"True Dune" Mod for Emperor

[TheSilverTurtle]

Before I continue wasting my time, has anyone ever tried to mod Emperor to make it true[er] to the novels?

I'm talking about removing most/all of the vehicles, giving all the infantry knives, shields...maybe even see if the worm/shield frenzy is implementable or make the shields work properly (doubt the latter's do-able, but I've already thought of a way to do the former), change the lasgun colour to purple, change the house crests so they're better...

And, of course, get rid of the weirding modules...

So far, I've...managed to get a shield on the infantry, though it isn't visible...I'm presuming I'll need a 3D model for that? How does one go about altering those..? (I've only been playing around with rules.txt so far...I only started a few hours ago, hehe)

And I've also got a knife of sorts working on the Atreides infantry...but what actually happens is they run up real close and then the gun-shooting anim/sound plays...I'm guessing some significantly-heavier modding of the 3d models would be required to rectify this?

I'm loathe to copy the elite sardaukar model to all the infantry units, but if necessary I suppose I could differ textures..? (I'm just guessing here, don't have any experience with fiddling with the 3d models...like I said, I don't even [yet] know how...)

So, any advice/guidance/thoughts, anyone?

[nemafakei]

To be honest, you're only going to get about three or four models out of a retextured Sard - one for each house. You'll likely need to do some heavy-duty 3d editing to get more models.

[TheSilverTurtle]

Hmm.

Ah well, good to know. Wasn't planning on having this finished until October anyway, so I suppose I'll have plenty of time to get good.

On that note, does anyone have a link to the .xbf viewer/editor thingy? I've just searched the forums and learnt of it's existence, but all the links I found were dead :(

Here's some of my further ideas for this mod;

At

Relatively poor

Infantry second only to Sardaukar...and Fremen

Relatively expensive units

Half-price Fremen compared to ord (House=Atreides, PrimaryBuilding=Fremencamp) (honourable)

Hark

Richest

Keep flametroops (dishonourable)

Lose rocket troops

Rubbish infantry

Cheap units

Double-price Fremen compared to ord

Ord

Mid

Keep chem/mortar troops (dishonourable)

Lose rocket troops

Mid-skill infantry (maybe instant kill-poisoned blades?)

Mid-price units and Fremen

Fremen

Rocket troops

Best fighters

Expensive

No shields

Sardaukar

Second only to Fremen