New Mod: Babylon 5 Shadowfall

[Jamiri]

Sounds good to me having the Starfuries as a fighter bay add-on. However, don't you think it would make the Omega a little bit too powerful right from the start? Maybe you could make the fighter bay only available from Babylon 5 (i.e. the Glory system) or any other race (maybe from EA Earth??) once you fulfill a mission or two. That would be really cool!

Looking forward to the jumpgates!

[PaddirN]

Aight, well tried contacting Psientist and haven't recieved a response yet and it looks as though he hasn't even posted on this forum in about 4 months the last time I checked. I'm gonna go ahead and start up a new thread and try and post a newer updated version of the B5 mod.

As for the starfuries in fighter bays, I'm not planning on making them available to players, but you should be able to see them in game >hint hint nudge nudge<

Also, I'm planning a name change in this newer version (for a number of reasons I'll get into when I post), credit still goes out to Psientist, wherever he is.

[Jamiri]

I think Psientist wouldn't mind to meddle with his (abandoned) mod, as long as you give him the credits he merits!

And while you are at it "modding the mod": can you change the Minbari ally into a Tinashi Light Frigate? I always found the Nial Fighter such a poor addition to my fleet. Well, actually any lone fighter ally is useless, imo.

[ImUrOBGYN]

I haven't heard from Psientist myself nor have I been on in a long time, either. I see PaddirN has created an update to the Babylon mod that I've yet to check out but will in a moment.
For this mod, one of the problems was the Narn ship being unable to launch fighters. In your b5shadowfall_v22 mod folder, open fb_gorith.ini and replace line "STR0 Narn" with "STR0 Narn Regime" without the quotes, of course. This will allow the fighter bays to work. I have not tested any other fighter bays, yet. Thanks to Fingers for pointing out the simple name error that we missed before. I find it's usually something silly like that people miss.

[Psientist]

Hey everybody.

My apologies for my absenteeism. I have been *very* busy with work, and the forum activity really dropped off for a while, and after investing so much time in the B5 mod I just got burned out for a while.

I'm overjoyed you guys got the Narn fighter bay to work! I haven't played it in the working mod version yet, I was concerned about it making narns too strong. They are supposed to be, militarily, probably the weakest of the major babylon races.

As to stepping on my toes... Let me be official. I am releasing my work on the babylon 5 project to the gaming community under the GNU license where appropriate ... basically, everybody can do what they want with it so long as it's not for commercial profit, they give acknowledgement where credit is due (not just to me), and they make clear indication about changes from the original (starting a new Mod title/thread, or collectively managing a common updated mod).

I really don't have the time to continue development on this mod, so everybody else's efforts are welcome.

I did try to maintain a very high level of quality in this mod, so I would request that either a few of you work together to maintain standards, and that the moderators keep a copy available of the original b5 shadowfall mod v2.2 I designed out there.

As to the other questions - I'll try to rummage through my memory to respond -

Jumpgates don't work. They were wishful thinking, I couldn't make them work. I would have preferred a couple of jumpgates and no hyperdrive or black hole surfing to change the game's strategy significantly.

I wanted starfuries too! never got around to them...

I did not include special diplomatic conditions for all the races (e.g., brakiri, gaim, etc.). You might not be able to "get friendly" with all races.

In the large map setting, the Vorlon, Shadows and the planet killer don't show up, even if the quests come up. I think it's been suggested that it may be a limitation on the number of ships.

Map size shouldn't affect this. Those are set as random quests, and I think I flagged them so only one of the major quests would show in any given game (like the planetkiller).

Vorlon did not show up at all even though I had the beacon. Bug?

The vorlon ship will not show if it has been destroyed, or cannot reach you for some reason.

Please, make all the other ship conversions as well (Gaim and others). I'd also remove all the original WW items as they distract from the B5 mood a bit.

I agree... but it's so time consuming to make proper, high-quality custom fleets and fleet graphics ...

first of all my respect for this fantastic mod, even if it still has some glitches.

ah, thanks, glad to know it's appreciated.

* Didn't like the way mr. morden just drops off a drakh cannon and then everyone else hates you. Instead he now asks the chilling line, "What do you want?" and acts more like a timeless bauble instead, only i upped the penalty. Seems like a better trade off now.

Well, in 2.2 you should have the option of turning down help from Morden. but if you accept, then you unfortunately have signed on with the Drakh, and they make you behave hostile to other races... that was my "deal with the devil" idea. Don't change it too much, because there are about 3 other quests that check on how you responded to Morden.

* Brought some unused ships over from the original WW and added ships for drazi and made a new race, the raiders, even included primordius fortress (now a raider mothership) as a mission, but have yet to see it show up so I don't know if it even worked.

I tried to leave as few original WW ships in the game as possible, using babylon-universe ships only. Time limited creation of all new fleet graphics.

I'm wanting to add in the rivalry between the narn and the centauri by having their ally ships make you enemies of each other race. So if you get the narn ship the centauri will attack and vice versa. Good idea?

good idea, there are a few events in there to make that happen. Defeat Centauri Prime, and then go exploring, for example.

sometimes I reach a planet and the music for meeting an ally plays, but no ally at all shows up, neither anything else is found on the planet. Is that intended?

well, I reused music files alot. I never made any original music for the mod, which was needed, and maybe I made some wrong music choices for events/planets... sorry?

Apologize for the late and long reply, and good luck to any future work you folks undertake on it!

[ImUrOBGYN]

Thanks for dropping in. It's too bad you don't have enough time for this any longer. I stopped checking in and playing for awhile, too. You did such an awesome job and the quality is great. Maybe one day you'll get a chance and an urge to start up again.
Any other games you've got into the mod community with?

[Psientist]

I'm starting on Dominions 3 (also by IllWinter / Shrapnel). Much of the modding is similar, some differences. I may find more motivation for modding Doms3 because of the ability to have play-by-email games with friends, and it seems to support "small" mods much more easily (you can play multiple mods at once).

However, there appears to be a lot of undocumented limitations / parameters for modding Doms3 too, so we'll see!