question(s) regarding modding (AI tech/reference stuff and weapon range)

first question is yes, at least if you have Diplomacy, the earlier versions could as well but not it took them a while (of course the earlier AI's in the Original and Entrenchment barely could handle the unmodded research)

second is yes but cant remember what the link is and its incomplete at best

third is first of all there is no dice in the game, it always hits (except is special circumstances) but yes there is a slight difference in graphical hit and a game hit, mostly seen with the missiles but the lasers usually are insynch unless you do extreme ranges (across the gravwell)

Ryat is correct that the AI will handle different tech level fine, however, the hardcoded maximum tech level is 3 so increasing it beyond that will cause problems.

Also, there are different damage application settings for each weapon. I believe they are 'overtime', 'instant', and 'backloaded'.

What do you mean maximum tech level is 3? Like you can only have 3 levels per reserach item?

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/363233

this is the forum thread for the limits of Sins

there is no line for Research Limits (we've had it up to 10 in the Distant Stars mod at times and it worked fine)

think Myles is getting abilities mixed up with research

Ryat's right. I thought I saw max_tech_levels, but obviously I was wrong.

Thanks so much for the replies guys and/or gals This helps me loads!

Don't I miss those days of 10 lvl of research

A few followup questions,ragarding weapons, bank targets and effects.

How does TargetCountPerBank work for lasers, missiles and beams? I changed the TEC battleship to have a TargetCountPerBank of 4, this makes the four beams go at four different targets. However it looks like each beam has the same damage as previous before I buffed it (TargetCountPerBank of 1) But the ingame display shows normal damage, yet stuff dies a lot faster? 

Also does burstCount under weaponeffects affect damage in anyway, or is that just for the graphics purely? What about beams, how does this effect them with/without the targetingcountperbank (dps wise?)

TargetCountPerBank works by setting up a new set of weapons per count, so in other words you have 1 bank of weapons with 3 points of damage and when its increase to two its still at 3 points of damage per bank, the info chart shows per bank (this is what makes Starbases sooooo deadly)

burstcount is a graphical effect, anything under weaponeffects is pure graphical

Aha makes sense! Thanks a lot

Yeah I gave Starbases 5 extra bank targets trough the research.  I lost my whole fleet pretty fast   Back to the drawing board.

double post >.<

hmmm, shouldn't be able to give the starbases that many, the max is 4 banks per weapon

Really? That's interesting, it doesn't crash or throw errors, ill give it a test later on with beams, easy to see how many different ones they shoot.

lol, some limits when broken just don't give you what you want, always interesting to see what does what when broken

How much does say, higher values on health (hull, shield) damage and lower cooldowns (so more damage calculations) effect performance?

My games always become a slideshow after 1h-1.5h of play with 2+ AI and sometimes the application ends in a runtime error. I'm sure it's not graphical lag and I doubt those extra numbers of health and dps can cause such an effect. It almost feels like some form of memory leak, could this be a result of a broken limit? If so I need to go trough everything hehe. Could this also be the effect of uncompressed data files (as in, non binary gameplay entities that I edit)?

Performance shouldnt really be an issue as I'm running a fairly good game system:

Intel quad Q9550 at 3.7ghz, 8Gig of ram and a GTX285. win vista U 64bit, all updated ofc.

Anyone have a clue what the performance loss could be linked to?

The only thing that would effect performance would be the reduced cooldown as that would mean more effects, but it shouldn't be an issue. The game can handle a max of the 2 gb ram which can be an issue if you increased the fleet size etc.

I just searched the tech section of the forums and got a link to the 'large address aware' fix. I did the same a long time ago for Supreme commander, so the game should now be able to make use of more then 2gig of ram . I'm not sure if that's the cause of the choppy slowdowns though.

actually the game does not use more than 2 gigs of ram (even with that fix) it merely becomes satisfied with 2 gigs (having only 2 gigs of ram myself l never dump) which is why with the fix you no longer get the dump but you still get the chugging

unfortunately gruntmaster1 is right, this means there are too many ships in the game, there are ones who are trying to fix this issue and hopefully the devs are as well (though I doubt it will be enough for some people), recommend keeping the size of the fleets low and/or how many opponents you deal with

Yeah I played a round and it still slideshowed :/

Going to remake my mod from scratch and half the total amount of ships the research gives, same for cap ships, going to lower the amount of trade ships as well but increase cargo hold to compromise, then it'll test in a large game.

yeah in the Distant Stars mod, we dropped the trade ship to one per port instead of five, that helped a lot

This was soo much different 3h 30 min game, 7 AI + Me, 5 stars 110 planets, after the 3h 30min mark it started to lag again. But it's much better then slideshow at 1h+

Now I'll change the port to have 1 instead of 3, and keep to smaller maps (5 stars is hude oO, that game would take days haha)

On a side note, increasing starbase cap for home planets to 12 hurts! <.<

I'll just put this in this thread, hopefully someone sees it, though not super important

Is it possible to change the time it takes to update shield and hull values to that of antimatter? Currently hull and shields HP update every few seconds (like 5-10?) Wondering if there's something I missed in the entity files that has the update time. Checked everywhere, and I'm thinking that's hardcoded

There is these entries in the ships entiy files

HullPointRestoreRate 1.000000
ShieldPointRestoreRate 0.500000

Not sure if thats what your looking for, but they are 24-25 lines down in the frigate files and around 60 lines down for the capitals.

Those are by how much they restore/repair their shields and hulls. Sadly not what I'm looking for. I'm trying to change the display time it takes to update.

For example, anti mater, if you watch a ship you can see it go up, one, two, three, four.  High rate means this happens faster, but it still counts 1-2-3-4-5-6 etc

For hull and shield, the display is every few seconds, so if they repair lets say 10 hull damage per second, it shows 100 damage repaired, then 10 seconds no change, then 100 again, etc. High rate just makes it repair more, but I want the visual update time to be one second rather then 10 seconds.

Ahh! yes. They may well be hard-coded, I guess to optimize processing. I don't know.