MOD: STA2 Upgrade Project 2014 - A stock A2 mod in FO

[rifraf]

posted on December 13th, 2013, 5:03 am

Last edited by rifraf on February 6th, 2024, 1:45 am, edited 48 times in total.

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Star Trek Armada II: Upgrade Project 2014 Edition - version 2.0a Full
A stock Armada 2 mod for Fleet Operations
By Rifraf
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****FLEET OPERATIONS REQUIRED TO PLAY**** Download it at: http://www.fleetops.net
***Star Trek Armada 2 game disk required to install Fleet Operations***
**This mod made using the v3.2.7 FPQ loader in Fleet Operations**
*NOT multiplayer tested*

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< Contents >
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1. Introduction
2. Installation/Play
3. Known Issues
4. Backup/Bonus Information
5. Credits
6. Contact Information
7. Distribution/Hosting/Third Party Usage
8. Copyright
9. Change-log

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1. < INTRODUCTION >
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The STA2 Upgrade Project 2014 is a complete stand alone Stock Armada II mod for Fleet Operations originally based upon, but taking a step further the work done by Blade in STA2 Classic for Fleet Operations and has turned into a continuation/progression of the original Upgrade Project released about 5 years ago by Freyr. This mod takes the base Armada 2 game and uses the stock 1.1 patch and the Midnight Universe mod as a base to spiff up the graphics and updates about 99% of all ship, station, object, effect, and background models and textures with far superior versions using works from those around the Armada/Fleet Ops community like redone Borg, Cardassian ships, Federation, Klingon, and Romulans by Aad_Moerman, Cardassian stations by Dan1025, Species 8472 by Chiletrek, explosion and shield effects by the Fleet Operations team and much more.

Also new is the addition of omni directional lighting* to enhance the lighting effects of each maps atmosphere. You'll see ships light up when next to mining moons, latinum nebula and also when firing pulse or torpedo weapons. (*The omni lights as worked on by Freyr and Medafusion, but never released weren't directly compatible with the FO engine so I actually just altered the light settings already on the moons/latinum nebs thanks to a bit of code by Cabal. I may release updated maps in the future that have all the various nebula lit with omni lights, however this may be too performance intensive on the engine as some maps have a huge amount of them. (I've put this last idea on the back burner for now.)

In the interest of better game play I've further modified the AI personality (blending Freyr's personal edits/findings with some of my own,) the build lists and physics files along with the RTS_CFG, ART_CFG and some of the various ODF's to make it look better and hopefully play a little better without straying (hopefully not too much) from stock play. I've changed the lighting effects of all stock maps and I've left the single player campaign intact as well as included the ideas and in most cases the work of the Improved Single Player Campaign mod from stock A2 to make the missions more challenging.

I've also added a few more ships to most of the races for a little variety when playing Instant Action games. With only a few exceptions these additional ships have the same stats/weapon load outs as their similar races classes to keep balance intact and they are NOT usable in the campaign missions.

See full readme for full details

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10/19/2014:
This will most likely be the last version of the mod. I've fixed everything I'm aware of (that I'm capable of fixing) so there's not much left to do. I will still post fixes and such if anyone finds bugs and reports them. I will also post a small update once the new Race-Specific GUI's get completed.

Link updated 2/5/2024:
STA2 Upgrade Project 2014 v2.0a full--https://mega.nz/file/SshU3TxA#6cbeINOONhVxsBdSc1YOqldSabTAlYWtxHvAc6aGosU

The small update in the next post below is still valid as well.

[rifraf]

posted on December 21st, 2013, 3:21 am

Last edited by rifraf on April 12th, 2015, 5:07 pm, edited 15 times in total.

2/2/15:
v2.0a to v2.0b Patch -

Here is a patch to fix a bunch of miscellaneous things in the mod. Hope you like the changes. **A word of caution regarding the lights sprite file-When I resized all the ships/stations originally the blinking navigation lights on many of them now appear to be offset from the models in some places. I don't like the way this looks so I got rid of all the blinking navigation lights. If you would rather keep yours then back up your lights sprite file in the Sprites folder and copy it back into your mod after applying this patch.**
Unzip to your FO--->Data--->mods folder and overwrite or copy files over manually. Info listed is from the change log. Uses winzip

---Added missed explosion reference file to rbattle4 and rfreight ODF's

---Deleted R5D5's fscout texture and stock SOD and now use textures/SOD by Aad Moerman

---Added missed recycledilithium value to rorbital

---Altered sound settings for nebula, planets and asteroid fields so the ambient sound they put off isn't as loud

---Commented out running light entries in lights.spr file. Ships/stations no longer have blinking navigation lights as resizing the models threw the light placements off on some of them so it looked odd. **See note above if you want to keep them**

---Added missing texture for Klingon Commando Team special weapon (Kcruise2.tga from stock A2)

---Gave fdestroy (Defiant) two quantum torp launchers like the tv show. Edited existing weapon file and split damage in half for each one (same damage as stock though)

---Added various sprite entries from FO/Data/Sprites/tex_anim.spr to mod

---Corrected repairHardpoint and repairSide value on cyard2 to match cyard as they are the same station just different sizes

---Edited tooltip on starbases, 8472 mothership and turrets to display weapon range

---Changed Xshlddie and Xshldx01 SOD's back to stock along with the shield sprite entries and Xshlddie and Xshldx01 textures (stock shields aren't used in the mod anyway) Also deleted the xshldexp texture

---Thanks to Blade added a bit of code to craft.odf and station.odf so that now the Romulan Warbird Shield Inversion special and Romulan Shadow Energy Shield Converter special weapons display properly. The affected shield bubbles seem very large compared to stock, but at least the visuals are now fixed however, the color of the shield status doesn't change from green to red and red to green depending on depletion status.

---Edited Klingon pulse weapon sprites so that they are now green instead of red

***** Please also see page 23 in this thread for a fix to the Borg Tactical Cube which will allow Borg mission 10 "Rift" to function properly posted by yochenhsieh until I release another patch*****

Attachments

STA2 UP 2014 v2.0a to v2.0b Patch.zip

(1.33 MiB) Downloaded 1518 times

posted on December 21st, 2013, 7:49 am

Hello,

Looks like your mod is so popular that dropbox just disabled it.

Could you please upload it to http://mega.co.nz? It's a free web storage and you can share links with others.


Thanks.

posted on December 21st, 2013, 5:52 pm

Dropbox couldn't handle the traffic, well at least no for free, so I couldn't download your mod

[rifraf]

posted on December 21st, 2013, 7:05 pm

Last edited by rifraf on March 10th, 2014, 1:29 am, edited 1 time in total.

Sorry for the problems. Looks like my release has gone down in flames

I'm working on alternate file hosting methods. So freaking embarrasing

Ok, I'm using Mega now as suggested above so we'll try this. I'll add more links if this bogs down.

Edit: 3/9/14-Link removed. New version of mod coming

posted on December 22nd, 2013, 10:06 am

The mod works nicely so far, though I've not completed all campaigns yet. The whole feeling is so great and much better than old stock A2.

It looks weird that almost everything enhanced but still keep old loading and main menu background that won't fit. Do you plan to replace them?

Overall, this is a wonderful mod. Thank you for making it and share with us.

posted on December 22nd, 2013, 5:09 pm

Very good! Already played the first single player mission and everything is cool! Thanks

posted on December 22nd, 2013, 8:32 pm

Thanks glad you like it. It's been fun putting it all together and making it work. I know it's just stock A2 and not many people play it, but at least it looks better.

I am updating it with more improvements. A few more permissions have come in so I'll add those to the next version. My biggest want is to update the race GUI's, but only a couple of people have released updates of them and most people are not around anymore and/or hard to get a hold of.

If anyone knows how to contact Curtis from the Upgrade Project I would be most appreciative. I've emailed and PM'd him at FF, but no luck. I know the stock loading screen sucks too. I'm asking around for an alternative.

posted on December 22nd, 2013, 9:51 pm

It's up on MSFC as well now.

My biggest want is to update the race GUI's, but only a couple of people have released updates of them and most people are not around anymore and/or hard to get a hold of.

I did some work on the GUIs a while ago for H:FC before it went belly up. If you'd like, I could work on some new ones for 2013E.

posted on December 23rd, 2013, 3:30 am

Love the Mod, thanks for your efforts, it does make definite improvements to the original STA2 visuals and game play. The only question I have is there something that can be done to make improve the look of the earth style planets. In 3D perspective, they look as if they are warped when looking from afar. Is there a setting or file change that can be made to fix this. Other than this I can only see the mod improving with the extra changes you are going too make

posted on December 23rd, 2013, 4:57 am

@ Cabal: Wow, thank you for the offer, that is very gracious of you. I have gotten permission from Elevatormusic for his Romulan GUI and thought of asking Dan for his Cardassian one however, if you'd like to donate the remainder or any/all for that matter that would be great, whatever you are up for. Please let me know if you need anything from me.

Tain_Enabran has granted permission for a general button replacement mod that he released that looks really good so I'll be adding that. I really do prefer the stock build buttons however, so will probably be leaving those, but we'll see?

@ JH02: Those planets are high resolution versions of stock by Don_Quijote and unfortunately that warped/wavy look is how they are. I can include the versions that came with Midnight Universe that I don't think exhibit that behavior as backups in the update for you.

posted on December 23rd, 2013, 6:52 am

that would be great rif raf, how will I acquire them from you

posted on December 23rd, 2013, 6:53 am

will I just wait for the next update??

posted on December 23rd, 2013, 8:14 pm

Great work mate. It's nice to see A2 with a nice new coat of paint. However, idk if anyone else has noticed this, but in the first Fed mission, the Planet that is supposed to be Regula II has a different name and doesn't complete the objective when it is colonized.

Still, everything looks great and for those who wish to play past this mission, just hit 'Enter' and type 'kobayashimaru' and hit 'enter' again in order to skip to the next mission.

posted on December 23rd, 2013, 8:40 pm

Thank you Gorandius1256. I think the problem is (and more maps may run into this) when I first started changing the maps to be near zero elevation I had just deleted a few planets and then replaced them at the the proper location with a new one. I have since learned to just move the planets up/down where they were as needed. Sorry for the mistakes.

I will redo all the single player maps again without deleting stuff and instead just move what is already there preserving the names and such. I'll have the redone SP maps in the next update. Thanks again for pointing this out.

Also, for the planets/clouds, I've tested a few different options and none are really ideal. The stock planets suck visually and using alternate cloud textures either results in seams showing pretty bad on the planets or having black north/south poles, but white clouds around the middle of the planets. What is used currently I feel is the best solution even though they look like warped waves washing ashore instead of real clouds. Will have to experiment more.