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

posted on March 11th, 2014, 2:09 pm

That would be great Blade. Let me know if you need anything from me.

Aad Moerman and Ash (with the Zero Hour items) have been more than generous in allowing any edits with their work I've used. Everyone who's work appears in this mod or who's suggestions I've used, has been more than helpful and gracious in letting me use their stuff. I've tried to be so careful with the credits so anyone let me know if you see something missing or whatever.

Thanks to everyone again in case I never say it enough.

posted on March 11th, 2014, 3:02 pm

That reminds me, here, have the SC corbomite reflector. Just remember to credit Mr. Vulcan for the animation.

SCCorb.zip

(368.13 KiB) Downloaded 461 times

posted on March 11th, 2014, 9:18 pm

Hi guys,

Hopefully this isn't a dumb question but do you have to register at the Mega site to download the mod?? I hit "download to my computer" last night to find that the file didn't download to my computer in the morning.

JH02

posted on March 11th, 2014, 10:47 pm

I hate to be a pain...

But would it be possible to compress this down more? Perhaps with an installer or something like FO is? I would like to play this while waiting for the next version of FO but over 600 MB is a little to much for me and my bandwidth.

If not I'll have to go somewhere else and download it most likely.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 12:00 am

@JH02: You don't have to register with Mega or anything. The file should pop up and then you click download to computer. I just checked and it started to download fine for me?

@Xanto: As to the file size, I can look around for an alternative to try and get it smaller. I've never used anything like Unwize.exe or anything, but let me look into it.

@Cabal: Thank you very much for the corbomite texture. I thought it looked awesome when you showed at MSFC. I'll add it in tonite with proper credits of course.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 1:56 am

If you use 7z format, it can be about 470~480MB for current release.

If you want to use installer, I recommend NSIS or Inno Setup. Both of them support LZMA compression.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 2:06 am

thanks mate, it started downloading the other night but must have failed, will try again tonight.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 2:18 am

Thanks Yochenhsieh. I've been doing some digging and 7z format using 7Zip does seem to be the best at compressing to the smallest size from what I've found so far. The only reason I used the zip format is it was suggested it's the industry standard. Plus it's free. I haven't checked yet, but if 7Zip is free I may try that and let others decide which one they want to download depending on their program.

One thing I'd like to ask everyone who tried the new version is if they liked the map lighting? The instant action maps and fed campaign maps have directional lights that are med-dark gray. The borg and klingon campaign maps have colored directional lights that I tried to match closely to the map background colors.

Do people think they are too dark? Aren't dark enough? Do the colored ones not match the map backgrounds? Do you just hate it? I wondered if I could get some opinions.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 2:28 am

@Cabal: Thank you very much for the corbomite texture. I thought it looked awesome when you showed at MSFC. I'll add it in tonite with proper credits of course.

Not just a texture, also a model so that it scales properly and has a spinny animation thing.

If you use 7z format, it can be about 470~480MB for current release.

RAR format is also better than ZIP, and I think most OSes include support for it out of the box while 7z requires downloading software. I could be wrong about that, though. I don't do much downloading on Windows and I don't have a Mac. At any rate, the software for both 7z and RAR is free.

Hi guys,

Hopefully this isn't a dumb question but do you have to register at the Mega site to download the mod?? I hit "download to my computer" last night to find that the file didn't download to my computer in the morning.

JH02

On my computer, it does an odd download (maybe to RAM?) first, then you get the 'save to drive' window when it's finished. I have no idea how it works, but I did think something went wrong the first time.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 2:57 am

RAR is not free (neither free of use nor free of charge)!

WinRAR is shareware which ask you to pay after trail period ends. For Linux, unrar is propierty software that belongs to "non-free" category in package repository. You may have it pre-installed in some distro, but it does not mean it's "free".

7-zip, on the other hand, is a truly free software, with source code available for everyone and can be used free of charge, for either non-profit or commercial purpose.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 3:19 am

7-Zip can be downloaded from http://www.7-zip.org/. It's free software, published mainly under the LGPL. There are 32 and 64 bit Windows installers (64 bit is needed if you're going to push the compression settings -- the settings I used for a test compression of the STA2 Upgrade Project folder consumed 11GB of memory). It can handle unpacking a range of compressed file formats, including RAR.

I actually own a WinRAR license, but I haven't used it at all since discovering 7-Zip.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 3:21 am

RAR is not free (neither free of use nor free of charge)!

WinRAR is shareware which ask you to pay after trail period ends. For Linux, unrar is propierty software that belongs to "non-free" category in package repository. You may have it pre-installed in some distro, but it does not mean it's "free".

7-zip, on the other hand, is a truly free software, with source code available for everyone and can be used free of charge, for either non-profit or commercial purpose.

Whoops, forgot about that. UnRAR does come preinstalled on Ubuntu and I've been installing 7-zip on Windows for years. 7-zip does include RAR support, though. If 7-zip packs and unpacks RARs, is fully licensed in agreement with Eugene Roshal, and is free, why do they expect anyone to pay for WinRAR?

Anyway, go with 7z like Yochenhsieh said if you want better compression.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 11:13 am

yeah thanks cabal, it downloaded this time although I had to look on my HDD to find the file.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 6:56 pm

I not to concerned myself with which file type you go with, I have a free program that can pretty much open any zipped file type. Just the size mainly. If you can get it down to 400 MB that would be manageable, but getting it around 300 (aka FO size) would be amazing. Lol

An installer probably would compress it the most, then you could just point the installer to the FO mods directory.

Bandwidth caps suck... Thank you though for looking into it.

posted on March 12th, 2014, 8:35 pm

@Cabal: Didn't mean to short change your work above. My bad. I did credit you for the texture/model and Mr Vulcan for the animation

@ Xanto: I'll get 7zip tonite and put up an additional download. I'll probably break the texture folder out on it's own then the rest in a second download. 2 smaller downloads is better than one big one.