Delnar_Ersike

I still have no idea how the AI chooses what strike craft to build, which bothers me immensely, since the following two pieces of data prove that it isn't random: 1) the AI rarely builds strikecraft mines, and never mixes strikecraft mines with non-mine strikecraft; and 2) the AI will actively scuttle and rebuild strikecraft in a non-random fashion (ie. it will only ever scuttle one strikecraft type at a time, usually 3-4 bombers or 3-4 fighters). The next thing I want to test is damage t

[quote who="IskatuMesk" reply="42" id="3437903"] [/quote] Don't mind the derail, especially since I also post some sort of mod update with each reply, like the fact that I've started to notice the AI creates large armies of carriers simply as a result of adding AntiModule to carriers' frigateRoleType, and the fact that despite earlier claims, the AI can, in fact, scuttle strikecraft to change overall strikecraft composition, though because strikecraft only have

After a bit of testing, I can confirm that the AI does buy promotions past the standard limit; however, they don't do it as often as the starbase limit bypass thing and will only start pushing caps past the promotion limit after all of their capital ships have reached the promotion limit, so it isn't as bad as the starbase limits thing. It's still worth mentioning though, I'll update the main post with this info shortly. [quote who="IskatuMesk" reply="40" id="3437707"]

[quote who="Madfable" reply="36" id="3437485"]Does this mod only work for vanilla Sins? Or would it be compatible with other mods?[/quote] [quote who="Dark_Ansem" reply="37" id="3437488"]I doubt that as it alters the Entity entries. compatiblity could be done, however, by editing the files...[/quote] The compatibility section in the mod's Readme is a bit more detailed, but I actually altered quite a lot of Entity files (for researches, ships, abilities, etc.), since so man

Sorry I haven't replied to the newer posts yet, was occupied with other matters. As a result, I haven't really gotten a chance to verify the buying promotions advantage yet, but I'll do it shortly. [quote who="Jugurtha" reply="21" id="3436146"]Could you host this mod somewhere that doesn't want to put malware on my computer??? Christ..[/quote] Mediafire is quite reputable and has been around for years, almost 9 if Wikipedia is to be believed. Multiupload macros

[quote who="StormingKiwi" reply="17" id="3435394"] Is there any mod that greatly increases the ability of the AI? Is there any reason why the devs don't make the AI substantially easier to Mod? I'm thinking the StarCraft AI tournament or Sorian AI for SupCom[/quote] If you just want an AI-improving mod, you can always try mine, Artificial Unintelligence; you'll find it in Section 1 of the post. If it's still v0.4 when you're reading this, keep an ey

[quote who="GoaFan77" reply="14" id="3434414"]You know, I was already toying with increasing the max speed of ships at stars via the star ability, since it takes forever to move through them. If the AI really uses real time to reach the destination (which I suppose might be more logical), that may help too. Though I suppose that depends on the AI realizing the ability will allow it to move faster...[/quote] I still need to check if it's path time it checks or path distance. Test s

[quote who="Lavo_2" reply="11" id="3434320"]With regards to your research into priority for research entities, is it possible to put in a priority level such that the AI will look at every tech item and not get into a loop of checking for the same tech that it thinks that it does not want? Alternatively, is there a list of techs that the AI is hardcoded (or effectively so) to ignore?[/quote] As far as I know, there are no techs that the AI is hardcoded to ignore, and I have not found

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="9" id="3434127"]I took away the resource capturer roletype from the 3 ships when I started a planet mod...I didn't have any neutrals so I figured I might as well remove the roletypes...everytime I started a new game, I MDed about 20 or so seconds in....it happened again and again and again even though it worked just fine before I took away the roletypes...I added back the roletypes and the MDs went away...this, at least, has been my experience, and when

[quote who="WOEaintME" reply="2" id="3433228"]That's extensive I honestly thought that Economic was the best AI type (which may be the case unmodded, your research is more focused on the changes you made). Either way what you've put together is extremely thorough.[/quote] I actually thought the same thing, too, until I started running my test games. Turns out that Aggressor and Fortifier have better economies because they colonize more, while Researcher has a bette

Let's face it: we all know that Sins of a Solar Empire's AI is stupid. Unfortunately, their most fundamental parts are locked into an exe or dll file, their source code most likely never to be released for modders to examine, alter, and fix. However, there are still ways to push the AI, however dumb it may be, to still put up a fight without resorting to ludicrous resource or stat bonuses. This post contains the following: my attemp

DEFCON Mod Short version: this is the polar opposite of a "disable superweapons mod". Download: The current version is available to download here . Description: This mod happened as a byproduct of me me

1.80d uploaded and available to download. I removed mipmaps from the skybox textures, since they were bugged and higher quality mipmaps were never loaded. In addition, I packed an addon that reduces the size of some of the game's larger normalmaps (Titans, Starbases, Capital Ships, etc.); the normalmaps were sharpened to make the downsizing even less noticeable. RAM usage is greatly reduced when using the normalmap reduction addon (my estimates are about 30%), but some of the stuff is sti

[quote who="Major Stress" reply="25" id="3419915"] If you can reduce the starbase textures (including the -da, and -nm maps) to 2048 res, and make the quality look like the original 4096's. Then that will be a feat in itself. The game hates odd sized textures that are not in a power of 2. Despite a few odd sized ones being in game. Sharpening will be very hard to do without pixelating the texture. This is just from my experience using photoshop. Not saying it cant be done. I persona

Silliness aside, doing something like that might actually pay off; the map will have a lower resolution, sure, but it might not be not as noticeable if you can do some good sharpening. If I have a bit of time, I might try lowering the maximum resolution of some of the larger textures/maps by 25% (starbases, titans, planets, etc.), then doing a bit of wavelet sharpening (a little trick I learned way back to sharpen images with minimal noise by taking advantage of Photoshop's/GIMP's ima

While testing another mod I have in development, I found something nasty I overlooked in v1.80b. This is fixed in v1.80c, and since the modified file is only 7 kB in size, I uploaded a patch for the people who are already using v1.80b to download and decompress into the mod's folder. The full version will follow soon.

Next version of the mod is done and uploaded. In this version, I removed the RLE compressed .tga files and replaced them with .dds conversions of said .tga files. Since all 400 or so .tga files are different, I went through each one manually to do things like test to see if compression ruins the texture quality, remove unused alpha channels, check to see whether saving the texture with smaller color palettes e.g. R5G6B5 produced any noticeable quality degradation, rescale and expand textures

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="14" id="3417611"] What exactly were you changing? Were you comparing just normal files to DXT3 or .dds to .tga?[/quote] For v1.8a, I changed most existing .dds textures to DXT5 or DXT1, depending on alpha channel information. However, while converting the effect/UI files from .tga to .dds for v1.8b, I've recently discovered an odd way I can further optimize some textures: quite a few textures aren't colored (just shades of grey), yet th

[quote who="Seleuceia" reply="7" id="3417331"] I don't for sure remember the exact numbers, but IIRC using DXT3 cut down the file-size by a factor of 2 or 4 for planet textures (probably comparable for other textures too)...yet when in-game, the memory usage seemed unaffected regardless of how "zoomed in" you were on planets...I tried on maps with lots of planets and lots of different planets -- did my best to keep other things constant, but I didn't see any differences in

[quote who="myfist0" reply="5" id="3417305"] The bonus of dds is it loaded into the GPU's ram where tga is not, or it was when I worked on TSOP. DDS5 was a little to compressed for my liking on a lot of the UI stuff, I am happy with all the small research buttons and some of the smaller particle textures as tga[/quote] ... not to mention being able to have mipmaps for particle effects. In any case, I did a bit of testing with some of the tgas, and

[quote who="XATHOS" reply="1" id="3417235"]Sounds interesting, but how much difference is there between the TSOP release and yours (along the lines of graphics size)? Most mods try to use .dds format as much as possible, anyway.[/quote] I looked into TSOP, and the two don't really overlap. TSOP mainly concentrated on optimizing particle effects and meshes, while this mod focuses on optimizing texture files. The only overlap is that TSOP converted most .tga files to .dds, som

Mundanely Better Rebellion Textures This mod is a texture optimization patch. Though the changes themselves are rather modest, hence the title, they are still noticeable, especially on older systems; on my machine, which can run the game at maximum settings without any problems, the mod reduces memory usage by about 15% and improves framerate by about 5 FPS on average. Except in a few cases mentioned later, everything should loo