[MOD WIP] Star Trek: Sacrifice of Angels 2 - 0.9.5R Update 7/09/2024

Major Stress

Join Date 05/2006

+161

Ive been reading what you say about the AI Quiet_Man. If you think you can help make stuff work that doesnt work right now get with psychoak. Maybe you will see what we didnt see.

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@Major Stress: I will do

@psychoak: I can send you the files with my AI mod. If you send me a message with mail or upload location.

In an attempt to drive you crazy I was thinking about the Ion torpedoes better being none stacking . As the damage is very little the disabling effect is much more important.

If you fight with e.g. a borg cube I would expect the autocast to use the Ion torpedoes not all at once if they don't stack?

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and a message from my son (11 years old). I was explaining him that some people simply like to bash things by using forum trolls as example. They bash other peoples work without knowing the effort or producing something useful themselves in contradiction to an discussion between people trying to improve.

He asked me to post a message about how good your mod is and how much fun he has with it.

Hmmm, I might better stop posting stupid stuff until I know more and can suggest something really useful

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psychoak

Join Date 07/2007

+225

The autocast conditions on the Ion Torpedo do not prevent stacking.

The ships are not set to focus fire, they pick their own individual targets. As a result, it's a rare event for two relatively rare abilities to be stacked. It's a choice between infrequent stacked disables, and the weapon not firing when it would have had an impact on your casualties. The damage level is pretty heavy.

A common scenario you'll run into is with your D'verix. At the opening of a fleet engagement, the radius disable goes off. It lasts 12 seconds, and would prevent Ion Torpedoes from firing for that duration. At the end of the disable, they trigger, and fire on a five second delay with travel to the target.

One way, you have targets that are down for 15+ seconds, the other you have a 5+ second gap in between a 12 second disable and a 10 second disable. More time disabled, but neither are optimal usage since odds are the extra damage and disable time has a significant factor in whether the target blows up first. I can be convinced to change this if people want it the other way around, but if you really want to exploit the full potential of this ability, it needs to be manual.

Edit: pm sent btw.

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are there any trek maps on which you can choose your starting position and those of the ais?

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I'm not asking for this to be added, but I was just wondering if it was possible. When the borg assimilate a ship, would it be possible to make that ship look Borgafied?

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Do the Borg have a Envoy Ship? reason for asking is that i keep getting the same mission over and over about sending an Envoy Ship.

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I don't think diplomacy and envoys is a very Borg thing. No, the Borg do not have an envoy ship.

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Major Stress

Join Date 05/2006

+161

We tried doing this (along with ship specific debris), but there were several issues. First the borgified units need separate entity's, meshes, and textures. Second and more important is with all the added stuff to make this happen we hit sins 2 gig limit. There are many things we want to do but cant because of the 2 gig limit, and before it starts ill snuff it out right now... NO. We will not use the LAA patch, hack, or whatever it is. Do not even bring it up.

Unfortunately we had to leave some diplomacy stuff in the borg faction to make the AI work right. We really arent done looking though the diplomacy stuff and figuring out how it works yet, or editing it without breaking something.

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is it even possible to change your starting spot on non-random maps?

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psychoak

Join Date 07/2007

+225

Nope.

Well, there is... But it involves map editing.

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Hey guys

I was just curious on when you guys think a mod will be ready for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion? I know the beta is out and it's not released yet. I thought about buying Rebellion but I honestly have no interest really in playing the vanilla or spending 40 bucks (common steam deals), I only like the mod that you guys have made for SINS. Also do you guys know what kinds of new things you may be adding to the mod once it is released. I am looking forward too playing the mod you guys will be doing for this. I would like to also help you guys do any testing of the game and contribute any ideas I can come up with. I've been playing your mod for 2 years and still enjoy it much. Is it ok for a 32 year old man to still be playing vids lol?

Keep up the good work.

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Quoting a110,

reply 3485

is it even possible to change your starting spot on non-random maps?

there is one way, but you have to select a DIFFERENT player number in the setting up of the game after the map selection, and most players tend to use the player 0 slot instead of the player 1 - x (number of players for the map) positions.

harpo

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psychoak

Join Date 07/2007

+225

The time frame for a Rebellion release is going to depend on asset generation. Both of the modelers are otherwise occupied in RL.

Code wise, I could have a release out tomorrow, it's a simple matter to get it compatible. There just isn't any point in doing such a thing, as it would be the exact same game.

There are some major performance gains to be had from Rebellion, but the main ones are either fixed already by us modders, or setting generated and can simply be turned off, like the auto-record function that hoses game performance after a while. Porting it now means several hours of text editing, all so I can tandem update whenever the rest of the team gets back to work.

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Quoting harpo99999,

reply 3488

Quoting a110, reply 3485is it even possible to change your starting spot on non-random maps?
there is one way, but you have to select a DIFFERENT player number in the setting up of the game after the map selection, and most players tend to use the player 0 slot instead of the player 1 - x (number of players for the map) positions.

harpo

how do you change your player number in-game? or am i misunderstanding you

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Quoting a110,

reply 3490

Quoting harpo99999, reply 3488
Quoting a110, reply 3485is it even possible to change your starting spot on non-random maps?
there is one way, but you have to select a DIFFERENT player number in the setting up of the game after the map selection, and most players tend to use the player 0 slot instead of the player 1 - x (number of players for the map) positions.

harpo

how do you change your player number in-game? or am i misunderstanding you

sorry, I was thinking of both the multiplayer and dev.exe operations, in the standard game exe it is NOT possible except for multiple players mode, but by changing one line in the map from false to true (line 8 that contains the randomizeStartingPositions ), but then you do NOT have any control over where you start.

harpo

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psychoak

Join Date 07/2007

+225

As SOA2 is relatively bug free, it's actually reasonable to play from dev.exe, so if you really want to start as another side it's not too difficult.

Every now and then you'll run into some strange error and need to click skip all, but it's easy enough to change your side from there.

ctrl-shift-period to get to the console, followed by

a, d, b

This sets you up as AI, then hit a till you get to your side of choice, and do b again to take it off AI. Cancel whatever orders they've gotten up to that you don't like, and fire away.

Comma gets you back through the console commands.

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Major Stress

Join Date 05/2006

+161

I answered a while back when Rebellion was announced that we had NO plans to immediately port SoA2 into Rebellion when it was released. We want to get as much as possible done with the Diplomacy version of SoA2 first. Then we can start work on Rebellion.

We also want to let any possible rebellion patches happen before we port over as well. Nothing is more frustrating than to have to rebuild a mod from scratch over, and over again, because the latest patch's consistently break it.

SoA2 will eventually get ported over to Rebellion, but it will take much longer to port than it did when we ported from Entrenchment to Diplomacy. We have much more mod assets now than we did with Entrenchment when we ported to Diplomacy. We all know how long it took us to port to Diplomacy... Too Damn Long. Converting some of our stuff to Rebellion will indeed be more challenging with the new graphic, shader, and file changes. We also do not want to push SoA 2 over Sins 2 gig limit.... Rebellions 2 gig limit.

I will make the foundation for the SoA2: Rebellion port myself (everything but the research trees and ability's which the SoA2 team can add later). While the rest of the SoA2 team focus's on finishing up the Diplomacy version as much as possible. The reason I will be making the foundation is, because i will be making it a little bit at a time since my free time is VERY limited. I want to make sure a new version of TSOP is fully incorporated (since i will be making a version of TSOP for Rebellion as well), and it may sound arrogant, but if anyone else ports SoA2 to Rebellion they will just do it wrong.

I cant make new models anymore. I just do not have the free time. Nor do i have free time to even fix/tweak the existing 3rd party stuff in the mod. Modeling is demanding, and unforgiving work if you let it be, but is very rewarding in the end. It takes lots of time, and patience that i can not spare right now with a 15 hour a day RL job. We need experienced modelers, and texture artists to help us finish the Diplomacy version of SoA2. To make what is missing, and fix what we have. We have needed that kind of help for a long time. The more help we get. the faster this project will be finished. Contact Psychoak if you wish to help us out.

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Quoting Major Stress,

reply 3493

I answered a while back when Rebellion was announced that we had NO plans to immediately port SoA2 into Rebellion when it was released. We want to get as much as possible done with the Diplomacy version of SoA2 first. Then we can start work on Rebellion.

We also want to let any possible rebellion patches happen before we port over as well. Nothing is more frustrating than to have to rebuild a mod from scratch over, and over again, because the latest patch's consistently break it.

SoA2 will eventually get ported over to Rebellion, but it will take much longer to port than it did when we ported from Entrenchment to Diplomacy. We have much more mod assets now than we did with Entrenchment when we ported to Diplomacy. We all know how long it took us to port to Diplomacy... Too Damn Long. Converting some of our stuff to Rebellion will indeed be more challenging with the new graphic, shader, and file changes. We also do not want to push SoA 2 over Sins 2 gig limit.... Rebellions 2 gig limit.

I will make the foundation for the SoA2: Rebellion port myself (everything but the research trees and ability's which the SoA2 team can add later). While the rest of the SoA2 team focus's on finishing up the Diplomacy version as much as possible. The reason I will be making the foundation is, because i will be making it a little bit at a time since my free time is VERY limited. I want to make sure a new version of TSOP is fully incorporated (since i will be making a version of TSOP for Rebellion as well), and it may sound arrogant, but if anyone else ports SoA2 to Rebellion they will just do it wrong.

I cant make new models anymore. I just do not have the free time. Nor do i have free time to even fix/tweak the existing 3rd party stuff in the mod. Modeling is demanding, and unforgiving work if you let it be, but is very rewarding in the end. It takes lots of time, and patience that i can not spare right now with a 15 hour a day RL job. We need experienced modelers, and texture artists to help us finish the Diplomacy version of SoA2. To make what is missing, and fix what we have. We have needed that kind of help for a long time. The more help we get. the faster this project will be finished. Contact Psychoak if you wish to help us out.

NPS Not to worry stress im back and ready to mod and roll

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Mod and roll.....lol

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I have to say, having played the Rebellion Beta for a week now, and I'm of the opinion that the SoA2 team would be well advised to sit it out unless there is some programming advantage I'm not aware of. Graphics and gameplay are effectively unchanged from Diplomacy; the game merely has the new "factions," the Titans (of course), and corvettes.

Given that SoA2 already has:

5 Factions,
fighter motion on the ships (which was implemented for Corvettes in Rebellion)
No need for Titans (based on the Star Trek universe)

I don't see why the SoA2 team would need/want to take Rebellion on (unless, as I noted, there is a programming advantage that I can't yet see). On the up side, the programming tweaks are simple - it should only take a few hours to port a mod over since as far as I can tell, Rebellion is just Diplomacy with the addition of a Titan Factory and Titans (which are not particularly complex if you look at their entity files).

The *only* possible upside is that the Borg faction would be able to have larger cubes be Titans, but that would only be necessary if you wanted to balance the Borg 1-on-1 against other races. Given that the SoA2 team's vision has been for the Borg to be the Super-Faction that you need to gang up on, I don't see that as necessary or even desirable.

Thus, I conclude that the SoA2 team has the right approach for the time being with wait-and-see. That said, don't assume that this upgrade will bring nearly the improvements to SoA2 that previous add-ons did.

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A straight port of researches and ships may not produce much, but there are a few additional research modifiers added to Rebellion that may be useful if additional technologies are ever added for any of the factions. Also, the limit on maximum weapons a unit can have was raised from 3 to 5, so that may be useful in some capacity. According to the developers Rebellion has also been optimized further from Diplomacy, plus of course all new shaders were added that finally have shadows.

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Major Stress

Join Date 05/2006

+161

You can thank TSOP for the additional optimizations to Rebellion. Many things are there that are very similar to what we did with TSOP. It did come to good usage after all. Which is why we made it. There are some things in rebellion that i dont agree with. Like the TGA textures, but its nothing that we cant fix ourselves later. I havent looked at any converted rebellion files yet, and i m not sure that the current convertXSI will work with rebellion meshes due to the graphic changes (speculation is that the shadow system needs info from the mesh files themselves).

No start on SoA 2 rebellion until we know that we can make the move for sure first. We stay on diplomacy for now.

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According to TobiWahn_Kenobi mesh compatibility with the new shaders is a single line added to the .mesh file in Notepad. Either him or Lavo_2, I forget which one did it first.

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Lavo_2

Join Date 05/2010

+112

Quoting Major Stress,

reply 3498

i m not sure that the current convertXSI will work with rebellion meshes due to the graphic changes (speculation is that the shadow system needs info from the mesh files themselves).

The current convertXSI works, however you need to add the following line before the hasValidTangents line: "maxDiffuseMipLevel 0". With this line meshes from as old as Ent will work fine in Rebellion. Though, if you're tangents sucked in non-Rebellion Sins, they will likely look even worse in Rebellion.

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