The Mirage UI for Age of Conan was the second third party modification for Age of Conan released and since then it has remained the top most downloaded and popular modification for Age of Conan. A large reason for it's success is a different design approach in which I decided to maintain the game's default interface appearance as much as possible and focus on added functionality based on user feedback through the game official forums, this modification is primarily about added functionality and an improved user interaction.
The game Age of Conan supports user modifications at a very limited level, there is not even a standard file version used throughout the many XML definition files and every patch users must figure out which files changed version and to which, the developers are based on Norway and support for the mod community in North America has been nil to date making it a very frustrating and tedius project to work on, never the less I managed to attain actual interface dynamic changes through much trial and error and the community response makes all the work worthwhile as they tend to be very supportive.
The interface adds two static shortcut bars with 17 buttons each fixed above the main shortcut bar, a brand new larger group and pet window, enhances the display of buffs and debuffs and makes the friends and guild list easier to read. All of this without removing any functionality to the existing default user interface. Based on popular demand it includes a total of five variations: 4-Bars, 3-Bars, 2-Bars, 3-Bars-Small and 2-Bars-Small.
The name for this user interface comes from the Lord of the Rings lore. In J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, the Rohirrim were a horse people, settling in the land of Rohan, named after them. The name is Sindarin for People of the Horse-lords (sometimes translated simply as Horse-lords) and was mostly used by outsiders: the name they had for themselves was Eorlingas, after their king Eorl the Young who had first brought them to Rohan. Forth Eorlingas!
Eorlingas is my personal favorite project in large part for this one being the first in which I compensated for my lack of concept artwork by doing vast research into the many sources of lore and art for Middle-Earth resulting in a large amount of material that I used as inspiration for the artistic rendition of the Rohirrim, to date this is the interface for which I am the most proud as it took many sleepless nights, revisions and even a complete remake of the theme (you can see the original version 1.1 screenshots in the gallery), this one is close to five hundred individual images and I created four variations to the theme.
There are many limitations to working with The Lord of the Rings Online game engine as a third party developer, like in most games there is no access to the API and I found myself very limited in what could be accomplished, however access to the XML definitions and most of the graphical assets does allow for enough flexibility to make artistic changes and some minor design changes.
Eorlingas has been continously voted the second best user interface for the game since release by the online community, the top favorite is my other interface for LOTRO: Durin's Folk.
The name for this user interface comes from the Lord of the Rings lore. In J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, Durin is one of the seven first Dwarves, he founded Khazad-dûm (later called Moria by the Elves after falling to the Balrog), his lineage carries all the way down to Thorin II Oakenshield (The Hobbit) and even Gimli. Durin's Folk are also known as the "Longbeards".
Durin's Folk was my first interface for LOTRO and was released soon after the game's release, since then it has remained the most downloaded and highly rated theme by the online community, this theme is about Dwarves and their love of stonework, ore, gems and of course axes!
Any form of official support for user modifications from game developers is a very rare thing in the video game industry, but even with all the adversity and difficulties involved in creating a free third party add-on without any official tools these user made modifications continue to extend the life of games and some very wise person in Blizzard Entertainment noticed this because World of Warcraft is the only MMO to be designed with full support for modifications to date. Many developers and publishers are trying to figure out how to make an MMO as succesful as World of Warcraft but very few seem to pay attention to the fact that the user interface plays a large part in retaining users in World of Warcraft as it has offered an open and dedicated API with full continued support for the mod community since the day the game was released.
I can not recount how many users of my interface for World of Warcraft have pointed out that they would have left the game long ago had it not been for the many interface modifications that enhance the game appearance and functionality. Clearly third party add-ons are a very important part of retaining a subscriber base and in MMO's that is critical to the game's ongoing success. I truly wish more developers will notice this trend and follow up on blizzard's footsteps as it also builds up a stronger and closer online community for the game.
In World of Warcraft there are very few limitations to what can be accomplished with the user interface and there are literally thousands of user modifications out there which can make it a very daunting experience for users to find what they are looking for. On top of that, the many different programming styles can cause some very amusing if not downright game breaking results when you combine add-ons programmed by many different individuals.
Because of this, very shortly after the game release in late 2004 I began my work on the "Insomniax Recompilation", initially conceived as a compilation it became clear to me that a lot of work was needed to get all the add-ons to work together properly and then some more to establish an uniform theme and an easy initial setup for users. Before I knew it I was knee deep into LUA reverse engineering other authors abandoned works to get them to work properly and to keep them up to date. Not long after that I began writing my own LUA modifications and adding hundreds of custom graphical assets to compliment the package.
The latest version of the compilation is now named the "Mirage UI for World of Warcraft" and contains over 3,700 files which has become a daunting project to manage, but never the less I have continuosly updated the project even going to lenghts such as creating my own forums at LedMirage.net to offer users technical support, an alternate download site and provide them with a place to offer feedback and exchange ideas.
My work with the World of Warcraft user interface spans now almost four years, many add-ons coded in LUA using layouts in XML, hundreds of custom icons, buttons, frames, bars and background textures and a continously evolving interface package based on the current community trends and preferences. The Insomniax Recompilation reached well over a million downloads on one website alone before the game's first expansion was released and the community that has developed around it since then continues to provide feedback, suggestions and encouragement for me to continue my work on this project.
The Mechwarrior 4 game engine did not provide any support for user modifications, however thanks to a few brave users that managed to reverse engineer parts of the game, modifications became a reality. This was my attempt to sharpen the HUD graphics which were carried over into Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries from the original game which had all of the HUD elements crammed into a single 256x256 tga file, I managed to increase the resolution to 512x512 and inherently had to redraw everything for it, I also made positional and design tweaks to improve the accuracy of the aiming reticle down to the exact pixel as the original HUD reticle was offset by a number of pixels.
Being my first endeavor in user interface modifications I am very proud of what I accomplished with this interface by improving vastly on the feel, appearance and functionality of the original game interface. The "Terminal" interface remained one of the top rated online community modifications from its release until long after my departure from Anarchy Online in 2003.
The game used an image format for the interface that offered no alpha channels for transparency and instead used a specific RGB value to make the pixels transparent, this led to a great deal of creative ways to offset the complete lack of anti-aliasing on the interface. I also created a custom font for use in the game without an alpha channel and provided a pixel accurate world map for which I spent weeks mapping out coordinates and relating them to pixel positions.
Having played City of Heroes since the days of beta testing I found myself wanting to have an assault rifle texture that looked more realistic and had a black metallic gun finish, eventually I discovered how to modify the game and created this texture for my personal use.
The texture is based on real weapons, including the M-16 and M-4 assault rifles, the flamable material sign was drawn based on a real warning sign. Due to limitations on what users could modify in the game I was not able to change the specular map which made the rifle unrealistically shiny. Other work I did for city of heroes included a very large sound pack and custom city map graphics.
After many revisions to my modifications to the player models and textures for Counter-Strike this was the final release of the SWAT set, all four player models came in four sets in different colored uniforms variatons. All the 3D model work for the accessories including helmets, radios and gun holders was done exclusively with Milkshape 3D and the animations were reused from the original game player models.
Other work also done for Counter-Strike between 2000 and 2001 included a compilation of new weapon models, custom made HUD elements, aiming reticles and a sound pack.
Dawn of War is one of the very few games in the real time strategy genre that allows the user to customize their army units appearance. In Dawn of War every unit texture is broken down into seven individual image files and then compiled into a single file for the game to use. Five of the seven layers determine each of the five customizable army colors, the sixth layer serves as an alpha layer for the last and seventh layer which is the base normal texture, with some work the sixth layer can be used to give the five colored layers dirt and rust effects making for a very dynamic texture set.
Working on these textures allowed me to customize the units appearance in a dynamic way which combined with the users custom army colors results in almost endless variations. Warhammer 40k is a very unique universe which combined with the heavily stylized miniatures and the many fantastic paint jobs out there, makes working and researching background information for the game units a very fun experience for me .
This particular set is a texture replacement set for almost every Tau army unit and building in the game, there are too many individual changes to list but here is an overview of the changes included:
I created all new unit banners and badges for the Tau army because the ones included in the game did not work properly, the game released with the Tau army unit textures lacking proper arragement to use them and instead used a static non-dynamic logo, I resolved that with my Tau Army texture set and then made this set of Tau emblems all based on the official warhammer 40k game universe. The banners and badges that you see in the screenshots with what appears to be a plain black background are actually using an alpha layer and dynamically allow the primary army color to be used in-game.
These are my first textures for Dawn of War, I worked on the scout and landspeeder as they were consistantly neglected by the other people working on textures for the game and they are fantastic support units.
Description coming soon.
The Mechwarrior 4 game engine did not provide any support for user modifications, however thanks to a few brave users that managed to reverse engineer parts of the game, modifications became a reality.
The game made use of dynamic textures, every mech has a texture with a complicated alpha channel transparency that allows team color and camo textures to be displayed dynamically. The original game texture for the MADCAT was in my opinion not very pleasant to the eyes as it had brown semi-transparent blobs here and there and it was a 256x256 texture, I took it upon myself to redrawn this iconic mech and did a lot of research on the miniature and source materials for Battle-Tech, the result was as accurate as I could make it at the time and I still am very proud at the complicated alpha layer work I created for it.
My goal with the mech texture was to make it look more cell shaded for which I used thick heavy black lines sharp contrast shadows where possible. Creating the textures was a very lenghty process since the original source texture had no defined part edges and it was mostly all blurred color blobs, without any UV mapping reference I took it upon myself to figure out where the precise UV coordinates were through a very tedious trial and error process involving screenshots and launching and restarting the game more times than I care to remember.
Just like with the MADCAT texture, the original source had no useful reference UV mapping information and I had to redraw the texture from scratch. With the Nova Cat I feel I managed to attain the best cell shaded look out of all of my other work.
Same story as the other two mech source textures above, and I do remember that working on this one was more tricky for some odd reason that escapes me at the moment.
Sword of the stars is a very unique game that follows in the footsteps of Master of Orion II, it is also developed by a small independant studio (Kerberos) and I find great personal satisfaction in supporting independant games in any way, shape or form... even more so when those games are innovative and unique, and Sword of the Stars definitely fits that category nicely.
This set replaces the Human race ship textures with an all new "Gun Metal" theme which is an almost black dark grey metallic hull texture set. This set was inspired by the Earth destroyer ships from the Babylon 5 TV series.
This set replaces the Zuul race ship textures with an all new "Slavers" theme, while I love the game I just could never get into the junkyard look the Zuul spaceship had, so I took it upon myself to add more team color dynamic areas on the textures and make a more appropriate dark theme for them.
Description coming soon.