Sil's Mods - Update 07-11-18

[sil]

My mods focus on improving areas of the game that I feel are lacking, whether its how your decisions impact the story, making combat more thrilling, giving reasons to visit the Spectre Terminal, expanding content for certain aliens, etc. These mods were once labelled under the name Mass Horizons, but I've now chosen to rename my mods and keep them separate for now. By having them as smaller releases it prevents me from experiencing the intense pressure that a massive project can create, and with new names I hope that they will draw in more users..

These are the mods that I have in development/have released:

-- Respawn - Mission Overhaul; Edits missions to bring more enemies to the field, making the game more difficult for those who have played it many times over. Also, to edit out bugs and to bring in enemies that change based on previous decisions in ME2 or 3.

-- Spectre Expansion Mod; Adds morally grey choices to the Spectre Terminal, how far will you go to defeat the Reapers? Also aims to expand the Shadow Broker terminal with new intelligence about the war, adds immersion changes to how you purchase medi-gel upgrades and adds a number of new star systems from the background lore with a war asset for each one.

Example Content from the Spectre Expansion Mod:

SPOILER: Click to show

-- The salarian Special Tasks Group want to field test varren bioweapons against Reaper ground forces. Do you support their scientific endeavour?
-- A batarian anti-Shepard movement has been established on the Citadel, will you authorise planting false evidence against their ringleaders in the hopes of turning their followers against them?
-- Alpha Centauri; home of the Manswell Expedition
-- SM2183 Rua; former home of the near extinct DC1938 Aliens

SPOILER: Click to show

Mechanized Infantry
Military Strength: +10

Evolving in a high-gravity environment where any fall can be lethal has made elcor psychology deeply cautious and conservative, making them unsuitable for spur of the moment military situations. When they were only bound to Dekuuna this was not a problem, but expanding into a dangerous galaxy has forced the elcor to evolve their traditional views of war. Their strategists have developed thousands of pre-conceived gambits, solutions and strategies to any situation they can predict, the most suitable of these are then chosen by sophisticated combat VI’s built into elcor suits of armor. Elcor traditionally enter battle heavily armed and armored, with combat VI’s dictating their strategy and targets, but it has become common for each elcor warrior to be accompanied in battle by a squad of mechs. These are networked to the combat VI’s that guide their weapons, allowing them to enact more advanced strategies.

It will take a long time to add everything I would like to add, if I ever do, but I will update this thread periodically with information about how I am doing and occasionally show something off. If anyone wants to provide help they are more than welcome, otherwise I hope you enjoy it. Below are the list of releases:

Respawn - Mission Overhaul v1.3 Released!
Spectre Expansion Mod - 0.8-beta Released!

Mod Images:

SPOILER: Click to show

[sil]

Here's an update for anyone who is interested:

I released the 0.6 version of the Respawn section of the mod a couple of days ago. This update adds in all the missions from the Quarian-Geth War over Rannoch. Not only that, but on my PC are the edits for N7: Fuel Reactors, and for the Citadel DLC Story Missions. It is my intention to add a downloadable patch for these extra files as v0.7 once I have edited Priority: Thessia. The link in the opening post has been updated to reflect the new release.

In other news, I have decided to open up the Spectre Module for other people to write content for, specifically this is aimed at the Shadow Broker terminal messages. There are a number of reasons for this, but the primary one is that I would like to have different writing styles present as well as other ideas which have escaped me. Below are the conditions/rules for submitting anything.

Here are the rules for submission:

- The message must have grounding in the lore.
- If planets/moons/star systems are referenced then they must be ones that have appeared in the games, Cerberus Daily News messages, or the books.
- I'm happy to have obscure races or people from the lore mentioned, just make sure they aren't dead by the time the message arrives.
- The aim is to provide more intelligence on the war, or the impact of the war. The impact of the war could cover everything from a refugee sending a message to someone to a news report about some form of civil strife. I'm open to a lot of ideas.
- I will be happy to accept submissions but I may feel that they need some tweaks or edits. If I do, I'll discuss these with you, as it's not fair to just edit it on a whim.

If you want to help, that would be amazing, but if no-one does then that is cool too. I hope people give it a try though, it could be fun.

[sil]

I have had one submission so far, which is great! Thanks to BladeZero for taking the time to do so.

I thought maybe people would want to read one of the Spectre Authorisations that you will need to deal with. This one has been written by me. The message appears in the aftermath of Priority: Horizon, so If you don't want to spoil anything then don't look in the spoiler tag below, but I hope those that do enjoy it:

SPOILER: Click to show

Disciplinary Companies

The galactic economy is struggling to cope with the demands of the Reaper War. One of the biggest drains, beside the military, is the justice sector, where the population in prisons has dramatically risen as a consequence of widespread civil disturbance. In a surprise move, the volus have proposed the formation of Disciplinary Companies; conscripting prisoners into military units for use on the front lines in exchange for cutting years away from their sentence. It has been speculated that the initial proposition was drafted by the turians before being presented to the volus, yet that does not change the fact that it could reinforce embattled planets and will free funds for military and civilian relief efforts.

[sil]

Update:

I have begun work on the Stellar Module, I'm not going to reveal many pictures of this, but I felt people might be interested in seeing a Work-In-Progress pic or two for my first star system.

Cluster: Nubian Expanse
Star System: NX1647 Qustul

Hopefully you will like what you see, but this is early in the mod, so don't judge too harshly. : )

[sil]

Update:

I've collapsed the Fallout/Consequences module into Immersion, Spectre and Xenos mods. This will mean less downloads, and less mods for me to sort through.

I'm also going to update the first post with a progress log. I wouldn't recommend looking in the spoiler unless you want to spoil the kind of things you are going to see in the mod. It's partly for my benefit, partly for anyone who is interested. I'll continue to update the colour coding on the current list I have in the first post as well.

[sil]

Update:

I have just released v1.02 which includes a fix for the Cerberus HQ Ladder bug and removes the Cerberus Cafeteria edit to restore the ambush you can lay.

Also, in other news, I've uploaded the experimental N7: Cerberus Labs mission I've been working on for people to try and comment on. It changes the enemies you fight depending upon your choice to destroy or keep the Collector Base. I'd love feedback on how it plays out. It is on the Nexus DL page.

[sil]

Got a little announcement for you.

I've decided that I need to trim down the modding time in my life. I've been attempting to write a book for some time, and in many ways modding has been a method of getting past the fact that I had trouble writing it for months. Even though I am happily writing it again, the block I had has lifted, I'm still devoting a lot of time to my Mass Effect modding that should be either devoted to my book -or- to expanding my real life situation and getting fitter.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that I am now relegating my modding time to only 2 hours a night at maximum. This means that my mods will be slower to be released, but there is a chance that focusing my efforts into a 2 hour window will make me more productive. We shall see. I'm still modding, I'll finish at least a v1.0 of each mod, so its not cancelled or anything. It's just time to re-evaluate my time.

This also means that I won't have another release ready in time for Mass Effect: Andromeda.

[sil]

For those who are interested, Respawn has hit 1,000 downloads . I never expected it to be so successful, so thank you to anyone who has downloaded it.

[sil]

The first post has been updated to provide screenshots and more accurate information regarding the status of the mod.

[deadspear]

Oh wow thats awesome, maybe now it'll be actually interesting to walk around the place. I remember in ME2 when you visited Anderson there was an Elcor walking in the plaza under the window, small bits of world building, but noticeable. How long did it take you to add it? When I first read about it, I thought it was just a simple text mod, now its becoming a full fledged content mod like EGM or MEHEM. Any plans of adding any other NPCs in the future?

[crazyrabbits]

So, if I understand this correctly (forgive me if I'm wrong):

- Respawn has dynamic changes to enemies (and GAW assets) in levels based on decisions made in previous games;
- Spectre adds text-based stories/moral decisions/potential GAW changes based on choices made through the Spectre terminal, and;
- Xenos adds material to the galaxy map (War Assets/lore changes) along with other changes

Right?

[sil]

deadspear said:

Oh wow thats awesome, maybe now it'll be actually interesting to walk around the place. I remember in ME2 when you visited Anderson there was an Elcor walking in the plaza under the window, small bits of world building, but noticeable. How long did it take you to add it? When I first read about it, I thought it was just a simple text mod, now its becoming a full fledged content mod like EGM or MEHEM. Any plans of adding any other NPCs in the future?

Thanks! It took quite a few hours but nowhere near as many as I had expected, I'm surprised I got it working so quickly though . The mod started off pretty simple but it's getting more advanced as I get better at modding, I've got a lot of ideas for content but I'm aiming at just getting the v1.0 released before expanding it further.

I'd like to add some other NPC's in the future, for example, I want to add some elcor refugee's to the refugee area if you complete Dekuuna: Elcor Evacuation, as well as some scattered other aliens. I haven't worked out how to add npc's that are dependent on a certain conditional, but its only a matter of time until I do.

crazyrabbits said:

So, if I understand this correctly (forgive me if I'm wrong):

- Respawn has dynamic changes to enemies (and GAW assets) in levels based on decisions made in previous games;
- Spectre adds text-based stories/moral decisions/potential GAW changes based on choices made through the Spectre terminal, and;
- Xenos adds material to the galaxy map (War Assets/lore changes) along with other changes

Right?

You've got it partly right. Respawn v1.0 changes the combat in the game so you fight more numerous enemies, but I'm gradually patching it so that each mission will have different enemy spawns based on previous decisions (either decisions in the previous games or in ME3). I'll reveal which decisions affect each mission as I edit them. However, the Collector Base decision will feature commonly in Cerberus mission, and the Heretic Station choice will affect all the Geth missions. The aim is also to add more waves where appropriate. There aren't any new or changed GAW assets in Respawn.

Spectre adds a Baria Frontiers store to the Presidium to buy new star charts, new star systems with new GAW Assets in them, and new spectre authorisations that will add and change GAW Assets and provide small stories told through private messages. There are also new shadow broker and spectre messages giving additional intel on the war. My aim is to add text-based stories too. The content of Xenos has been folded into Spectre, but I forgot to remove it from the opening post.

I've also got small immersion updates for the v1.0 release. These change the way that the medi-gel upgrades are bought, so instead of buying Medi-Gel Capacity I, II, III, etc. you buy upgrades such as new medi-gel formula's, or a Unity VI. These new upgrades just add to your medi-gel capacity, but it removes a game-ified upgrade system which I think breaks immersion.

Pretty much Mass Horizons boils down to two different mods, Respawn edits combat gameplay and Spectre is a story and content mod.

[sil]

Updated with two new screenshots.

[sil]

Update:

I've got bad news for those people that were interested in seeing Mass Horizons - Spectre. A few weeks ago I had a catastrophic hard drive failure rendering the entire HDD dead. With this I lost Spectre mod and also Patch 1.2v for Respawn, both of which were on the cusp of being released. I hadn't made backups, I hadn't expected it and its gone.

So, what now?

In the past few weeks I've been scouring the text files on my laptop, and I've managed to find documents that contain roughly 90% of everything I wrote for the mod. I have lost half my text for planets. On the positive side of things, after talking with Kinkojiro it was discovered that I had sent him my galaxy map file when I had an issue, meaning that I have all the data for the planets in the game, just no text. I also have all my conditionals saved in an excel spreadsheet, along with what plot bools I created are, and with the names of all my war assets.

It is my intention to rebuild Spectre, but I am going to be releasing this in a different way. As you might imagine I'm somewhat paranoid about losing it all again, so I will be adding a Spectre Terminal authorisation, the star systems that I have text for, and the star charts for those systems as a first release. An v0.1 release. This is far from ideal, but I believe it is the best way of preventing a catastrophic loss of data again and getting it into the hands of people sooner rather than later. It is likely that the final release of the mod will lack certain features that I had been proud of, such as the new store Baria Frontiers and the elcor shopkeeper, but if the rest is in then that'll still be good.

I'm sorry for the bad news, but it'll get its v0.1 this month.

[crazyrabbits]

Sorry to hear that, but perhaps it can be viewed in a positive light. I've lost chunks of work before and had to remake them, which forced me to take what I had and remold them into something that was even better than it was before.