Vandenburg

Go to www.imageshack.us and upload it there. :)

It's hard to tell what the problem is. My custom pictures always worked. :NOTSURE: You could upload the picture you want and I would then take a look at it. Would make it much easier to find out the problem. :)

[quote] Mitigation is based on how much DPS the ship is receiving, not how much shielding it has left. The harder you hit it, the stiffer the shields get.[/quote] That's not quite correct. Shield mitigation is based on absolute damage a ship receives, not on dps (though it doesn't make that much of a difference in practice). Mitigation is increased by 0.001 per damage point (ie. 0.1%). It decays at a rate of 0.0125 points per second (1.25%/s). This is regardle

[quote] We dont know if other factions can be modded in or not. My trek mod will have the Feds, Klingons, and Romulans [/quote] They can "easily" be modded in. Currently the faction selection is hardcoded (which can be bypassed with changes in the map files) but the devs promised a soft selection for the release version.

[quote] All I meant was that if you run in windowed mode you will not have to alt-tab. I didn't mean that it would magically enable more error messages than are usually presented. [/quote] Yeah, I misread you, blame it on a lack of sleep.

[quote] If you run the game in windowed mode you will be able to see all error messages without alt-tabbing. Also you can keep an eye on the IRC chat during lagging . [/quote] Actually no. There are some sorts of crashes (which happen when you load a game) that don't generate an error message. Mostly they're are read/write errors

I have a weird bug related to modding. Removing all random planetary bonus from the ice planet results in a freeze at the startup of the game (no crash, minidump or error message gets generated and the log is empty). Setting [I]possibleRandomPlanetBonusesCount 4[/I] to zero and removing the next 4 lines of random bonus from PlanetIce.entity results in that. Strangely you can remove all random planetary bonus from all other planet files without problems, only the ice pl

Hmm... could you upload on of the maps you're editor has created? So I could take a look at the .galaxy file to see what is missing/wrong there. Sounds like you either don't have the TXT at the beginning of the file, or it's saved in a wrong format.

[quote]anyone know which version[/quote] It shouldn't really matter what number you have there. [I]TXT versionNumber 1 isBrowsable TRUE browsePictureName "ScenerioPicture-Flashpoint"[/I] Something like this at the beginning of the file and it should be ok.

[I] connection planetIndexA 8 planetIndexB -1 spawnProbability 1.000000 type "PhaseLane" [B]spawnProbability 1.000000[/B] playerCount 2 player designName ""[/I] That's what I've called star's spawn probability. It could be that it is related to the connections, but I for myself connected it with the star, since it makes it easier to remember that it has to be at the end of each star. Edit: After checking out your mapfile, that

Not really. Every star, planet and connection needs to have exactly one [I]spawnProbability 1.000000[/I]. There's not really much you can do if something is wrong besides checking it from hand. Btw. you've got a pm with a mail addy.

[quote] I won't play Vasari any more, they require too much micro-management to really take advantage of their abilities.[/quote] It's even worse with their cruisers. You can micro your capitals since you often don't have that many of them, but with the cruisers it's a total mess. But all in all, battles still need a very high amount of micro management for your ships to be effective, which I hope will be changed in fu

[quote]I see your point Annatar. The only comfort is that it equally slows everybody down a bit for the joy of economic warfare being a viable strategy in the mid/late game.[/quote] Well, you could make it so that the drain on resources of new colonies is connected to loyalty (ie. how far away it is from your capital planet). Thus you would not slow down the early game but would create a higher resources drain in the later game when the planets you colonize are farther away.

[quote]There are lines in planet definitions for 'required bonuses' (pirate planets Loot)[/quote] Wohoo! Must have overlooked that. Silly me. Opens up quite some concepts.

@Gauntlet Sorry, I didn't want to imply that you don't know how to do it. It was more meant as a general remark and about the difficulty of making planetary textures (which I'm currently unable to do decently) . [quote]Something that might not be possible- Special Planets that yield minerals from themselves. Could be a cool feature for volcanic.[/quote] We could probably force that by making a new planet bonus that generates resources and then force the planet to have

[quote] Beta 4 already reduced the allegiance penalties pretty dramatically when you consider how many planets away from your homeworld you can have, so in that regard it was a great improvement [/quote] This and playing on the new [I]normal[/I] or [I]fast[/I] increased resource collection so much, that players are now complai

[quote] But does the Phase Gate object have an abillity this corresponds to or no? if it does we could try applying that ability to other structures or ships. [/quote] No, it seems to be hardcoded. Though you could make gates which only certain ship types could use, they would all jump with the same speed.

[quote] Yeah, probably. Except it might just be a lot more work to learn, then write, the program than to just do the work. Of course, if he then needs to change something... yeah, learning a scripting program would be helpful![/quote] Nah, changing the amount of asteroids in the planet files takes about 5 seconds, renaming the files and adding it to the definition file takes much more time then that. [quote]Planets tha

[quote] Found this interesting article on Gamespot. Apparently, THQ acquired the Homeworld licence (confirmed) but would not say if they've started working on a Homeworld 3. Still, why would they bother getting the licence if they didn't plan another Homeworld game? We can only hope <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/news/6182452.

[quote]Most RTS's have very little diplomacy. Sins of a Solar Empire has considerably more than the typical RTS.[/quote] And it has significantly less then your usual 4X game. [quote]The game has NPC units known as pirates who are effectively like Barbarians from Civilization but more lethal. But you can passively pay them to attack other races by putting a bounty on that race. Best of all, nobody knows who is putting the

[quote] Well, hopefully the promised Mod Manager will be of use if you can't do that via the map editor -- but I think there are ways to modify maps so that you have extra asteroids, I've seen another map with it before, I believe. [/quote] Nope, not possible. If they don't change the .galaxy files considerably (and a I doubt they will, with that little time remaining until release) it will only be possible by moding the planet fil

Ok, I honestly don't get your problem with an infinite economy. Refineries are still worth it, since it still gives you more resources then without refineries. Also the change usually only has an effect in games that last longer then 2 hours (or one and a half hour when you've researched mining technology). Since your usual run of the mill asteroid has around 3500 resources at a rate of 0.5 per second 3500/.5/60/60=~1.9 hours. The part of the game where you expand usua

[quote] Very few games should go Open Source, they can allow their editor to edit those files if they want, but the shouldn't allow the code to be wide open. I doubt they work so their game can be given away. [/quote] What does this has to do with open source? Open source != free

[quote] :o Very few games at all go open source.. [/quote] Of course, but one can still dream? I'm just wondering, because already almost everything (besides the .exe) is accessible to us. It would just be another 2.5 Mb of data.

I not only support Therax's request I also have a further question. Is there a possibility to get access to the sins.exe? Currently almost all game files are easily modable with a text editor while other will be modable with the corresponding forge tools (.mesh and .particle files). Since important parts of the game is hard coded into the .exe (especially the file layout and what is possible for certain entities) it would allow much more customization if we could change the .ex