How to run 2 instances of SoaSE?

from Sins Forums

Hi all,

Situation:

1. I own SoaSE (vanilla), Entrenchment, Diplomacy, and Trinity.

2. Trinity was bought on Steam while the previous 3 were on Impulse.

3. In essence, I would say that I have 2 full "sets" of the game.

4. I would like to run 2 instances of the game in windowed mode so that I can control 2 races at the same time. But it doesn't seem to work even when I run the exe files direct from their respective directories (steamapps/etc... and stardockgames/etc.....)

 I've dug around the forums (here and on steam) and haven't found anyone asking this question yet. If I'm mistaken, would someone please point me in the right direction?

Thanks! 

 

 

 

technical
2,759 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

You'd need to do something with virtual machines as the game will look for other copies of itself when it launches. Sadly that's the extent of my knowledge.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

When I want to do something like this I use a program called Sandboxie http://www.sandboxie.com/ BTW controlling more then one player is harder than it sounds.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Did you try the dev versions?

 

I routinely have two or three of them open while modding to test "faster" since my system can run four simultaneously with little slowdown.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Run the .exe that have the word "dev" in them or something like that...you can run multiple instances of it and you can even switch between players within the same instance (so really you should only run it once)...

Once you got a game running, you need to press three buttons at the same time: "Ctrl", "Shift", and "."

A black command window should come up in the top left corner...press "A" for "change galaxy"...press "D" for "player info"...press "A" whenever you want to switch players...use "<" to go back to the previous list of options...you may also want to press "B" for "IsNotAI" (or something like that) so that no one controls them while you are switching players...

Note that everytime you switch between running the dev.exe and the normal .exe, all your setting files get changed, so I recommend backing those up...

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

You have to take them off AI, or they will be AI controlled even while you're switched to them.  You also have to set yourself to AI should you want to change to another side and have the AI take over yours.  It's not automatic.