Yeah.  And you have a problem with that?

Who could ever have a problem with Star Destroyers duking it out against USS Enterprise?

the thought bothers me alot. Sins BSG and Starwars rely heavily on fighters which are really rare in Star Trek. Star wars ship designs are dull. The empires flying triangles and the rebel alliances giant space dildos. At least the Borg have an excuse for uninspiring deisgns based off simple shapes. I like soa 2 because its a star trek mod and theres no good star trek startegy games. Your talking to someone who edited the string file for soa 2 to be all trek references. Class m planets, dilithuim etc...

Woah.  Well, after Stress quits after Demo 3, you can take over for SoA 2 for Sins.  He's basically saying "To Hell With It!  Community, have fun!".  So basically DANMAN will take the ST stuff for 7DS and make everything horribly uncanon yet still fun, and you can continue with SoA 2.

I gave 7ds permission to use SoA 2 ships under the condition that any of the 3rd party model authors are properly credited, and that i dont have to play tech support for any SoA 2 stuff in 7ds that goes wrong, and this topic gets filled up with the "waaaahh!! why doesnt it work?!" posts. Also what is in 7ds is NOT SoA 2. It is Star Trek ships in the 7ds mod. So there wont be any confusion. There can be only ONE SoA mod

I have always hated Star Trek vs Star Wars vs B5 vs BSG vs etc etc debates. Enjoy each of the genres for what they are Sci-Fi

SoA 2 is NOT going to rely heavily on fighters. Only a few ships per faction will be able to carry strike craft. The Romulans wont carry any at all though they are capable of doing so. Thier ships will be compensated by their weapons being able to easily shoot down others strike craft. The numbers ships can carry are low as well. At least that part is not hardcoded. While the Galaxy venture refit can carry 3 squads the number in a squad will be no higher than 3 ships (may be reduced). That is still pushing it due do the size of the fed strike craft. The 2 ships can only carry one squad. The Sovereign, and Galaxy wont be able to carry more upon leveling there numbers are fixed. The feds have only 3 ships that can carry fighters. That is how it will remain for now. This is one of the aspects i do have some control over now that i fixed the spawn issue.

Pretty much every file gets in GameInfo gets opened up with notepad.

And Stress, I know DANMAN taking SoA 2 and making ST part of Sins with your stuff is nowhere near SoA 2.  It is 7DS, and is basically just Star Trek vs. Star Wars vs. Star Control.

Too many Stars!!!

Who said i am saying "To hell with it"? If that were true i wouldnt be posting on other topics about the hard code problems. I DO NOT want to give up this mod. That is the whole point of those posts. However if there is no way to work around the issues then there is no point in continuing, because then the mod will be nothing more than a half ass skin job. Do you really want that?

If it turns out that SoA 2 does die because of this then SoA 2 will be dead. There will be no takeover. A new project will have to be started, and be called something else. The thing is if i cant pull off a trek mod here with all of my experience from Starfleet Command, Bridge Commander, Homeworld, Nexus, etc. etc. Then i seriously doubt that anybody else can pull it off. That is not a diss of other modders. It is just a fact of the game engine. I am trying NOT to let this mod die though. I worked to damn hard to get it this far to just "give it up".

Yeah I know.  You also mentioned something about moving to the NanoFX engine, didn't you?  That is IF the hardcodes don't get removed, changed. or otherwise altered to allow what you want to be able to do.

And no offense Stress, but as one who has run up against many annoying things, such as hardcoded weapon types and fixed capital ship names (I bet you'd love to be able to stop throwing beam around and just have your weapons be "phaser" and "quantum" and "photon"), I feel your pain, and I wish the devs would basically remove every single one of the damn things so we can stop hitting our heads against the damn walls they put up and get on with modding.

Unfortunately, Kryo said many of these hardcodes are part of the engine itself, and the engine would need a total rewrite to remove a lot of them.  Unfortunately, those are the most annoying hardcodes, and the ones that are causing 99.99% of the combined bitching on these forums.

I question some of those "re-naming" issues, because of the fact that i was able to (with no coding knowledge) create SIX playable factions that are separate from the vanilla factions. Each with their own build menu's, icons, and in game icons/pictures. It was just a simple matter of making sure the entitys, and other game info pointed to the right files. I think the same thing can be done with ship names and such. it may be hardcoded but you may be able to trick the game into thinking there is more. Ill need to look into this when i have time.

Make sure you share any findings with the rest of us since some of that is of relatively big concern to me as well. When I am done with the volumetric explosions mini-mod, I'll have a crack at it too. Though at a first glance I don't see any refrences to ship names in .entity files, aside from the string ID's which refer to their class name (for example Kortul Devastator) and description.

We altered the ship names in Our SoA 2 Fan demo.  It is easy, they are in the string file and even labeled for the races:

StringInfo
 ID "IDS_CAPITALSHIPNAME_TECH13"
 Value "USS Potemkin"

See, so just go into the string file and alter them.

thign with soa 2 is that 2 races look back to the same string file for names. So if you were to list in the advent file uss enterprise you could wind up looking at an ensalver named enterprise because the feds and dominion share the advent string file and tek tree the cardies and romulans share the tec and the breen and romulan share the vasari

That is true for now because i havent had time to screw around with the ship names yet. that is low priority for the mod right now.

However each mod faction has its own player entity. For example PlayerFederation. That is the point i was trying to make. So in that entity it is possible to change ID "IDS_CAPITALSHIPNAME_TECH13" to ID "IDS_CAPITALSHIPNAME_FED13" or add a new line to the english string, and to the modded ship entity.

I think you're confusing class names with ship names. Ship entities only have reference to class names and descriptions, not the list of ship names capital ships get when they're first built.

Also, the only reference to ship names I was able to find  in the player entity file is capitalShipNameType, but changing that results in a minidump.

Admiral_Cobbs, that would work only if you want to replace existing races. I want to add completely new ones, so simply changing existing ship names may fix it for the new races but also busts it for the old ones. I'm not too stressed about this, as I can do a workaround, but its a strange hardcode limit, if it truly is hardcoded.

whats the big deal with changing ship names tho?

Just to let u guys know things are still chugging along. The Federation faction is now complete. All 15 "combat" slots are filled. Unfortunetly i had to start the mod over again from scratch, because of an error on my part. Technically you can add as many units as you want (minus the hard coded cap ship limits), but I didnt realize there were only 15 slots worth of unit pics, and icons on the UI texture sheets. I have been going over the existing sins units, because i am unfamilar with the window grid system on th UI textures. 15 combat units per faction were all i planned on using since the beginning, but the elite/standard system kinda screwed me up for the federation faction. so i had to change some things around. The 15 unit per faction limit will remain even after the 1.1 patch, because there is no change in the UI.

I scrapped the elite/standard system for the Federation faction. The feds get an elite unit, or a standard unit.. Not both like in the other factions. So there are no longer 2 versions of the galaxy, akira, etc. I did this so i can fit the nebula, and the intrepid in the mod.

The other factions will still use the elite/standard system .

All Ships now mimic the sins role type they replaced to a point. I had to do this because the Sins AI is hardcoded. If for example a scout role type ship is missing then the AI will not build anything at all. If it is missing siege role types the AI has a heart attack, because it cant capture worlds. I chose the best ship for the role type. The Excelsior is no longer a siege ship. She fills the light frig role. The miranda is a true scout now,

The weapons stats, and hardpoints are all being redone. There wont be any Mirandas/Excelsiors with ridiculous 100+ torpedo firepower. Also attack types are no longer all "capitalship" attacks. Frigate roles use antiheavy, antilight and antiverylight attack types now. Most if not all ships will have at least some anti strike craft capability. Light carriers can be armed, and they will be.

I am reducing the number of hardpoints on some ships, but compensating with weapon stats. Hopefully this will reduce incidents of the firing through the ships own hull issue. It was kind of ridiculous to see beams everywhere when lots of ships were on the map.

Doesnt 1.1 raise the per-faction capital limit to 9?

He is talking about UI elements, not actual units ingame. It does you little good to cram many ships in game if you also cannot cram UI buttons onscreen to press.

Is there no way to make a button that displays a different layer so to speak in the ui?

Nope. You would need to program the "up and down" arrows into the UI itself, all we can do is cosmetic change. As far as I know, we can't even add new "pages" (for example in adition to frigate, cruiser and capital ships have a "battlecruiser" or "elite" page in the build menu).

Dang thats harsh

so....it cant be done like that....dang this was the only other mod besides 7 Deadly sins that i was really looking foward to. the fact that i cannot spam Akrias/Galaxies anymore....

well, they do somewhat fill their roles better that way (cause Canon wise only a few Galaxies were made and a handful of Akria class were ever produced)

sucks that the venture shuttle wont be the scout

Hahaha! What good does adding extra ship slots do if there is no room on the UI textures to put the ships. The 1.1 UI textures are identical to the 1.05 textures.

It can be done, but i wont do it in the method that it can be done. Which is duplicating the multiple UI textures, and having the files point to the duplicate textures. The problem with that method is its a major resource hog. The Sins UI is a lesson on redundancy to begin with. There are so many different textures for the UI that IMO are totally unnecessary. having to duplicate the UI textures for the 3 extra factions was bad enough. I am not about to do it again just to get extra ship icon space. Sins loads up all of the textures in the game. Not just the ones you see on screen. Which is why it uses damn near 2 gigs of ram when set to highest. People with high end puters prolly wont notice the hit, but my poor little laptop will fry itself. If that happens then no more mod development. I cant replace my laptop. Especially with no job.

No Venture is an attack fighter now. Quite an effective one too.

Darkshimmer is back, and he is helping me with the balancing.

This may be the last release but i amtrying to toss the kitchen sink into it.

Can't you have the entity references point to the same file? For example, make a sort of "class" icon instead of unit-specific and simply have all the (for example) colony ships point to the same texture? That way you would only need to do one texture file. As far as I understand it, Sins have different textures for different races because the hud icons *are* different. But if you reduce the amount of variation in the HUD icons, then you get extra room for whatever else you need. And actually avoid having to have several separate texture files. The drawback is that an UI which relies on symbols rather than tiny ship pictures is not as... pwetty.

Anyway I haven't touched UI yet, so you know more about what can be done or not. The above is an idea which I got from looking at the relevant files just a minute ago.