Ultimate Mod: HardCode Assault!

ROFL

it's kinda right if we at least knew where are the hardcodes limits it would help a lot

but has we saw on entrenchement text files they seem to move the limits in the right way not remove them but at least move them

I'm joining the fight against the hardcodes.

I think I'll fight for the hardcodes.

I too will join you against hardcodes. My most hated is hardcode 10!

I will add my txt voice in the fight to release hardcodes

Some things I would love to be able to change, but I would probably end up completely destroying the game mechanics. Oh well, thats what reinstall is for

Ha ha, can I have a side battle against the game engine?

The hardcodes are probably there to stop the game from overflowing things like the texture cache, frame and vertex buffers so just removing them will likely cause a minidump 30mins into a game for some poor bugger. 

IMHO the game engine needs an overhaul before the restrictions are lifted, so in Alexander the Great battle style I'm going straight for the leader !

I also add my voice.  I have been fighting the damn hard codes since the beginning.  I had to discover them by myself, and when I did I thought that I had done something wrong, only to spend weeks finding out it was not my fault, but an unsaid limitation in the game engine.

I have asked for a revelation before, but to no avail.

I have even heard rumors of Blair sayign that they had no intention of changing the limits, and that the only problem is "crazy mods", which I am assuming he is talking about 7 DEADLY SINS, but I cannot take all the glory.  Any mod, such as the SOA2 mod by Major Stress, or the upcoming Last Stand by ManSh00ter, or the Star Gate or B5 mods, are going to run into these problems.

I bought this game because of the promise of high modibility.  It seems that the game is only partially moddable, which in my eyes is lying to the consumer, of which I am.  I was the firt person in the game store to ask and buy the game the day it came out, and I bought it not only for the cool graphics and engine, but for the sole purpose of modding.  I feel like I hae been let down.

Not to mention that all my emails to Ironclad still go unanswered.  There is practically no support given to specific questions.

So, this is my general gripe post.  Hard codes have to go, or at least be exanded upon greatly.  And the support needs to come in.....big time.

So, if I may be so bold, I speak for the entire 7DS community....all 800 members.

DANMAN

Engine stability > mods. Fact is, the vast majority of players do not use mods.

Rather have a stable game than one that crashes left and right because there are no limitations on it.

Can we like tie Annatar to a Novalith shell or something?  He reeks of "The Devs can do no wrong.".

Vs. your "7DS totally humiliates the developers" stand?

Well, my opinion is that the devs and modders should ideally work together for the benefit of the players. So far, I must say that the SoaSE devs have been more than averagely forthcoming when it comes to the needs of us modders - we saw some truly crippling limits eased up, after all. Yes, there are still limits, but keep in mind that SoaSE is, like any other software, based around a computer concept which has limits built-in. You won't find a limitless game, precisely due to reasons Annatar11 and BigBang stated. Its a necessary evil.

As for us modders, yes it can be very frustrating when you run into an unexpected hardcode limitation that wrecks your brilliant ideas, but that's what you get for working with a ready-made engine. Some games are more modable, some are not. When making mods I think one should always be aware of what can be done with the game engine and what cannot - and RESEARCH before comitting a significant amount of time into developing something that, ultimately, is doomed to fail. You can't make an aeroplane out of a tractor - and vice versa.

I san say that the Last Stand mod is on schedule and will not be suffering from any hardcode limitations - not to say that I had to compromise and drop a number of potentially interesting ideas for the sake of actually going ahead with mod production.

Anyway, to reiterate, it should not be a war between modders and devs. Modders work with what devs give them, and devs can potenitally profit greatly from said effort, so its more of a symbiosis.

Not really. I just understand something you don't because you just refuse to. There are some things that truly make no sense and it's probably something they just didn't think about when developing the engine (like being unable to create a cap ship name list for a 4th+ race), but the numerical limitations (meshes, sounds, etc) are all there because they have to be.

It is extremely poor programming to leave it open if it can cause problems. For example, if they know that a huge map with 10 players will need x amount of memory for the ship AI (not even talking about empire AI), they have to _guarantee_ that that memory is always available by making sure that the other stuff doesn't take up more than it should. So on, so forth. They also have to make sure that it runs well on older machines, and that places even more limitation on the engine.

Now I know you're so attached to your mishmash of "Let's just throw together all sorts of random crap and call it a mod" that you don't really care about this, but that's your problem and not the dev's. They need a game that they know runs well on a wide variety of hardware, and that means they need to be very careful with how much of what they can allow because they need to guarantee that resources will be available. Just take a look at Entrenchment. They added a few new models and mines, and anything larger than a medium map eventually minidumps because it's trying to use up out-of-bounds memory

The bottom line is this: memory usage in Sins is extremely important. The majority of limitations on the "number of stuff" are there so that they can make sure there's enough memory for everything the game needs.

Hold on, you're saying Entrenchment eats up 2 gigs of RAM (the max Win XP allows per appliacation usually)? Because if its that memory intensive, then we all might just as well drop all mod efforts that go beyond stat tweaking.

I'd say that it minidumps because there's a memory leak somewhere, not because of a few new models. Although granted, Vasari spamming ten million billion mines could be considered a memory leak too

Which is, coincidentally, a very nice demostration of what happens when you lift limits on the game mechanics. 

Well no, Sins itself isn't pushing 2gb but it does also have to play nice with everything else running as well. I was referring to the 32-bit OS limitation on memory addressing rather than actual physical memory usage. And yeah, it may be mostly mine spam, but maybe not. IC didn't really optimize Entrenchment much yet, so it wouldn't surprise me if all the meshes on the mesh list for the starbases and defense structures get tossed into memory on load, for example.

But yeah. I just try to be general enough. I just know that memory usage is a huge thing for IC to worry about. Some of us have been asking since release to put in stack queueing for orders (like right clicking on a stack would queue all the ships belonging to it as targets), but the answer we got was it's not in because they don't have a good system worked out for how to limit potential memory usage on it - since 10-ships-per-stack is not hardcoded and someone could change it to be 100 per, and queueing 5 stacks of 100 is bound to be a good chunk of memory for the new data structure to hold the pointers/references to those ships.

Edit: Actually, ManSh00ter, I remember a lot of people were crashing within 10 minutes of a game. Much too soon for any memory leak to build up. What fixed it was turning down texture details (which would use less memory). So it really does seem like Entrenchment overflows

Ive been wondering about this....So why cant they just make enemy ships alt_selectable. It would let ships of one type focus/spread fire against enemies of a certain type in a given gravity well. (without overloading the instruction stack)

That cant be 2 hard to implement....can it?

Ah, but I have to point this out - if the stock setting work well, what is it to the devs if someone decides to make a mod which doesn't actually work because they get an overflow in five minutes? That particular argument "someone might change it" doesn't make sense to me.

And I'll admit I'm not too savvy when it comes to technical details, so excuse my ignorance, but aren't textures mostly loaded into video memory, or does that apply only for textures actually being rendered onscreen, while all the rest get loaded up on-demand or preloaded in RAM? And are we talking about some very high-res textures here (don't have Entrenchment)?

I'm asking because I'm slightly worried the engine is going to meltdown with three new races I plan on putting in, if it gets memory problems from what, nine new models and some extra textures?

Maybe you could suggest it I can only guess at how they have it set up, but the way I think of it is (and I think this is their worry) is that it would just make it possible to queue too many ships. I mean, we can queue now manually by just holding down shift.. but this way we're unlikely to queue a large number of ships (100+) so it's highly unlikely to matter in the grand scheme of things. But the target queue has to be unique in the code, I would think. It would need to store a pointer/reference to the queued ship so it can just pull them off the stack and pass it to whatever functions that do the "go blow them up now" dance and it sounds like they're just worried about that queue stack getting too large. Last I heard, they just weren't sure on how to limit the number of queued ships so that it doesn't grow too large.

So with your method, it would still be possible to queue a very large number of ships wouldn't it?

Well.. you'd probably have to ask them that. On one hand, I see your point. But on the other, it would probably be quite a lot of hassle for them to trouble shoot the "my game keeps crashing wtf!!!!!" problems. I can't really blame them for making it hard for mods to break it.

You got me on this one. I've not done any graphics-related coding so I honestly don't know how it fits together, and obviously I don't know what exactly the engine does I just know that for everyone who was crashing, turning down the texture quality from Very High to High solved the crashes. So it's got to be a memory issue. As far as I know, the video card memory is supposed to store them but then it probably uses RAM for leftovers. And on older hardware with ~128-256mb video ram, it probably runs out pretty quick?

Well, like I keep posting everywhere they said they didn't optimize Entrenchment yet, but they fully expect the same performance from Entrenchment as Sins once they're done. The rest.. I don't know

Well...yes. I guess so, but only if the enemy has 100+ ships of the same type, in the same grav well. All at the same time and if you ever get into any battle where there is more than 100 of the same type of enemy then your PC is plenty powerfull enough to handle the que.

Strangly though, I dont think the devs will listen to me. Otherwise it would have been in the game already.................

Actually the more I think about your idea, the more I think it could actually work out fairly well. But I just realized something else.. wouldn't it also be tied to your selection? For example, you select your flaks and alt+click on enemy fighters. So your flaks now have their queue. But if you select your LRFs, they won't have a queue and you can then alt+click on light frigates or something, and so on so forth. Essentially, wouldn't it allow to have every enemy ship queued for every group of ships in your own fleet, in theory?

The best of all is that you dont have to use it at all, but the micro manager that wants to squeeze that last DPS vs armor type would become legendary on the field

Yeah.. but isn't this what they tried to avoid though? Queueing too many ships, that is.. Well, maybe after the next Entrenchment update hits I'll try to chat with Blair about it, see if they reached any decision and pitch your idea.

Are you sure about it... let see some number please... for 7DS, the 1.03d version of one year ago, for one download place, we have a total of 20652 download... and it is growing... around 500 download week in December... last week, it was 736 download... and this for a old mod, no counting the French, German and Spanish version, no counting the torrent one... sure that the 7DS 2.0 will make a better result...

Now, how much people have download other mod ? Maybe you have something like 100000 people using mod... don't think that you can ignore these user...

We don't ask that Stardock break all the hardcoded limit... a first step will be to document them... second step will be to change some limit if a majority ask about them... after a lot of asking/complain, Stardock have rise the limit of sound... is the game more broken now ?

A other limit is the mesh/texture limit... some mod working in 1.05 or 1.12 will maybe not work in Entrenchment after conversion... since entrenchment add already a lot of mesh, maybe some mod working fine now ( 1.12 ) will not more work with it because of the limit... unless Stardock raise these limit in the final Entrenchment...

All game have limits, some cannot be changed without a fully new core engine... but document these limit is a must... people who create mods have work hard and use a lot of their time for create the mod... once they try it, they discover that it don't work because some hidden limit... i understand the fustration of several who have post here...

Mods are generating money for Stardock... i have read a story ( on a french forum ) of a guy who have show Sins running a mod to friends (4 people )... Result was these friend buying the game and playing together online with the mod... don't remember what mod, but it was related to a TV serie...

Don't say that harcoded limit are created to allow the game on lower end machine... with or without limit, the game will always run in a identic way... of course, creator of mod will need to test  their mod and publish own minimum computer spec for their mod... but we will never complain about the need to make this task...

Don't reply that the task is difficult or impossible... if you are not able/wishing to raise some hardcoded limit, feel free to give us the source code... we will work on it for free...

Sins is probably closing on a million units sold (if not past, it was in the 10 best selling games of '08). But even going with the last announced number was what, half a million? To your 20k downloads?

There's your numbers.

How many Entrenchment betas players are there i.e. those having played SoaSE are coming back for more?

How many players login to ICO per month?