They call it a UNIcomplex for a reason. 

I also forgot to mention I'm toying with a third option in case we can't turn it into the home planet: turn the Unicomplex into a one-time base that can only be built at the home planet.  The Transwarp Hub would then be the starbase that can be built in various gravity wells.  As noted in the final Voyager episode, the hub would have no weapons but would be practically invulnerable.  This might be balanced with other starbases by giving it an ability to spawn a sphere or something as a protector.  It's primary purpose would be to create transwarp conduits to all nearby planets without the need for another transwarp gate.  It's still theoretical at the moment, but that's what I'm thinking. 

LOL.  Noted, Major Stress.  Noted.

Seriously, I do all my testing on an unsynced copy and make sure everything is at 100% before porting into the sync folder.  If it doesn't work, no one else will ever have to worry about it.

I know this proposal will probably get shot down but here it comes.

Are there any plans to, for lack a better term, Crusier-ify some of the capital ship.

Let me explain how it would work.

Let say there is a Galaxy class crusier. The research to unlock the ship will come from the base research which unlocks the capital version, but add another level to it to unlock the crusier portion. Or vera visa, use the the first research level to unlock the crusier, and use the second level to unlock the capital ship. The research cost will remain the same, however, when it comes to the second level, make it cost either 10% - 30% more than the base, however, when it unlocks it, if the first level unlocks the crusier, then make the capital version 5% or less stronger. If it unlocks the crusier, make it 10% - 15% weaker than the capital version. Of course, the cost of the ships will reflect the increase in cost of research, but the supply use the same, and the time to create it the same.

Of course, crusier-ify only the ambassador class, nebula, galaxy, and the defiant class only. The Soverign can remain only a capital ship.

Stress, I can see where ice is coming from- though don't feel it should be quite as drastic. You're completely right about the whole elite thing, that they were designed for something particular in mind, or just turned out to be exceptional designs.

It would be interesting though to have some sort of "problem" with each of the elite units which needs to be researched away before the ship reaches it's full potential- for example the Defiant couldn't make it above warp 4 until the chief fixed her up, so she could have a lower phase jump or something until you've researched the 'fix'. It wouldn't be two different ship types then, instead more like the miranda/excelsior refits.

That being said, I'm pretty happy with how caps are now, so while it would add some more roleplay into the mod, I'm not sure it's really necessary in any way.

It "could" work, but we really do not want that many galaxy classes on the map... at least not until we get the model itself at around 3000 tri's. Right now it is 6000, and if you have more than 5 (at least on my machines) it starts slowing things down.

3 years ago when i started this project i made it clear that any model in this mod should NOT go over any vanilla sins poly count or texture size in the slot that the model is replacing. I had a gut feeling when we started to mod that we should mimic original sins almost EXACTLY, because we would run into an issue like the 2 gig ram crash issue. I had to leave the project to deal with real life, and most of my warnings were largely ignored. The result was models imported with ridiculously high poly counts, and texture sizes. Now we are hitting memory limits, The mod (and sins itself) is having a meltdown because of it. All i can say to this is "i told you so". Now i am literally wasting time rebuilding stuff that should have never been imported to begin with to deal with this major 2 gig ram brick wall issue.  Which is ok because we NEED to get rid of the 3rd party work, and replace it with our own.

Fleet cap, and supply is being looked at for future updates. I agree with most, and do not like the current fleet cap/supply system. Things that may be bogging the AI down, and making it have siezures are also being looked at as well.

M456 your idea does indeed have merit, and we will look into it. It may work to the point to where elites (or any ship for that matter) dont need research to build, but to unlock certain aspects, buff's, or weapons. That is actually a briliant idea.

Finally realized what i told you about the scale and movement aye....lol

great work stress, ironclad hould hire you as a system optimiser.

harpo

I gave the skybox's the same "Taste great-Less filling treatment" that I gave to the planets.

Before optimization the skybox's are 1100 tri spheres using a ridiculous 4096x1024 texture with at least 30% wasted empty space. I tried to make a "box" to minimize the poly count to the bare minimum.... needless to say it was a failure, because a box shows some nasty seems. So i went with a sphere again. Testing different sizes poly wise till i got the minimum count with least side effects. Which was half the original. About 590 tri's. Nothing was chaned on the skybox textures themselves except i added the sphereized north and south. The center is the same resolution, but it all fits on a 2048x1024 texture saving 60% ram. The goal with all of this is less ram usage with ZERO detail loss. So far it has been sucessful on planets and skybox's

Each shot u will see my task manager open. I use 142 to 150 megs ram before i run sins, and have only 15 processes running at any given time. With sins and task manager it makes it 17 processes. The test machine is an AMD sempron 1900+ with 2 gigs pc3200 ram running a g-force 6600GT video card. It is what i call a piece of industrial art, because it is useless for anything but internet, and playing sins. It is the very same system i beta tested sins in 2007 with. If the mod can run on this system it should run on any freaking system.

After you enable the mod 1st thing that you will notice is a tremendous framerate increase. Now that i have optimized planets, and skybox's there is little to no lag on startup. However the ram usage difference is minimal. That is because vanilla is in binary while the mod is not. The performance increase alone had me doing the jig. Plus there is no visible difference in game.

You will notice the "optimized" skybox is a little darker. I hated the extremely bright skybox so i altered it a bit. I also altered some of the others. I may just make my own. Can someone tell me what the enviroment cube does? i see the texture, and the reference to it in game info, but there is no mesh or particle for it. If the game doesnt use it it should NOT be there, because the game loads the textures anyway.

Looking good!  Glad to see ya'll finding creative solutions to get around the silly hard-codes (I mean, seriously, did they not want to bother with scalability?).  All my mates just upgraded to Diplomacy, and we're really looking forward to SoA2 D update.

Any chance that at one point ALL borg caps could bomb planets? Yes i know they are pretty powerful as it is, But i rarely see the AI getting around to bombing planets, plus it can be a pain when trying to take other planets out( The planet assimulater i think its called does about 20 dmg to the planets health a hit...) also i know your still working on the great mod, just wanted to ask if its on the list anywhere, or if your happy with how they are like that? ^^

Later today i will upload what i have done so far as a general mod (nothing to do with SoA 2). Understand it is not a perfect solution, and there will be some drawbacks. I still have issues with tangents. So i will upload xsi's with the mod so anybody that has more experience with XSI can take a look at the meshes, and perhaps fix the tangent problems.

Much more can be done to increase vanilla sins performance, and decrease memory usage without sacrificing in game quality. Particles themselves is a good place to start. There is no need for a 256 res texture on a particle when a 64 res looks exactly the same in game. Nor is there a need for 10000 tri models when 3000 tris will look just as good with proper bump mapping. Same with textures in general. Bigger does NOT mean better. Even if you have gods own computer all of the eye candy is absolutly useless if it pushes the game over the hardcoded memory limits.

If sins supported 64 bit we wouldnt even be having this discussion, but it does not, and there is nothing that can be done. Except make the best of what we have to work with. I got some more tricks, and nonsense i can pull off to lighten sins load up. Without losing the quality of the game itself.

Other Mods need to consider downsizing. Sure it will be great to have the high poly, High res texture models, but if it means only a "few" people can "barely" run the mod, and the rest crash because of 2 gig memory limits then what is the point? All that hard work is for nothing.

Sins memory problem is also my failure as a beta tester to see it coming. This is my way of making up for that failure, and hopefully Ironclad will study the work i am doing to prevent any future games from suffering the same problems. Be it 32 or 64 bit.

This might be a stupid question but why does the game crash when it uses 2GB ram when u can adress 4GB on 32 bit?

I'm not questioning the fact that it crashes, I'm just curious