RespawnedTitanL10

I don't see any Lua exposed in this game. Might have been a change of plans with that, e.g. the engine might support Lua, meaning it can be configured with Lua, but Lua wasn't used for Sins. The entity files don't allow for Turing-complete computations within. You can call some of the predefined tests (i.e. defined in the C/C++ code) for conditionals, but you can't put arbitrary conditionals in the entity files and there's basically no looping within those either,

[quote who="Admiral Slinky" reply="6" id="3474212"] Fair enough. As you can see I did quite a bit of in- and out-of-game digging, but it never even occurred to me to search the game files.[/quote] You need to convert them from binary to text first (with a command-line utility that itself doesn't do batch conversions), so that's another dissuasive factor for the non-modder gamer... And as comment on software engineering: making the in-game text descriptions

My bet is that given what's in the entity file, namely modifierType "CapitalShipsTitansAndStarBasesCountAsPlanetForNoGameLoss" this was designed like this, as Sel says. There's no "TitansCountAsPlanetForNoGameLoss" modifierType (or in fact any other kind of *NoGameLoss modifier.) Each modifierType needs C/C++ code to implement, so given what it's called, it's obvious this was designed as it behaves. So, it sounds like the in-game description was [alwa

I've offered a fair bit of my own apologia for the relatively obscure Ship Graveyard (which although basically a planet type was added in SP not in FW) in another thread: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/453893/page/1/#3474159 As for the 2 GB memory limit, that's actually 3 1 -bit address space. There has been a (perennial?) discussion about enabling the /LARGEADDRESSA

The big 5v5s maps popular on ICO (Huge Single-System Random Map Fair.galaxy) use basically just WeightedRandomFair and RandomFair for most of the map (except for the moon/roid/volcanic Fair near the homeworlds). There are approximately four times more WeightedRandomFairs than RandomFair on those maps. Does anyone know how the WeightedRandom[s] work, i.e. how are they weighted? Ah, the answer is rather simple in GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef: the "Weighted"

By the way, if one just wants to get rid of specific planet types popping up via the randomizer, isn't it enough to remove them from GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef [via modding]? As far as I can tell, there are no other references to Ship.Graveyard [as a case-insensitive regular expression] except in that file (GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef) in the planetType lists: WeightedNonIce, WeightedNonIceFair, WeightedRandom, WeightedRandomFair, Ast

I've done a test of my own using 400 fleet supply: 25 carriers vs. 116 corvettes + a cap on each side (Halc and Akkan both L3). The carriers were loaded with half-and-half fighters/bombers. The Halc had fighters only. Both capital ships amusingly die at exactly the same time, despite using their abilities. The corvettes then menacingly head for the carriers. And then... big FAIL. They manage to kill 4 carriers before beeing all wiped out. That's right 4 carriers lost out of 25

Two quick notes based on that presentation: On 64-bit Windows /LAA actually gives the app the full 4 GB entirely for user space (the 1GB/3GB split is for 32-bit kernels) and this requires no special boot flags (unlike the 32-bit kernel case). As for testing your machine's LAA config: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963901 has the "testlimit" utility. The 32-bit version of

It's a little annoying that while you can turn off random events as a group, you there isn't a more fine-grained method to check/uncheck them individually (without modding). The same goes for the planet types used [by the randomizer]. And the modding needed (as shown in "DLCs Off" above) is rather intrusive, touching a lot of files, so it's PITA to carry forward (reapply changes) for every new version of Sins. You need to have <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat

This is a pretty good guide. Important things the guide doesn't say though (probably because Grimm forgot to add them to the guide, not because he doesn't know/use them in his play): Targeting the constructor frigates when attacking an enemy well and then exploiting the huge rebuild time penalty while your fleet is in the system (10x more time). As a continuation to that, if you must leave the enemy well with the bulk of your force before their planet is dead, leave a s

[quote who="Protoplazm" reply="7" id="3441192"] Quoting backup7, reply 6 How did Doci steal grimm's roid when it was under cultural influence?Doci is famous for hax. This is one of his early ones. The Z axis worm hole is a lot better.[/quote] No hax involved. Apparently the rules about culture and colonization circulated on this forum (and on the Wikia) are old and by now wrong. Others have been able to colonize in similar circumstances [I haven't

There were apparently lotsa gotchas with DX9 on Vista [related to memory usage/allocation], but I guess people don't run into those anymore. I found some interesting resources at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chuckw/archive/2010/12/16/windows-x64.aspx but I don't' have time to read them tonight. Note that his presentation " Why Your Windows Game Won't Run In 2,147,352,576 Bytes" is lin

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="44" id="3473887"] Quoting RespawnedTitanL10, reply 43People who see PF usage increase/pressure with Sins probably have too little RAM (for OS + game + video if not using dedicated VRAM). If your paging file is ~2GB or less, overtime your Sins game will be unable to load textures...you could have all the RAM in the world, it wouldn't matter....large mods run into this issue faster, but it can happen with vanilla, and even for users who

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="6" id="3473852"]you have to micro the bombers to keep them out of range of the corvettes [/quote] My large scale test in the other thread shows that (unlike in small scale) you don't have to worry about keeping bombers outside the corvette's range in the large scale. The corvettes massively overkill a squadron or two on every pass, but that's small potatoes when you have 80-100 bomber squads and it only takes a few passes to take out everythin

No, you can't explicitly cache anything into the PF (from an application). It's up to the OS to page stuff out from RAM, in which you can indeed cache stuff. People who see PF usage increase/pressure with Sins probably have too little RAM (for OS + game + video if not using dedicated VRAM). My gaming box has 12GB and the PF is set to 4GB (more would be a waste of SSD). It hardly ever gets touched even then. About 160KB of Sins ever gets paged out, after a couple of hours play. Process

[quote who="furyofthestars" reply="38" id="3473817"] I would think the benefit of the SSD would be load times only, yes? Unless you have a lot of the memory usage going to a pagefile?[/quote] Yes, Sins doesn't seem to cache much itself, probably because of address space limitation. I don't have exact numbers, but subjectively load times went from 10-15 secs with a HDD (startup and loading the 1st game) to 3-4 seconds with SSD. Most games don't see 3x-5x speedup

The crazy rebellions in 1.80 were fun to watch, but not so much to play against. The first time I saw them, I said to myself... "Ah, so that's what Rebellion in Rebellion is about". I think I still have a save game where 3 planets rebelled, each with a cap ship, a dozen heavy cruisers and a zerg of other ships. Combined they had more fleet than I did, and I had practically won the game by then. In 1.82 I don't think I've seen any, probably because I don't have any trouble keep

Fury, I guess you don't know anyone (personally) who works in the game industry... The pressure/rush to release stuff is quite something.

Someone could try searching the change logs posted on this forum to see if this was changed on purpose at some point. I've noticed that balance fixes/tweaks often enough don't have the corresponding in-game description updated. Even today the Percheron's description says "a squadron" of strike craft, even though it can field two. And that balance change was made in 2006 or so...

Split off from another, non-technical thread: [quote who="WJC3688"] I still play SP actively and running the dev exe resets my extensively customized settings in the normal game, very annoying. [/quote] That happens to me too and it is indeed very annoying, particularly that it resets the video resolution. Something the devs could easily fix... The rest [of the settings being reset] don't bother me as much. You can make a backup copy of your

[quote who="WJC3688" reply="4" id="3473723"] I still play SP actively and running the dev exe resets my extensively customized settings in the normal game, very annoying. [/quote] That happens to me too and it is indeed very annoying, particularly that it resets the video resolution. Something the devs could easily fix... The rest [of the settings being reset] don't bother me as much. You can make a backup copy of your user.setting (or of the entir

[quote who="RespawnedTitanL10" reply="7" id="3473671"] For what it's worth, I think (1) is a bug: "Fair" Oceanic/Ferrous/Greenhouse having a variable number of extractors seems to contradict the notion of "Fair" that stems from the other planets. Having said that, the randomly generated maps even with the truly "Fair" (constant-resourced) planets generate a huge amount of map luck/randomness by connections' length and more so by complete lack thereof, far exceeding wh

Meh, if there's any doubt of the veracity of my report, just look in one of the maps in the Galaxy (not Galaxy Forge) directory, e.g. at Crystal Storm Fair.galaxy. That file employs the same fix I ended up making: zeroes out the two homeworld's upgrade sections (after setting the desired values for both homewrolds using the global/galaxy section.) The rest of the [uncolonized] planets also have some buggy [generated?] values theere, but those don't matter because they are ign

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="9" id="3473699"] Normal asteroids allow specialization while "fair" asteroids do not...I'd assume it is an oversight...[/quote] Who knows... That one I could say was more likely deliberate. It's also on fury's list at his (ahem) second "1" (half-way down in his OP where he restarts the numbering.) It's a bit sad the devs gave no feedback on any of this. Most of these points aren't complex issues that would take hours of debugging

[quote who="Turchany" reply="2" id="3472144"] For me it seems planets always grow 3 health per time unit, with TEC research level2 4 (sometimes 3), it never increases nor decreases in any other ways. No matter if they have 1000000000000 max health or just 500. These are just my observations from the game, not from any files or something. While being bombed it never increases, and if bombing cedes, it takes several seconds to reinitiate health growth. So it is useless upgradin