great idea    I think this idea coupled with a few of our own in house ideas with the brush files will assist us in saving some space.

thanks jtaylorpcs

The smoke trails are still there , with the previsous soa2 builds we modified the volumetric ingredients and increased the smoke trails. Also on the planets ,  I have succesfully incorporated extra planets using the same mesh and or texture as other stock planets. No issues. So we can add extra planets and use assets that are already in game.

thank josh

The mod WILL get more polish. As in total model rebuilds, and texture re-works. Which i was going to save until almost the end, and we got everything else in and working, and all including myself on the SoA 2 Team had time to focus on only that.

It was another all too human mistake we made in not forseeing the 2 gig ram limit. We thought Sins could handle the content we put into it. It is obvious we were mistaken. The 2 gig limit has always been there since Original Sins. It only now that the modders, and Ironclad pushed Sins to that 2 gig limit. There is nothing we can do about the 2 gig limit. Sins is 32 bit game. I just wish it was not hardcoded to dump when it hits 2 gigs. We can now see why the 3rd expansion for Sins was cancelled. Sins just can not handle any more new content.

The Solution for us is to make our mod not use up any more ram than what Originsl Sins uses (Not Entrenchment, or Diplomacy). LESS if possible. We have to think like game developers of 2005. There are many ways we can do that. Reducing the poly counts of most of our models, and setting maximum poly limits is one. Hence the model rebuilds. Lowering texture resolutions is another. Some of our models are already pretty low resolution (most of the trekmods work). Others are pretty high resolution. We need to find a happy medium. We also need to experiment and see what works for us and what does not. The mesh and texture nerf should also apply to map objects, and particles as well.

Micheal456 Your suggestion most certainly has merit, and we will try it. I made our textures to match Original Sins format thinking they wouldnt work any other way. This is definetly good to know, and will save some resources. THAT is what i am talking about!

Basically all 7 factions in the mod (5 playable, 2 NPC) COMBINED need to use less ram, and resources than the 5 factions (3 playable, 2 npc) of ORIGINAL SINS. Not Entrenchment, Not Diplomacy. Original Sins is our benchmark. On top of finding new ways to optimize the UI, and Maps, and We are NOT programmers. So all we can do is hit it from the art aspect.

I do come off as being a dick from time to time. I admit it. Doing a Trek mod can be far worse than taking constuction orders, or being a fashion designer.. The fans are far more nit picky than women shopping for shoes at Saks Fifth avenue, and our patience is being tested constantly. I know we shouldnt snap back at you guys, but c-mon have you read all of the back posts? This mod is only a hobby for us that we enjoy on our free time. We just happen to be sharing with you guys. We do get enjoyment out of seeing you guys enjoy it, but unlike professional game developers we dont have to put up with people trying to armchair quarterback this mod, and naysayers. We are not game developers. We do not get paid to do this. We are only doing this for fun. We want to have fun with it, and we want you guys to have fun with it. That is what any mod is. The last thing i want to see when i get home from my RL job is a horde of "fanbois" trashing, and nit picking our hobby apart. Telling us how to make the mod like they are in charge, or what we should, or shouldnt add to it. We could have toned down our response a bit, but we all apparently were having a very bad day. We do like to see suggestions, but try to keep them on the topic of "How can we stay within the sins 2 gig limit", or how can we fix this, or that for now please. We got plans for the future of the mod trust me. Then we can talk about what can we add/take away.

Did you guys give the Dominion any love in this recent update (besides the starbase)?

Woops, double post please ignore.

mystic angel, unfortunatly for your suggestion regarding the shareing of meshes, the MESH defines the texture, not the entity. I had suggested this exact same idea to the devs in an ideas thread with all the possible problems that I could think up, which boiled down to 1 re-writing the engine, 2 difficulties in corectly alineing the textures to the mesh when the entity specifies the mesh and texture, and the benifits which include reduced memory usage as it would be east to share textures AND meshes therefore reducing the numbers of meshes in memory freeing more memory for other items.

harpo

Thanks Harpo.  I figured that out and just sent a message to Stress with my findings.  Your right though, it is unfortunate.

Glad to help, only reason I'm not beta-testing and helping out more is because there's no way to get LiveSync to work behind my Uni firewall.

I haven't tried using 16 bit files with the Dev.exe, but I've played full games with 16 bit sheets before without a hitch . To be honest, I only realised Sins didn't care when I started modding your UI files a while back and wasn't actually sure which format sins wanted it in, so I just tried a few and realised they all worked. It's certainly not something I would have purposefully looked for normally, so not surprised you didn't notice.

The only thing we can do then is to reduce the tri count on the planet meshes, and the texture resolutions. The textures for the planets are a whopping 4096 with a LOT of wasted texture space. A good 2048x2048 pixels worth.  I dont understand why the planets were not sphereically UV mapped with a 2048x1024 texture. It would look EXACTLY the same in game. Reducing to 2048, and replacing the meshes with optimized (under 2000 tri) spherically UV mapped meshes will greatly reduce video, and system ram usage, and planets will retain the detail without looking blocky.

Another thing is that Jaytlrpcs found out is that Sins is loading stuff into memory that Sins DOES NOT USE. Like the old beta content, and Beta load screens. Which should not be in the game to begin with. He is now searching for other unused content, and files that should not be loading. Since Sins loads EVERYTHING, Finding the entrys that are calling for these unused files, and getting rid of them will free up some ram as well, and make room for the stuff that is used.

Well guess we all got off to a bad start. And I was'nt aware of the 2 gig limit till now which explains alot!!!! lol

Hmmm if there is anyway I can help on that front.

Just a question could you do away with a milatry and civilian reasearch base and just have one type? Reduce the logistic slots accordinly and you would probbaly not notice.  I'm not a graphic desiger or texturer so cant help on that front.

Lastly Is there any good reason to port this mod onto diplomacy if its given that much trouble? If entrenchmet is better then you may as well keep it there and build on something that is alreday good. Gameplay for SOA is perfect as it is I dont see how diplomacy will improve it really.

CrazyEwok, glad to see the swords being sheaved . Anyway, regarding your queries;

The research trees are hardcoded into sins, so if you just took away one of the trees and somehow managed to fit all techs into the remaining tree, the empty tree would still be there. It's one of the changes they made when they created Entrenchment, adding in a third tree, and in diplomacy a 4th. And in all honesty, it would save at most 8 buildings for each player- and as Stress pointed out the poly count on the research stations aren't that high.

About the diplomacy port, yes it is worthwhile- if you have diplomacy you'll already know this, but- diplomacy really does make the game complete at last, you can give missions to the AI, and feel like an equal diplomatic partner, not just "keep them happy". Also, porting over to diplomacy itself isn't that much of a problem, as Ironclad made it very similar to Entrenchment, so most of the hard work is already done. The main problem the mod is seeing now (and diplomacy especially, both stock and modded) is a re-emergence of the old 2gig ram dump error. Ironclad had mostly removed the problem by putting in game hardcoded limits for textures and meshes and the like, however the community felt they needed more room to mod, so IC massively increased the limits, allowing modders to add several whole new factions into the game. Ofcourse that threw up the old error again.

Mods which have a whole bunch of textures and custom models in are now hitting the 2 gig limit a lot quicker (within the reach of a normal game). The same can be said about stock diplomacy, as it too increases the textures and models loaded up within the game. So that being said, the main problem with porting it over to diplomacy is just plain old hard work- the next full revision of the mod has to be rebuilt from scratch, leaving the mod team and community help to fix the 2 gig limit.

Right now the issue seems to be the massive amount of data sins loads up every time- sheets and sheets of unoptimized graphics, and some quirky coding. To be fair to them, IC is an indie company (or was when they made this game), and I'd hardly expect them to have a full team of modellers, texturers, and an optimizing team or any of the like. Unfortunately, what this does mean is that the mod team (and feel free to check up on things and point them out to the mod team) needs to look through all the data that sins loads up, and try to figure out how to optimise it so that it takes up less ram, but still maintains the high standards stress, jtaylorpcs, loki and the others set for this mod.

If you've had any experience playing with the sins code, or any experience you think may help (ie photoshopping model textures etc) then feel free to say, the mod team is great with advice, and they value any contribution that's made. At the end of the day, it saves them work, and gives us a better game to play.

Wow that's a big post lol. Night!

Indeed,

Diplomacy does merit a port of the mod. Even though it is a "small" expansion it adds much to the game, and yes 99% of the work is already done with the Entrenchment version, However the Diplomacy "foundation" which i am working on as i type has to be built from scratch. The good point to this is that any Diplomacy work done can be copied right into Entrenchment. The files, and structures between the two expansions are identical in every way. What works in Diplomacy will work in Entrenchment, and vice versa. The only exceptions are if it specifically deals with the Diplomacy expansion itself. Which there arent very many files that are Diplomacy specific. Diplomacy only adds new tech trees, and research. 3 new ships, and new ways to interact between the factions. The AI is greatly improved, and the pirate faction recieved a huge buff, and they can also research now (hence the 'uber pirates"). I personally like the challenge the buffed pirates bring, but new players are having a very tough time with Diplomacy pirates.

The original intention was to cease production of prior builds of SoA 2 in favor of the new expansion. However it became problematic. While it is extremely tough to keep track of 3 different builds of the mod, it also brings the mod to people that do not have Entrenchment or Diplomacy. The Original Sins version will get an update, just not right at this moment due to entire SoA 2 Team dealing with the 2 gig dump issue.

We already tried to combine the tech trees, and met with abysmal failure due to hard codes, or something we are not aware of calling for vanilla sins stuff that isnt there. We just cant find the reference, or file calling for it. The idea has merit, but it already has been tried. Along with reducing the amount of labs needed. Also a failure. Hard coded. Crashes at any attempt to change it.

The best course for us is to duplicate as much as possible the structure of vanilla sins. Not exactly like it, but close to it. This will not only help avoid stupid mistakes, but also to deal with the 2 gig issue.

BTW i FINALLY got to see Avatar today... Freaking awesome movie.

I KNOW, RIGHT !

Iv only been addig stuff into the game not takeing away so nice to know about the labs. Yeah that was the other idea I had make the research labs simaliar.

I'm guessing you can save models on the borg to as they dont need broadcast centers and trade posts, cause of course culture and trade are irrelivant.

As far as ships maybe for romulans and dom you could remove some of the non canon ships and replace them with duplicate  cannon ships?

Trade (as in supply) is important to the borg, and also their culture "we will assimilate you" is needed- don't forget that if they didn't have culture their planets could still be cultured.

Regarding removing ships, Stress and the others have made quite clear in the past (go back oh about 20 pages) that they want fully fledged factions, and not just "lots for Feds/Klingons, nothing for everyone else.

And yeah, Avatar good- you see it in 2D or 3D?

I think (and I'm not one of the mod team here) that we can sort out the 2gig problem by having models which fit the right poly count, and by optimising all the unoptimised graphics data stock sins leaves us with, such as the pointlessly unoptimised planets- I'm sorry but they just *don't* look good enough to imagine they're the actual size they are, and the other problems I mentioned earlier (16 bit graphics saved on 32 bit sheets).

Regarding the borg, they're meant to be overpowered- they're designed for 4v1 games.

The idea's not to cut down on anything at all, just to find a way to make it all fit- I think most people would prefer if the models were 1k poly's less, and they were all in there, than we cut out some models. And the way sins works, it wouldn't make a difference if you put identical ship models in instead, as they't still use poly/texture ram space. Sorry to keep putting your ideas down, but yeah.

To be honest the models aren't the biggest contributor to memory usage.  Once they're converted to bin format they use FAR less space than textures.  Being that I'm a modeler and texturer, I can tell you with 100% certainty that there are few ships you can design with less than 1000 polygons, especially when it comes to Trek ships.  It just takes more polys to create their complex designs.  They also start to look really crappy when you get below a certain figure.  The models Stress has made specifically for this mod so far both exceed 2000 by a tiny bit.  They're fairly simplistic in terms of lines, but they look good.  The curvier the ship gets the more polys it's going to need.  

The biggest saver is going to be what you suggested Micael.  I haven't tested it in-game yet, but I checked on saving textures under 16-bit intead of 32-bit and it does in fact cut the size down by half.  That's HUGE when we're talking about the massive number of textures in the game.  If it really doesn't have an adverse affect on what textures look like when playing then I think you've probably given us the single most effective tool to combat the memory problem. 

Just a note on doubling up on models; I think it's safe to say that is an area where no one is willing to scrimp.  We can cut back in other places, but I don't think any members of the team nor most of the players wants the same model being used for different purposes.  For me, at least, it's a smudge on the gameplay experience.  

I'm also fairly positive that every faction must have all building roles (like ship roles) accounted for to satisfy the AI.  Besides, the point here is to make what we have more efficient; not necessarily to cut stuff out.  Plus, the Borg are already using less than a quarter of the textures of the other races.  I think it's safe to say they're fairly economical as it is. 

Yes I agree on not wanting to reuse models, where we can.  Also we have used some models withing  soa2 with no issues. We might address this with a case by case basis, but doubt we will be reusing structure mesh and or ships mesh , unless its something small such as trade ship etc.  Also the game engine needs the following rescources or spazz's out , All strucural  assests that are ingame for soa2 0.4.2e with the exception of the antiwarp inhibitors are needed.   Also i agree on the borg being economical already. 

thanks jtaylorpcs

Indeed the 16 bit textures are pretty much going to be what saves this mod (and sins for that matter). It makes you wonder why it was done that way. I guess Ironclad was much like us in the beginning. Learning, Growing. Finding things out the hard way.

No we will not double up on meshes or use same hulls to represent different ships. We have been down that road before, and it was a disaster (check soa2 0.01, and 0.02).

I looked over the original sins meshes (finally got the max importer to work), and i think it is safe to say the mod is indeed way over the poly budget, and texture resolution budget.The average poly counts for Capital ships should be at 3500 tri's which is the Vanilla sins average. Cruisers are at around 1500-2000 tri's. Same with frigates (including builder, and civilian units). That is the vanilla sins average. Vanilla sins structures are ridiculosly high. The tech hangar defense (fully upgraded) is 5807 tri's. The advent starbase fully upgraded is almost 12,000 tri's! THERE is your problem Ironclad. Too many polys running at once, and lots of wasted texture space. Some of the Vanilla Sins models need optimizing because i can see many places on the meshes that can use far less triangles with zero loss of detail. I havent even looked at the shield meshes yet.

The SoA 2 units with some exceptions fit in budget (at or under 3000 tri's), but there are many units that are way WAY over the 3k mark, and need to be reduced badly. That will be done in time.

The planets, and skybox's were not as bad as i originally thought, but they too can use some optimizing. The planet textures are 2048x2048, but over HALF of the texture is wasted. So we are really seeing only 1024 resolution on planets. The skybox uses TWO 1100 tri spheres. One for the skybox up close, and one for the zoomed out far away skybox. The up close sphere uses a 4028x1024 main texture which from the looks 30% of it is waste. Along with another 1024 texture (enviroment cube). The far away skybox uses just stars as far as i can see. However, The worst offenders as far as texture, and memory waste is the UI itself. They use texture sheets that waste so much space it isnt funny. It doesnt matter if its 1024 or 512 or whatever. of 90% of the texture is EMPTY. Then it is a waste of space, and system resources, because all of it loads anyway.

The question now is which path would be the better way to go? Some of us think combining all of the UI textures into one sheet, and redoing the brush files will save space. I also think that if we break the texture sheets down to individual icons, and have a specific ship or unit or research call for that specific tiny icon texture that will save resources as well (zero wasted texture space). Depite the major pain in the ass it will be to use individual icon textures instead of whole texture sheets. Which is more economical? Homeworld uses individual icon textures. Most other games do as well. I think that is the path we should take. We will have better control over texture economy that way. EDIT: I just remembered the texture hard code limit of 4000. So the idividual icons idea is out of the question. Sigh was worth a try i suppose.

Hmmm, I was just wondering...  do the Klingons have any anti-structure vessels?

yes they do , however it is a place holder atm.   Using a brel mesh. We do have a model that is in the works . The kron class.

thanks jtaylorpcs

Have to say Iv been playing borg for 8 hours now on a 171 planet map and it rocks!!!!

They way you have them balanced is peferfect! I love warping in with a cube and laying waste to entire fleets. I had one battle with one cube against 70 odd miranda and excelors and they where uttly destroyed! It felt just right and startreky unlike the start trek amada games   Nothing beats when the decemated fleet trys to retreat and you turn on tractor beams and stop the suvivors retreating   You can almost imagine the terror in those ships as they realise  they about to become drones 

One thing I do suggest is scaleig the unimatrix complex up. It just seems alittle small and understated.  When you warp in and see it you wanna feel terror.

I certainly agree about the Unicimplex.  Jtaylor and I have been discussing the possibility of using the Unicomplex as the Borg home planet, and instead use a transwarp hub as the station.  It would change the overall play-style of the faction a bit (less about high-powered weapons on the near-indestructable station and more about transwarping to as many points across the sector as possible; thus increasing the focus on cubes and mobility, as it should be), but it would definitely give that intimidation factor of warping into a system that's dominated by the Unicomplex. 

If that doesn't work out, then when we implement the half-size ships we might be able to leave the Unicomplex at its current size.  I'm afraid increasing it any significant amount would impair ship movement within the gravity well of its location.

Yeah I kind like that idea alot more. Have a super strong unicomplex home base. But have less strong trans warp hubs to act as starbases.  I would still make them petty strong though enough to hold off a sizable fleet.

Something you may not have considerd but could you do away with all borg bases and maybe have all borg planets start with a basic uni complex which you can add research labs and influance bases into?

O another idea. I vanilla sins you have the ability on the egg ship that sucks resources from the planet. I thik it would fit in rather well on a borg ship or two. Reason I suggest this is in the TNG it was stated the borg would come along and sco0p coloneys up. This ability would simulate that, scooping up the coloneys resources.