We have a size cap of 1500 meters for ships, and about 1900-2000 for stations right now, because any larger, and it interferes with ship movement (bumper car syndrome). I am not sure what the unicomplex is scaled at because i didnt import it. However when i get to the borg with half scale 1500 "should" be where a standard cube should be at. Scout cube (best of both worlds type) will be around 750, and the tac will be at 1000, because it is slightly smaller than a standard (first contact) cube. The Unicomplex shouldnt go over 2k, but im sure you guys will be impressed with the new scaling system. At half scale most of the ships fly flawlessly.

They call it a UNIcomplex for a reason. 

I also forgot to mention I'm toying with a third option in case we can't turn it into the home planet: turn the Unicomplex into a one-time base that can only be built at the home planet.  The Transwarp Hub would then be the starbase that can be built in various gravity wells.  As noted in the final Voyager episode, the hub would have no weapons but would be practically invulnerable.  This might be balanced with other starbases by giving it an ability to spawn a sphere or something as a protector.  It's primary purpose would be to create transwarp conduits to all nearby planets without the need for another transwarp gate.  It's still theoretical at the moment, but that's what I'm thinking. 

As long as it doesnt break the mod

LOL.  Noted, Major Stress.  Noted.

Seriously, I do all my testing on an unsynced copy and make sure everything is at 100% before porting into the sync folder.  If it doesn't work, no one else will ever have to worry about it.

can any one tell the newb (me) where the frack do i get the 1.181 patch so i can play SOA2 OS???? PLZ HELP ME

I know this proposal will probably get shot down but here it comes.

Are there any plans to, for lack a better term, Crusier-ify some of the capital ship.

Let me explain how it would work.

Let say there is a Galaxy class crusier. The research to unlock the ship will come from the base research which unlocks the capital version, but add another level to it to unlock the crusier portion. Or vera visa, use the the first research level to unlock the crusier, and use the second level to unlock the capital ship. The research cost will remain the same, however, when it comes to the second level, make it cost either 10% - 30% more than the base, however, when it unlocks it, if the first level unlocks the crusier, then make the capital version 5% or less stronger. If it unlocks the crusier, make it 10% - 15% weaker than the capital version. Of course, the cost of the ships will reflect the increase in cost of research, but the supply use the same, and the time to create it the same.

Of course, crusier-ify only the ambassador class, nebula, galaxy, and the defiant class only. The Soverign can remain only a capital ship.

SoA 2 OS should work with 1.19.  Just put it in your mods-v1,19 folder. Understand the OS version is a "striped down" version of SoA 2.

Once again we fail to understand the concept of the "elite", or "hero" starship. The elite units are just that .."elite" units. They dont "have" to be capital ships. They are ships with an outstanding crew, or captain, or they are designs meant for certain applications. Defiant for example specifically designed to fight the borg.

We already went exactly that route in past builds. We had cruiser slot variants of the elite units. 0.01, and 0.02 both had the elite/standard ship setup. It was a failure because too many people got confused over what was elite, and what was a standard unit. It sure would save us a lot of work, but unfortunetly it just cause more confusion than what it was worth.

Stress, I can see where ice is coming from- though don't feel it should be quite as drastic. You're completely right about the whole elite thing, that they were designed for something particular in mind, or just turned out to be exceptional designs.

It would be interesting though to have some sort of "problem" with each of the elite units which needs to be researched away before the ship reaches it's full potential- for example the Defiant couldn't make it above warp 4 until the chief fixed her up, so she could have a lower phase jump or something until you've researched the 'fix'. It wouldn't be two different ship types then, instead more like the miranda/excelsior refits.

That being said, I'm pretty happy with how caps are now, so while it would add some more roleplay into the mod, I'm not sure it's really necessary in any way.

i have perhaps an idea about more capital ships for the ai.

can they perhaps modded that they dont need the 1 command supply to be build? so that they cost for example 90 standart supply but no 1 capital ship suplly? perhaps the ai would build more galaxy classes for example.

could that work?

but the other side of the coin would be that human player wouldnt have to research capital ship supllies, too...

It "could" work, but we really do not want that many galaxy classes on the map... at least not until we get the model itself at around 3000 tri's. Right now it is 6000, and if you have more than 5 (at least on my machines) it starts slowing things down.

3 years ago when i started this project i made it clear that any model in this mod should NOT go over any vanilla sins poly count or texture size in the slot that the model is replacing. I had a gut feeling when we started to mod that we should mimic original sins almost EXACTLY, because we would run into an issue like the 2 gig ram crash issue. I had to leave the project to deal with real life, and most of my warnings were largely ignored. The result was models imported with ridiculously high poly counts, and texture sizes. Now we are hitting memory limits, The mod (and sins itself) is having a meltdown because of it. All i can say to this is "i told you so". Now i am literally wasting time rebuilding stuff that should have never been imported to begin with to deal with this major 2 gig ram brick wall issue.  Which is ok because we NEED to get rid of the 3rd party work, and replace it with our own.

Fleet cap, and supply is being looked at for future updates. I agree with most, and do not like the current fleet cap/supply system. Things that may be bogging the AI down, and making it have siezures are also being looked at as well.

M456 your idea does indeed have merit, and we will look into it. It may work to the point to where elites (or any ship for that matter) dont need research to build, but to unlock certain aspects, buff's, or weapons. That is actually a briliant idea.

Glad to help again . If you took away the prereq's to simply build the elite units it would probably also help the AI a fair bit, as in normal sins you can build all of them off the bat.

But yes, if at first they're simply as strong as cruisers, and then they get more "elite" and "prestigious" it would add a nice RP feel to the game.

Finally realized what i told you about the scale and movement aye....lol

Ok, ok, I stand corrected lol. I didnt realize the scale we were using before would cause so many problems. This will be fixed in 0.5.

I have been tasked with finding ways to optimize sins itself. So far i have been sucessful in creating new lower poly, optimized Vanilla Sins planet meshes. FFS's they are only spheres. The problem was getting the cloud effects to work on these new meshes. Solution was in the tangents, and on the mesh itself. Every point, and edge MUST be welded. and DO NOT alter the duplicate tangent map in xsi. Just assign the tangents and leave it alone. There is some pole pinch with the new sphereically mapped optimized textures (all made using the original vanilla textures with ZERO detail loss), but TBH i can like with it. This is a game, Not the Sistine Chapel. Result is the new vanilla planets look exactly the same as the old ones except for the pole pinch, and some more texture cleanup i need to do, but use half the memory. Thats right HALF. I only have the terran, desert, ice, gas giant, and volcanic planets done so far. Asteroids and such may need more time, and much more work. The Skybox itself will get the same optimization process as the planets.. Perhaps some new skybox textures

Planet before optimization (original sins unaltered) 2200 tri's. 2048x2048 texture with 1024x1024 pixels of wasted space. Memory Hogger

Planet AFTER optimization 1800 tri's. 2048x1024 spherically mapped texture made from original sins texture. Uses HALF the ram of the above. Yes texture is a little missaligned that will be fixed later.

This is not a "perfect solution", and the computer "elitist" may want to keep thier original memory hoggers, However this along with other optimizations i am doing will help prevent sins from hitting its 2 gig ram brick wall.

Once i am done with this i will upload the Optimized Planet Mod for all users. Other mods will be welcome to use it like Distant Stars. The only planet mesh i didnt touch was the gas giant, because there was nothing wrong with the original mesh. Its texture however was optimized, and uses half the ram.

great work stress, ironclad hould hire you as a system optimiser.

harpo

I can't believe it's not butter!

I gave the skybox's the same "Taste great-Less filling treatment" that I gave to the planets.

Before optimization the skybox's are 1100 tri spheres using a ridiculous 4096x1024 texture with at least 30% wasted empty space. I tried to make a "box" to minimize the poly count to the bare minimum.... needless to say it was a failure, because a box shows some nasty seems. So i went with a sphere again. Testing different sizes poly wise till i got the minimum count with least side effects. Which was half the original. About 590 tri's. Nothing was chaned on the skybox textures themselves except i added the sphereized north and south. The center is the same resolution, but it all fits on a 2048x1024 texture saving 60% ram. The goal with all of this is less ram usage with ZERO detail loss. So far it has been sucessful on planets and skybox's

Each shot u will see my task manager open. I use 142 to 150 megs ram before i run sins, and have only 15 processes running at any given time. With sins and task manager it makes it 17 processes. The test machine is an AMD sempron 1900+ with 2 gigs pc3200 ram running a g-force 6600GT video card. It is what i call a piece of industrial art, because it is useless for anything but internet, and playing sins. It is the very same system i beta tested sins in 2007 with. If the mod can run on this system it should run on any freaking system.

After you enable the mod 1st thing that you will notice is a tremendous framerate increase. Now that i have optimized planets, and skybox's there is little to no lag on startup. However the ram usage difference is minimal. That is because vanilla is in binary while the mod is not. The performance increase alone had me doing the jig. Plus there is no visible difference in game.

You will notice the "optimized" skybox is a little darker. I hated the extremely bright skybox so i altered it a bit. I also altered some of the others. I may just make my own. Can someone tell me what the enviroment cube does? i see the texture, and the reference to it in game info, but there is no mesh or particle for it. If the game doesnt use it it should NOT be there, because the game loads the textures anyway.

I think the environment cube is for reflection.

Looking good!  Glad to see ya'll finding creative solutions to get around the silly hard-codes (I mean, seriously, did they not want to bother with scalability?).  All my mates just upgraded to Diplomacy, and we're really looking forward to SoA2 D update.

Wow, stress, i'm very excited to play SoA2 D just because i may actually be able to play LARGE maps with the Trek races haha. I already have to stick to small and medium with vanilla and all other mods just because of how bad my games get from mid-game to end-game.

Okay, i lied, im not excited JUST for that reason. I really can't wait to see how the races get more and more finished and polished (love my federation ships). You guys really are QUALITY mod makers, and i put forth all of my thanks for you all making this mod.

Any chance that at one point ALL borg caps could bomb planets? Yes i know they are pretty powerful as it is, But i rarely see the AI getting around to bombing planets, plus it can be a pain when trying to take other planets out( The planet assimulater i think its called does about 20 dmg to the planets health a hit...) also i know your still working on the great mod, just wanted to ask if its on the list anywhere, or if your happy with how they are like that? ^^

Stress, I love the Great Taste Less Filling Idea!!! I hate when I'm playing and the game starts getting "Jumpy" because of too much going on...  I can barely see the difference in the look, and if it'll smooth out and speed up the game... WOOHOO!!!

Later today i will upload what i have done so far as a general mod (nothing to do with SoA 2). Understand it is not a perfect solution, and there will be some drawbacks. I still have issues with tangents. So i will upload xsi's with the mod so anybody that has more experience with XSI can take a look at the meshes, and perhaps fix the tangent problems.

Much more can be done to increase vanilla sins performance, and decrease memory usage without sacrificing in game quality. Particles themselves is a good place to start. There is no need for a 256 res texture on a particle when a 64 res looks exactly the same in game. Nor is there a need for 10000 tri models when 3000 tris will look just as good with proper bump mapping. Same with textures in general. Bigger does NOT mean better. Even if you have gods own computer all of the eye candy is absolutly useless if it pushes the game over the hardcoded memory limits.

If sins supported 64 bit we wouldnt even be having this discussion, but it does not, and there is nothing that can be done. Except make the best of what we have to work with. I got some more tricks, and nonsense i can pull off to lighten sins load up. Without losing the quality of the game itself.

Other Mods need to consider downsizing. Sure it will be great to have the high poly, High res texture models, but if it means only a "few" people can "barely" run the mod, and the rest crash because of 2 gig memory limits then what is the point? All that hard work is for nothing.

Sins memory problem is also my failure as a beta tester to see it coming. This is my way of making up for that failure, and hopefully Ironclad will study the work i am doing to prevent any future games from suffering the same problems. Be it 32 or 64 bit.

That is a very considerate attitude to take about SoaSE Stress, but it isn't your fault.  Being a beta tester doesn't normally offer to you such knowledge of things and rarely ever allows you to learn of such ways or allow for input in order to improve them (other than just suggestions).  It is good of you to offer this, but it wasn't your responsibility to handle, and is a very nice notion for you to try and improve on their faultings.

For all of the Stardock and Iron Clad moderators who are reading these forums, it is THIS kind of fanbase that benefits game developement and you should applaud and encourage such notions as being truly great acts.

This might be a stupid question but why does the game crash when it uses 2GB ram when u can adress 4GB on 32 bit?

I'm not questioning the fact that it crashes, I'm just curious

That four gigabytes is for all memory on your PC, including video card memory.  And Windows claims half of that four gigs for itself, leaving just two gigs for programs.