ASK DANMAN - Question and Answer » Forum Post by DANMAN3712

kyogre12

Join Date 07/2008

+100

I'll start off with something completely random and completely unrelated to modding. What is your all-time favorite game?

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ShadowMastiff2468

Join Date 08/2008

+67

I'll add something to that by saying!

THANK YOU DANMAN! Thank you for 7DS, thank you for your presence and thank you for once again lending a welcome hand to the community!!!

CONGRATULATIONS SIR!

I bow my hat to you!

-ShadowMastiff2468-

PS: no questions here

+2

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I've got a question

I haven't been able to find a way to do this yet but maybe I'm just missing something obvious...

How do you add a new weapon type? There are the pre-built weapons such as BEAM, MISSILE, PHASE MISSILE, LASERTECH, etc but is there any place where we can specify and create a new custom type?

-dolynick

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Quoting dolynick,

reply 3

I've got a question

I haven't been able to find a way to do this yet but maybe I'm just missing something obvious...

How do you add a new weapon type? There are the pre-built weapons such as BEAM, MISSILE, PHASE MISSILE, LASERTECH, etc but is there any place where we can specify and create a new custom type?

-dolynick

I'm pretty sure (~80%) there is no way to do so - specifying a parameter like "TEST" and then adding the relevant string file (IDS_WEAPONTYPE_TEST or whatever it is) will crash. I think they're all locked away, but there's so many to modify (~15) I can't imagine using them all up.

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Yes, it's easy to reuse the basic ones. I'm only interested because I would like to add the ability to bypass shields ala phase missiles to a different weapon type and would rather not have it display in the stats as "phase missile" damage.

More specifically, the modifier ChanceToIgnoreShieldsAsDamageDealer only appears to work on weapons of type PHASE MISSILE. It doesn't have any effect on a ship with other types of weapons.

You're most likely right though. I have searched a few times and still haven't found a file that contains any relevant data to weapons types. I am afraid it may be hard coded but thought I would ask anyways.

-dolynick

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Quoting kyogre12,

reply 1

I'll start off with something completely random and completely unrelated to modding. What is your all-time favorite game?

Wow, that is something that is hard to say, but all my favorite games considered, I would say that Star Control 2 is my all time favorite game. Hence why I used 2 races so far from that game in 7DS. (Arilou and Korh-Ah). I have spent s many years on that game, and it never looses its playability for me. Next to Star Control 2 would be Master of Orion, also for the same reasons, and with its random galaxy generator, it is never the same game twice. Of course Sins is next in line.

On the fantasy side, it would be the Zelda series, Final Fanstasy, Never Winter Nights, and Oblivion.

Outside Space and Fantasy games, I love the Grand Theft games, any Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, and the Grand Turismo serires (I love cars).

Sorry for the long reply, it is hard to narrow down that ONE game that I love.

DANMAN

+1

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Quoting ShadowMastiff2468,

reply 2

I'll add something to that by saying!

THANK YOU DANMAN! Thank you for 7DS, thank you for your presence and thank you for once again lending a welcome hand to the community!!!

CONGRATULATIONS SIR!

I bow my hat to you!

-ShadowMastiff2468-

PS: no questions here

Thank you Sir, you are too kind. I try to make people happy, because that makes me happy. When people appreciate what I do, it gives me great joy.

Quoting dolynick,

reply 3

I've got a question

I haven't been able to find a way to do this yet but maybe I'm just missing something obvious...

How do you add a new weapon type? There are the pre-built weapons such as BEAM, MISSILE, PHASE MISSILE, LASERTECH, etc but is there any place where we can specify and create a new custom type?

-dolynick

Actually this is something I have been working on for a while that I believe CAN be done through some trial and error. I did it with planet types. For example the GAS GIANT research did not exist before Sins Plus/Solar Sins. Nor did the Rogue Star research. But after some playing around with the mod, I got the names to show up in the info card, which is where we want the weapons to appear. At first the game gave tons of errors, but after washing it through the converter (binary to text and vice versa) the errors went away and now it runs smoothly. I still need to try this with the weapons, and if it works, I will let you know ASAP.

Also, you CAN make other weapons bypass shields. I have done in it the latest version of 7DS. The Atlantians have BEAMS that punch right through shields with the proper reasearch, and the TCA have shiled piercing GAUSS railguns that also penetrate shields with research. These both get through ANY mitigation, so a ship with 100% mititgation (invincible) will still get hurt through shield piercing weapons. The thing you need to do is associate the weapon type with the shield piercing research, then give that research to a race. Once they research it, that weapon will pass through shields.

DANMAN

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Only one question for Danman... What are the hardcoded limit that you have found in Sins ? I wish number, not only a list... by example, i know that Sins have a harcoded poly limit for the mesh... but only recently, i have found that it was around the 50k poly ( have not yet a exact value )... You are the guy who have hit the more harcoded limit... Please, share your knowledge for people who wish make "extreme" mod....

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Quoting Thoumsin,

reply 8

Only one question for Danman... What are the hardcoded limit that you have found in Sins ? I wish number, not only a list... by example, i know that Sins have a harcoded poly limit for the mesh... but only recently, i have found that it was around the 50k poly ( have not yet a exact value )... You are the guy who have hit the more harcoded limit... Please, share your knowledge for people who wish make "extreme" mod....

Wow. You asked the ultimate question. Well, here is what I have found so far, but these are as of version 1.05 of Sins:

Structures and units - These cannot be changed or altered, which means that you cannot mix unit types. You cannot have a orbital defense cannon have fighters and you cannot have a fighter bay have weapons

Captial ship limit. - the limit was 5, but this has been now changed to 9 in the 1.16, which IS much better

Captial ship names - these cannot be added to. Its only the 3 races. Adding a 4th race yields nothing, or a minidump

Weapon limit - you cannot have more than 3 different weapons on a ship

Ability limit - You cannot have more than 4 abilities per unit

Star Abilities - you cannot have any abilities on a Star that does damage. Planets can.

Sounds - there is a max of 1100 sounds, spread across dialog, music, and effects. The combination of these files cannot reach 1100, or the game will dump.

Strikecraft - no more than 2 types per ship

MODELS- the 3D models, or meshes, can only have a maximum of 10 emitters for any particular weapon, engine, etc., or the game will crash. There is a goal of under 10k polys, or the game will start to slow down.

I thought there was a MESH limit too, as far as how many different ones you can have, but that now appears to be a memory leak that I think was fixed in the 1.16/Entrenchment, I have yet to discover this.

STRING FILE - No limit, as far as I can tell. I have over 6000 entries so far.

WEAPON types - so far, cannot be changed, but I am working on that

Particles - only 10 emitters allowed, all others will cause a dump.

That about all I can think of right now. Any more, I will let you know of course.

DANMAN

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hey im a noob and have no clue what im doing but i wanna learn. so i dbl click the convertdata_entrenchment and it opens up in a command window then quickly closes. what am i suppose to do to convert binary to text? youre gunna have to basically spell it our for me cuz im programming retarded.

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What is the Weapon entity file used for? All it has inside is

[qoute]

TXT
entityType "Weapon"

[/qoute]

Also, when would you be ready to make 7DS for the micro-expansions? Given your comments in the 7DS, would it be correct to assume only after they are released at retail and not just digitaly so everyone has access to them?

Along the Entrenchment lines, have you given any thought as to what might be added to 7DS if it is made for Entrenchment?(More specifically would you take advantage of fighter movement for ships like the Dynamic mod is testing currently? Plus there is also the mesh switching in Entrenchment that may be useful.)

A final thought on Entrenchment, given the way the Manifest system stacks mods it should be possible to make a 'base' mod for 7DS and then stack 'race packs' on top of it. IE each race come alone or in a group with similar races. This should let you get around the mod size problems you have currently talked about. While all the races couldn't be used at once, you would only have to worry about how many could be stacked at one time instead of not being able to fit them in.

Basically, if 7DS is made for the micro-expansions, will you take advantage of the manifest system or stay the way you currently have 7DS to avoid making it overly complicated to play/set up 7DS?

Looking forward to 7DS for 1.16

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MODELS- the 3D models, or meshes, can only have a maximum of 10 emitters for any particular weapon, engine, etc., or the game will crash. There is a goal of under 10k polys, or the game will start to slow down.

Actually Dan, I don't think that is correct. I have a couple custom ships that have up to 16 weapons-1 mesh points and they work fine. They are not all facing the same direction though so maybe that has something do with it. I have never tried 10 or more of the same weapon points facing the same direction.

-dolynick

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Ability limit - You cannot have more than 4 abilities per unit

5 in Entrenchment.

Star Abilities - you cannot have any abilities on a Star that does damage. Planets can.

Ninja-fixed in 1.02 Entrenchment (maybe 1.16 Sins, wasn't mentioned in the patch notes for either).

Strikecraft - no more than 2 types per ship

4 in Entrenchment.

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Quoting seipher77,

reply 10

hey im a noob and have no clue what im doing but i wanna learn. so i dbl click the convertdata_entrenchment and it opens up in a command window then quickly closes. what am i suppose to do to convert binary to text? youre gunna have to basically spell it our for me cuz im programming retarded.

Read reply #2 in this thread: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/320363

Obviously use the correct convertdata exe, and don't worry about the part where he talks about abilities not working, it was for a beta patch.

Otherwise he describes nicely an easy way to do it.

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Also, you CAN make other weapons bypass shields. I have done in it the latest version of 7DS. The Atlantians have BEAMS that punch right through shields with the proper reasearch, and the TCA have shiled piercing GAUSS railguns that also penetrate shields with research. These both get through ANY mitigation, so a ship with 100% mititgation (invincible) will still get hurt through shield piercing weapons. The thing you need to do is associate the weapon type with the shield piercing research, then give that research to a race. Once they research it, that weapon will pass through shields.

I am aware that I can use research entries to apply it to any weapon type but unfortunately that won't work in this case. I would like to add the ability to just a single cap ship as a special case. Using research would apply it to all ships that use that weapon type and would be bad. I could switch the weapon type to PHASE MISSILE and keep the existing visual effects but then other weapon upgrades for damage etc would no longer apply to that cap ship's main weapons.

Since ChanceToIgnoreShieldsAsDamageDealer only seems to apply to phase missiles and/or perhaps something else that has research entries to allow shield bypass it doesn't seem to be a viable solution for this one ship scenario. The best I can think of so far is to add an OnWeaponFired buff that does a small amount of damage directly to hull points with each firing of the desired weapon type. That would work but is a bit clumbsy and actually adds damage to the weapon outright instead of changing the way it applies damage.

-dolynick

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Quoting dolynick,

reply 12

MODELS- the 3D models, or meshes, can only have a maximum of 10 emitters for any particular weapon, engine, etc., or the game will crash. There is a goal of under 10k polys, or the game will start to slow down.
Actually Dan, I don't think that is correct. I have a couple custom ships that have up to 16 weapons-1 mesh points and they work fine. They are not all facing the same direction though so maybe that has something do with it. I have never tried 10 or more of the same weapon points facing the same direction.

-dolynick

EDIT: Annatar beat me to some of this as I took my time typing it

In the Entrenchment beta 2 change log they said they increased max weapon points from 10 to 20

Also, in the beta 3 change log they said they were working on making a lot more things data driven. It should be interesting to see if they manage to do that.

Other changes I can think of in Entrenchment

- Units can have five abilities, for capital ships the fith one is hidden by the button to spend points so it should be a passive ability.

- can have up to 4 strikecraft types, but there is a bug in the AI were non-capital carriers can't have more squadren points than they have strikecraft types

- structures can now have weapons(TEC hanger flak turret upgrade)

- Entrenchment introduces the ability to let weapon banks shoot at multiple targets at the same time(The maximum target number can be upgraded for starbases, but as the research increases an atribute with starbase in its name I assume only starbases can get upgrades.

- Entrenchment introduces mesh switching, which lets research be used to unlockweapons(Starbases and TEC hangers)

Also for limitations:

- to my knowledge upgrades affect every possible unit. You can't focus on what you want affected(such as only upgrading stucture hitpoints). I don't think I am the only one who wants for there to be a way to upgrade capital ships only(have an upgrade for structure hit points would work also, or an upgrade for light frigates only to increase build speed)

- can't change a unit's fleet cost in anyway(I think having the capital logistics research decrease capital fleet cost a bit each level would be interesting, or fleet cost could be increased a bit when mesh switching is used to unlock a more powerful weapon for a non-capital

Getting back to asking questions, have you tried the Cheating Stick in NWN1?(you can only get it by going into debug mode and entering something along the lines of 'dm_cheatstick')

Also, have you played the Witcher? I found it hard to believe they used a modified version of the NWN1 engine. If you have played it, what did you think of the comat in it?(I got the Witcher from Impulse last fall when they had that survey discount code, currently have 40+ hours played and only just started act 4)

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Getting back to asking questions, have you tried the Cheating Stick in NWN1?(you can only get it by going into debug mode and entering something along the lines of 'dm_cheatstick')

Also, have you played the Witcher? I found it hard to believe they used a modified version of the NWN1 engine. If you have played it, what did you think of the comat in it?(I got the Witcher from Impulse last fall when they had that survey discount code, currently have 40+ hours played and only just started act 4)

Um... where did the NWN subjects come from?? And no, I never tried the dm_cheatstick but since I built and ran my own PW for years I scripted custom DM widgets that were likely far more slick.

I bought the Witcher but didn't play it much.

Edit: Woops, I thought it was Dan asking those questions hence my confusion.

-dolynick

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Quoting DANMAN3712,

reply 9

That about all I can think of right now. Any more, I will let you know of course.

Dan, it is already more that i have wish... specially when i read the reply after yours... seem that a lot of people have it some limit... and from one version to the other, it is really different...

Maybe a new topic about the harcoded limit is needed... not one like the previous one where people complain... but one where people give some information... we need to not forget that Stardock try to please us but the game engine was made by Ironclad... the creator of the iron engine... some of the limit will never be remove ( unless a new engine ) but havinfg some information about it will really help the modder...

And information can be related to the system too... you speak about the 10k poly before lag... but if you have read my post on your forum, i feel lag from the 12k poly ( it is why i alway try to limit myself to the 12k poly for my capital ship model )... from now, i will try to reduce new model to 10k, so it will work for everybody ( maybe not everybody , but more people )... my 50k limit is a engine limit... a little over 50k, you will have a mini dump... a 50k model is possible in sins if you can build a very few of them... not if you can build a lot of them... have reach these limit when i was testinf some ring system for the Dino rinf challenge related to the Hallo mod ( have win the dino hallo ring challenge but it have lead to targeting problem, specially with the AI, so it doesn't yet work perfectly )...

Dan, you know me, i like to thing out of the box... but in some case, the out of the box method don't work due to harcoded limit...

Now, it is almost two month that i try to use the displacement map... you have a entry in the .mesh file for it... if some people was able to use the unused entry in the .mesh file, information is welcome...

By the way, is there someone having the .mesh of Entrenchment 1.02 in text mode... my convert don't work... and in the forge tools 3.0, the mesh are in binary form !!! I wish to build a new starbase for Entrenchment with huge mesh change in function of the upgrade... but without the .mesh file in text mode, it is difficult to understand how it work... these question is not for Dan since he is always vanila sins... but i hope that people like Annatar who seem to know everything can reply to me !!!

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Quoting dolynick,

reply 17

Edit: Woops, I thought it was Dan asking those questions hence my confusion.

Don't worry, it seem that some of the Sins fan are NWN fan...

Myself, i was a fan of NWN ( first version with his two expension pack )... about NWN 2, i don't know, have not buy it since it was not working on Linux...

About my prefered strategic game, before Sins, i have harpoon... first version is from 1987... recent one from 2007... ugly graphic but the AI is really good... and you have more that 25k different unit... everything is lower that 300 mb of hard disk space... seem that harpoon can learn from the sins 3D experience but that sins can learn from the harpoon AI... like i have wrote several time, "wait and see"... sins is only 1 year old... harpoon is 22 year old... what will be the sins AI in more that 20 year...

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thomosin I did succeed in converting the meshes to txt and it is in the entrenchment 1.02 reference rar here http://www.mediafire.com/file/gzmmkldvmda/entrenchment 1.02 reference.rar

hope it helps

harpo

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Hey Annatar, it keeps telling me convertdata is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. I followed that guys instructions to a "T" and even dbl checked but its the same thing over and over

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seipher77 change the convertdata to either convertdata_sins or convertdata_entrenchment WITH the convert*.exe in the same folder. that is what I used to create the 1.16 & entrenchment 1.02 reference rars

harpo

+1

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Dan man!!

I have a good question,

How does one go about finding texturers?

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horpo you rock! that def worked. thanks a lot!

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Greetings All!

Looks like I started something that is starting to take on a life on its own!

Just to be clear, the hardcodes I posted were for the 1.05 version of Sins. I am just now getting up to speed on the 1.16/Entrenchment versions. So I do know that changes have been made, but it is great to have them all here in one spot for reference.

Annatar, thank you once again for your participation. I feel that between you and I, we can answer just about any question about Sins!

Quoting dolynick,

reply 17

Getting back to asking questions, have you tried the Cheating Stick in NWN1?(you can only get it by going into debug mode and entering something along the lines of 'dm_cheatstick')

Also, have you played the Witcher? I found it hard to believe they used a modified version of the NWN1 engine. If you have played it, what did you think of the comat in it?(I got the Witcher from Impulse last fall when they had that survey discount code, currently have 40+ hours played and only just started act 4)

Um... where did the NWN subjects come from?? And no, I never tried the dm_cheatstick but since I built and ran my own PW for years I scripted custom DM widgets that were likely far more slick.

I bought the Witcher but didn't play it much.

Edit: Woops, I thought it was Dan asking those questions hence my confusion.

-dolynick

I mentioned NWN in my first post. It is one of my favorite games. And yes, I did try thr cheating stick. It was overkill, but funny. I have never played the Witcher.

Also, about the 10 weapon point limit, that is if they are all facing the SAME WAY. Again, I do not know if this changed for the new versions yet. And if Stars can now do damage, then that means I can bring my Super Massive Black Hole to its full reality!

As you all can see, I am constantly learning every day, just like you are! I also need to try to get the convertdata to work for Entrenchment, as I will need to use it for converting back and forth.

And about 7DS getting broken down into mini-mods, that is a YES. I will offer two versions, one big mod, and smaller broken down ones that can be stacked. This may be the way to make my ultimate goal possible, to be the merging of all the sci-fi universes into one, for one epic battle!

Evil-TeslaRG,

I know you tried the 7DS forum, I guess no one has stepped up to the plate. Do you need me to assign you some people? Just let me know, and it shall be done.

Keep'em coming guys!

DANMAN

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