

and also how many people in your team have actually read the books?
on Mar 29, 2008
what made you guys realize that sins had a superior engine rather then EaW for this mod?


The day Swiss discovered it, really. If you compare EaW and SoaSE's graphics..there is no comparison. I think I posted elsewhere that EaW never really had a lot of up-to-date graphics: it had zero specular maps, iirc, as well as extremely low poly counts. Had we kept developing on it, we would have been behind from the get-go.



I mean, look at that. Very basic lighting, basic exhaust blobs, fighter explosions that looked like blue paint dispersing in water. Sure, you can change some of this, but most of it's locked down in the executable and there's essentially nothing you can do about it.

But we suspected the EaW's engine was just not going to work once FoC was released and nothing as far as codebase was ever going to change. The limits we ran into made the "no new capital ships!" complaint here seem relatively trivial. I'll quote from our "we're moving!" thread back in 06:

After a number of struggles with the Alamo engine and its modding support, we would like to announce our intention to cease development of Dawn of Victory on the Empire at War platform. While Petroglyph has been cooperative with modders by offering an amazing map editor and decompiled LUA scripting source code, we feel that the game's moddability is much too low for the type of project we wish to create.

We at SSP do not think it is fair to build an extensive backstory and art for the universe and then present the SSP community with a shallow mod incapable of transcending the overall Star Wars feeling of Empire at War. XML and LUA simply do not give us enough creative and technical freedom: the impossibility of editing and creating new unit abilities, paired with the nearly-completely hard-coded building and construction system is not the sort of base we can build a mod like Dawn of Victory off of.

The bizarre proprietary model and animation formats are also a stumbling block, and overall we have been frustrated with the lack of flexibility for a while now...we will be developing Dawn of Victory as a total conversion of Sins of a Solar Empire... [w]e feel this engine is not only more capable of pushing the graphics of Dawn of Victory to a new level, but its modding support will be more open, accessible, and flexible.


We also got a little annoyed at how many people in the EaW community dumped on the mod for "not being Star Wars" and the community was generally pretty hostile. The fact that nearly all of the major EaW mods have died is probably a pretty good indication of where modding support went there, and so in summary the move was definitely the best thing we could have done to keep the project at the same level of quality that was expected.

and also how many people in your team have actually read the books?


Hahaha, maybe 3 or 4. A few guys on Asylum have read them too, I think. We've come up with so much original backstory that it's not a big deal, though.
on Mar 29, 2008
i have another question, are you going to make custom maps, planets, and relics?
on Mar 29, 2008
i have another question, are you going to make custom maps, planets, and relics?


In order: Yes, probably, yes.
on Mar 29, 2008
what would be some onf the new things in this mod for maps, relics and planets?
on Mar 29, 2008
what would be some onf the new things in this mod for maps, relics and planets?


Just based on our universe, really. Most of the maps in the first release are of the German and Soviet border, since the first release essentially ocvers their multiple border skirmishes. Maps in DoV have much more stars than the base game but much less planets per star. Planets will be much more important to hold and defend. We may make some custom graphics for planets. As far as relics, we'll figure something out. The ones in the base game obviously won't work too well, so all I know now is that they'll all get changed
on Mar 29, 2008
Good looking, yet I damn well hope it has bot support. For goodness sake please say it has bot support lol. But yeah, I will definately be watching this one.
on Mar 29, 2008
Good looking, yet I damn well hope it has bot support. For goodness sake please say it has bot support lol. But yeah, I will definately be watching this one.


Well, we don't have any AI scripting capability, so we've just tried to work around that. I actually had a funny problem when I was working on the mines - never give something a 1 cooldown and give it the aiusetime "whenincombat".
on Mar 29, 2008
does that mean the ai is going to be completely shit?

\and what happens when you use those 2 things in code?
on Mar 29, 2008
does that mean the ai is going to be completely shit?


Won't know until we get it released. It's likely the AI will be able to play well, but they may not understand how to use some of the abilities like mines.

and what happens when you use those 2 things in code?


Your cruiser starts spitting out hundreds of mines. Pair that with accidentally giving the mines the "deploy" instead of "detonate" ability, and..well..grey goo.

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