A related but annoying issue is some of (I say "some of" because while I've encountered one so far, I'm sure there's more) the hardcode limits on strings. For example, go to the following string in English.str:

StringInfo
    ID "IDS_GAMEMESSAGE_PLAYERCAPITALSHIPLOSTDETAILS"
    Value "Intelligence reports the loss of the level %d %s near %s"

While many other strings can be edited, sometimes removing the variables, this one can't. In fact, if you try to edit this string to the following:

StringInfo
    ID "IDS_GAMEMESSAGE_PLAYERCAPITALSHIPLOSTDETAILS"
    Value "Intelligence reports the loss of %s near %s"

..the game will instantly crash with a dump upon destroying a capital ship. Since these sort of things usually happen with GameInfo, only Beyond Compare saved me from a lot of busywork - once I had used an old copy of my mod to sub the String directory in, it was narrowed down with some difficulty.

While the fact that certain variables are passed into these strings and removing them might be a little troublesome at least makes a little sense (although it's kind of stupid, because people should have the flexibility to edit these sort of things), interestingly there's another quirk. Even if you keep the variable but place it elsewhere in an attempt to obfuscate it:

StringInfo
    ID "IDS_GAMEMESSAGE_PLAYERCAPITALSHIPLOSTDETAILS"
    Value "Intelligence reports the loss of %s near %s (%d)"

The game will crash. This seems like a hard-code problem to me in the way these things are being passed, probably specific to this one string. I'm a pretty rudimentary programmer, but I assume a function is passing these things in order as a integer, then two strings (%d, %s, %s), and so when they're rearranged, the integer is being passed as a string, and (more importantly) the string is being passed as an integer, causing a crash. What's weird though is that this string seems to behave a lot weirder than any others in this respect, because a lot will let you remove %s or %d and function with no problems.

It's difficult to make mods intuitive when you can't stop them from blasting base strings, and it's more difficult when troubleshooting them is an hour of trial and error.

I definately say up the hard code limits, however since they are enumerations it shouldn't be too hard to load them from a script at game start. Let modders break the game if they want to. (heck we break it all the time with poorly formatted entity files anyway )

My current solution was to simply eliminate the entire stock game, entities, textures and meshes as much as possible. It solved the problem for me, but for mods that want to include the original races it is burdensome

Agreed. The extrernal option to increase limits seems to be the best way. I dont know how difficult it would be to re-write the game code to incorporate that feature. I am no programmer so i would be clueless.

Untill some kind of limit increase is done im rebuilding my mod in "compromise mode". Giving up many of the ideas i had before so as to not go over the limits.

The mesh and texture limits seem to be the most crucial.  I think the first post in the thread should be edited to specify exactly *what* limits we're talking about, because it's rather vague as-is.

Three cheers for upping the max number of textures & meshes!

Yes, very good idea...

Since we are speaking about external file, what about the AI rules in a external file too... the fact that AI is hardcoded don't allow us to change it... several mod have create new thing who work very good with human against human but once a AI is in game, it act like a idiot because the AI know nothing about the new thing...

AI moding will not be easy... i have a 20 year old strategy game and until today, people ( modders ) are always working on fine tune the AI... being able to mod AI in sins will allow a lot of new idea to be implemented...

well, it doesn't help that EA is essentially treating their customers as software pirates (CURSE YOU SECUROM!! CURSE YOU TO THE DEPTHS OF HADES!!! (no, I am not Greek)).

My ideal limits on the things I think need to get upped-

MaxWeaponTypes- 5 (come on, like anyone will think this is a bad thing?)

MaxSquadTypes- 5 (need to use up that last square. Why not have 5 squad types for a single ship?)

MaxNumBanks- 6. This may be a wierd one, but I think that Sins needs to have the option to have units with dorsal (UP) and ventral (DOWN) banks. That would be very useful for dynamic mods, and likely some others that are a more full 3d oriented design.

MaxNumFlairPoints- 50-100. I give that value as it really depends on what the devs decide will not cause gigantic amounts of lag.

Ability hardpoints- I think that they should let us put up to 20 hardpoints/ability, instead of 10.

That's all I can think of right now.

Oh wait, I just remembered what other ones I wanted-

MaxNumResearchTiers- 10-12. Right now it is 8.

MaxNumBuffLevels- this is the max level of an ability. For researchable abilities it should be able to go as high as the research (to a point, that point being probably 5-10 lvls). THIS IS NOT MEANT TO HAVE LVL6 GRG, CB, OR MB. It MUST be a researchable ability to get more than 3 levels.

We are drifting off topic. Though you are right about EA.

I am a former Homeworld modder. I made HW dance with the 32 meg hardcoded texture limit. I made HW dance with poly counts unheard of in its day (2000 tri's was considered ridiculously high in the year 2000). I made HW dance with the hardcoded weapons and ship slots. I am making Sins dance now.

All i need is 400 extra mesh slots, and ill make Sins both Sing AND Dance!

Does anyone have a clear understanding hard walls are there?   Are the OS specific?  Hardware specific?  Some combination of both?  Has the community on average moved past them? 

No. They're not scaled to hardware. They're just values in the executable.

2GM limit is an OS limit, not the processor limit. Windows XP have a little switch you can use to enable them to allocate more than 2GB of RAM to an application (if you have more than 2GB, of course), I use it myself.

Where is that switch? how do you enable it? (forgive my computer ineptness).

I'd like to know this as well... though I don't use 32 bit anymore since I upgraded to win 7 ulimate 64 bit... also... I figured someone would say something after I posted what I said... then again I'm no tech savvy person... cept when it comes to building computers.