phew, did they even include non-canon ships? ok, I think federation and klingon are all-canon, but dominion might have a few new ones and maybe romulans, very probably borg when we see them.

as for the setting, don't forget that you want a situation where federtation and romulans at war makes kind of sense. or other pairings. so, considering that the three empires were allied, such a new situation gives more leeway in what disputes can arise.

ok i made a few tweeks i need to know if that solves the dump

btw i really hate waiting for people to post on the forums when stuff like this happens ! you all need msn lol

Missed it. My bad. I'm cool with waiting, was just offerin' to help.

I have yahoo, does that help at all?   I saw the new tweaks and I'll try them out see if it does anything.

That's alright salemonz.  I was just letting you guys know, because these guys have already posted that beta is full and I didn't want them getting erked by something when they already have plenty else on their plate (there's like 3-4 people making this ENTIRE mod).

FYI i have been toying with the idea of a "second" dominion war since we planned the failed HW2 mod.

SoA 2 is as "canon" as possible without looking stupid. What i mean is by stupid is all of the inconsistancys, and the Voyager/Enterprise nonsense where technobabble, introducing "uberships", and ignoring canon saved the day. Furthermore i dont want to introduce new a new "space thug" with every update. As far as i am concerned 8472 doesnt exist. As well as the entire series of Enterprise. The Kazon are just ridiculous, and dont get me started on the xindi. I dont want "Killer B Trek" in this mod. DS-9 had some bad moments but it wasnt all bad, but pretty much all of Voyager, and Enterprise epitomizes that stupidity i dont want in the mod.

In a war game it is very hard to focus on treks bright outlook on the future. However since sins is a war game we have to focus on the martial aspect of the federation. Dont worry we are not making the feds warmongers. We will leave that to the klingons and dominion.

We must fill EVERY default ship slot in sins with appropriete roletypes. Otherwise the sins AI has a heart attack, and ether builds very stupidly, or it wont build anything at all. So yes we must include non-canon ships to fill those roletypes. Not so much for the federation since they have a wide variety of canon ships to chose from. It is the rest of the factions where the non-canon ships are needed. The Klingons have 4 canon tng era ships. The Romulans only have 3 as do the Cardassians. The Breen only have 1 canon ship. So we have to use "something" to fill the void. Again when i chose non-canon i make sure it serves a purpose, and isnt "stupid", or cartoony. I chose FASA for the non-canon klinks and rommies.

Since the Trek timeline doesnt exist anymore thanks to the new trek movie. I think it is safe to say we can make up any story we want to now. What better way to show off the martial aspect of trek than another dominion war. With the borg jumping in late in the game

Also "IF" we need beta testers we will post it. So quit asking to join the beta guys. We are full now.

I think that your story idea makes sense to me, and I actually thought that it perfectly fit the game.

I understand where you are coming from saying that there are a lot of inconsistancies and "uber" races present in both "Enterprise" and "Voyager" Stress, and if we were to bring all of them in, no one would play as any of the other races (I can already see Loki's Borg totally getting played by EVERYONE because at the moment they SERIOUSLY need some balancing done ).  Could you imagine the amount of non-canon you would have to create for species 8472?  Most of their abilities would also be rather difficult to replicate in this game as well, so I could see why you would want to keep it to these races (as they were the main aggressors during this war period anyways).

I also thought of something, I don't know if you guys ever played Galactic Civilizations 2 (though you probably have since they are also made by Stardock), anyways they also had a mod that was Star Trek based, and I wonder if you couldn't use some of their ships meshes for the mod (I'm sure you have already been told this, but I just wanted to ask).  If it does sound interesting to, just let me know and I think I still have a copy of it that you could use (would still have to look up the modders for that game to see if they are ok with you guys using their stuff).

Hey Loki, I want to thank you for whatever you did (didn't see anything in the changelog).  It works perfectly now, and all the new researches are present.

I do know the GC2 trek mod. In fact quite a few of my models are in it. They didnt ask me to use them at 1st, but im cool with it. I even offered to help with it, but IMO that mod went killer B stupid beyond redemption. So i quit it. No one is working on it anymore AFAIK. I hate the non-canon dominion, klingons, borg, 8472, and some of the feds. I dont know where they got their other works from, but the non-canon work is absolute s**t (stupid designs, and very shoddy mesh work). So no i wont be using any of the GC2 trek models.

The balancing is where Darkshimmer comes in. Once he is done i think all of the factions will be worth playing. It will be interesting to see dominion vs borg.

Stress, I have to agree with you on their non-canon ships being mostly retarded looking (especially their Borg designs, but also the fact that they pretty much only had 3 ship types for the Ferengi LOL).  I didn't know you had modelled for them man, that's pretty cool and ironic (sorry I didn't recognize you from your previous work).  Just wanted to help, but since you have already considered not using any of the meshes, I won't mention it again.

I have also been waiting to see a battle between the Dominion and Borg myself (ever since watching old episodes of DS9 anyways).  I am extremely optimistic that you guys will balance all the races out extremely well, but it just seems like a battle like that would be really impressive to see.

As for balancing for the Borg, it's only my opinion, but if a ship for them cost so many Logistic slots than another races fleet of around that same many Logisitc slots worth of ships should be somewhere around an even match (I don't know if I said that right).  I am sure you guy's have already taken care of everything, just kind of wanted to voice that.

Well great job so far, and thanks for allowing me to Beta for you.

mm yea if you notice the crazy prices and build times of borg ships early game they are heavly reliant on assimilation late game not so much but obviously it still takes its place ( an assimilated federation or klink starbase will serve the collective very well !)

All capitals are immune to assimilation for now (god knows how the federation did this!) but we are working to adapt

ill be doing some work on the borg SB soon the model wont be going in but changing it so its Build order is like that of the TEC -- so need to know when i add this does it dump?

and are you all sure 100% that the dumps have stopped ?

new borg scout ship coming soon !

ps RESISTANCE IS FUTILE !

no i still got one mini dump, but i'll play more later to see if it still hapens. also if the rest of you beta testers dont get mini bumps it must be my pc but i dont thing so.

same here i got one after the  update i was borg against federation ai and 2 klingon ai

I have played several games through from start to finish (as each of the three races), and I still haven't had one yet.  Did you try some of the suggestions that Loki put out?  Also, very importantly, make sure you have the most recent drivers for your graphics cards and Microsoft .NET Framework (probably 3.5 SP1 helps since that's what I got).  You can download that here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569263.aspx

As for your graphics card drivers, you'll have to find that one on your own.  Hope that helps some (most games will ask you to update this in the future anyways, so might as well get it out of the way now).

Hey Loki, sounds like you have everything in the bag.  I hear you about the whole assimilation thing.  I actually take my assimilated ships and scuttle them to recieve resources back, which in turn I put towards building bigger and better ships LOL RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. 

One thing about that while I am on the subject.  I know you said you already have any bugs taken care of with them, but that assimilation ability seems to have a little too close of a range for it.  I normally end up destroying every ship I encounter, because once you tell you ship to assimilate a target, it almost immediately starts firing upon them (killing them in a few shots).  I am sure you have already thought of this, but is there any way of increasing the range on it slightly?

I have not seen a dump in 2 games, but the borg went out early so not sure if that contributed.

One thing i want to bring up. It may, or may not be an issue with Entrenchment, but it was definetly an issue with vanilla sins.

Regular Sins had a hardcoded 2 gig memory limit. If you went over you dumped. I had quite a few out of memory errors when i was beta testing, and aftarwards. I am not sure if its was just textures or if it was everything. So Testers while you are playing run your Task Managers. Keep an eye on how much ram you are using to run the mod. I want to keep it under 2 gigs. We may have to nerf the size of some textures, and reduce poly counts on some models drasticly to pull this off. Like i said i am not sure if this was fixed for entrenchment or not. It is still a good standard to keep tho.

major stress, the 2gb ram limit is for data space on ALL 32 bit programs on 32bit or 64bit os,so I suggest working to the 2gb limit

harpo

Ok i dumped playing borg vs feds and klinks. I belive it has to do with the assimilation ability because i captured several ships just before it happened. If not check and make sure the research pre-reqs match the units, or disable research on all of it for now.

Harpo, I thought it was based on a 32bit OS, not on the programs, according to a PM I got from Ironclad employee...?

it is old info from early xp64bit doco, as the address space for 32bit is a total of 4gb ms decided to limit programs to 2gb program & 2gb data, and to maintain compatibility they would have to keep the limits. the info might still be in ms'developernet.

harpo

Not according to what i've been told.

And thats why some games you could hack the OS to get it to 3GB under 32bit OS (Such as Supreme Commander).

from my understanding of the 'hack' it was changing the program space to 1gb and the data space to 3gb so still fitting the 4gb limit

harpo

If I may make a suggestion, Why not ask danman, or other total conversion  mod projects. We are all sins of a solar empire lovers. Lets pool our resources and talent into this ! It not only affects us but the whole of the sins modding community.

What the plan was from the very beginning was to not let the mod ships take up any more resources than the vanilla ships they are replacing. If a vanilla ship used a 1024x1024 texture then the ship that is replacing it must use the same resolution texture, or less if possible. If the poly count of a ship is 2000 tri's then the replacement model should be around the same amount. Give or take a few hundred tri's. Right now there are a few models that break those rules, and will be delt with when i get an oppertunity to do so.

The galaxy class poly count is over 6000 tri's. I let that slide because i didnt have time to optimize it some more.There is much that still can be optimized on the mesh, but i was gonna wait for the 0.05 update to go over ALL of the models to re-build, re-texture, and fix what was needed.

The highest poly count a capital ship, or "elite" should be is 4000 tri's, and use a single 2048x2048 res texture MAXIMUM. Most are under the 4000 range except the Galaxy.

Frigates and cruisers should be between 2000-3000, and use a 1024x1024 res texture Max. The Romulan blackwind has a ridiculous 7000 tri count, but since the romulans wont be in 0.03e so im not worried about fixing it just yet. Most of the other meshes are within the limits, or better.

fighters should be 500-1000 tri's and use a 512x512 res texture.

Stations vary from 2k to 10k if you look at the starbases. I need to know the exact poly counts of the defense platforms (railgun, missile defense, laser defense, and hangar defense) The Phaser platform is another ridiculous IMO 8000+ tri model.

My goal was to make soa 2 playable on any system that can play unmodded sins. All the extra triangles, and uber resolution textures contribute to the over 2 gig crash's. we need to watch what we import.

Lets leave the OS arguements out please, and focus on the mod itself.

Do you need an additional beta tester for your mod? I would like to volunteer

My Specs would be

Core 2 Quad 2.83 ghz

8GB DDR 3 Ram

3 * Nvidia Geforce GTX 295 (SLI)

Vista 64 bit SP 2

Look, if you would have read this page alone EaglePryde you would have seen that they are not looking for anymore beta testers.

See!  I am sorry, but you will have to be content to play the 0.03c one for vanilla sins for now (I don't know why everyone is so amped into trying to get into beta, it's a lot of work even for us testers).

Hey SOA2 Team, it probably would be better if you posted that you aren't looking for anymore beta testers in the initial thread post so that everyone coming to this thread can see that, because this is starting to get ridiculous.

I worked on mods on other games and i know how much work it is. Based on my knowledge

i assumed that it's no diffrent here and i just wanted to help. If your full then i wish you the best of luck.

I can wait and i'm in no hurry to play the mod. I myself am working on a Star Trek mod right now for Space Empires 5.

But that's another story and doesn't fit in here