great idea    I think this idea coupled with a few of our own in house ideas with the brush files will assist us in saving some space.

thanks jtaylorpcs

The mod WILL get more polish. As in total model rebuilds, and texture re-works. Which i was going to save until almost the end, and we got everything else in and working, and all including myself on the SoA 2 Team had time to focus on only that.

It was another all too human mistake we made in not forseeing the 2 gig ram limit. We thought Sins could handle the content we put into it. It is obvious we were mistaken. The 2 gig limit has always been there since Original Sins. It only now that the modders, and Ironclad pushed Sins to that 2 gig limit. There is nothing we can do about the 2 gig limit. Sins is 32 bit game. I just wish it was not hardcoded to dump when it hits 2 gigs. We can now see why the 3rd expansion for Sins was cancelled. Sins just can not handle any more new content.

The Solution for us is to make our mod not use up any more ram than what Originsl Sins uses (Not Entrenchment, or Diplomacy). LESS if possible. We have to think like game developers of 2005. There are many ways we can do that. Reducing the poly counts of most of our models, and setting maximum poly limits is one. Hence the model rebuilds. Lowering texture resolutions is another. Some of our models are already pretty low resolution (most of the trekmods work). Others are pretty high resolution. We need to find a happy medium. We also need to experiment and see what works for us and what does not. The mesh and texture nerf should also apply to map objects, and particles as well.

Micheal456 Your suggestion most certainly has merit, and we will try it. I made our textures to match Original Sins format thinking they wouldnt work any other way. This is definetly good to know, and will save some resources. THAT is what i am talking about!

Basically all 7 factions in the mod (5 playable, 2 NPC) COMBINED need to use less ram, and resources than the 5 factions (3 playable, 2 npc) of ORIGINAL SINS. Not Entrenchment, Not Diplomacy. Original Sins is our benchmark. On top of finding new ways to optimize the UI, and Maps, and We are NOT programmers. So all we can do is hit it from the art aspect.

I do come off as being a dick from time to time. I admit it. Doing a Trek mod can be far worse than taking constuction orders, or being a fashion designer.. The fans are far more nit picky than women shopping for shoes at Saks Fifth avenue, and our patience is being tested constantly. I know we shouldnt snap back at you guys, but c-mon have you read all of the back posts? This mod is only a hobby for us that we enjoy on our free time. We just happen to be sharing with you guys. We do get enjoyment out of seeing you guys enjoy it, but unlike professional game developers we dont have to put up with people trying to armchair quarterback this mod, and naysayers. We are not game developers. We do not get paid to do this. We are only doing this for fun. We want to have fun with it, and we want you guys to have fun with it. That is what any mod is. The last thing i want to see when i get home from my RL job is a horde of "fanbois" trashing, and nit picking our hobby apart. Telling us how to make the mod like they are in charge, or what we should, or shouldnt add to it. We could have toned down our response a bit, but we all apparently were having a very bad day. We do like to see suggestions, but try to keep them on the topic of "How can we stay within the sins 2 gig limit", or how can we fix this, or that for now please. We got plans for the future of the mod trust me. Then we can talk about what can we add/take away.

Woops, double post please ignore.

Thanks Harpo.  I figured that out and just sent a message to Stress with my findings.  Your right though, it is unfortunate.

The only thing we can do then is to reduce the tri count on the planet meshes, and the texture resolutions. The textures for the planets are a whopping 4096 with a LOT of wasted texture space. A good 2048x2048 pixels worth.  I dont understand why the planets were not sphereically UV mapped with a 2048x1024 texture. It would look EXACTLY the same in game. Reducing to 2048, and replacing the meshes with optimized (under 2000 tri) spherically UV mapped meshes will greatly reduce video, and system ram usage, and planets will retain the detail without looking blocky.

Another thing is that Jaytlrpcs found out is that Sins is loading stuff into memory that Sins DOES NOT USE. Like the old beta content, and Beta load screens. Which should not be in the game to begin with. He is now searching for other unused content, and files that should not be loading. Since Sins loads EVERYTHING, Finding the entrys that are calling for these unused files, and getting rid of them will free up some ram as well, and make room for the stuff that is used.

CrazyEwok, glad to see the swords being sheaved . Anyway, regarding your queries;

The research trees are hardcoded into sins, so if you just took away one of the trees and somehow managed to fit all techs into the remaining tree, the empty tree would still be there. It's one of the changes they made when they created Entrenchment, adding in a third tree, and in diplomacy a 4th. And in all honesty, it would save at most 8 buildings for each player- and as Stress pointed out the poly count on the research stations aren't that high.

About the diplomacy port, yes it is worthwhile- if you have diplomacy you'll already know this, but- diplomacy really does make the game complete at last, you can give missions to the AI, and feel like an equal diplomatic partner, not just "keep them happy". Also, porting over to diplomacy itself isn't that much of a problem, as Ironclad made it very similar to Entrenchment, so most of the hard work is already done. The main problem the mod is seeing now (and diplomacy especially, both stock and modded) is a re-emergence of the old 2gig ram dump error. Ironclad had mostly removed the problem by putting in game hardcoded limits for textures and meshes and the like, however the community felt they needed more room to mod, so IC massively increased the limits, allowing modders to add several whole new factions into the game. Ofcourse that threw up the old error again.

Mods which have a whole bunch of textures and custom models in are now hitting the 2 gig limit a lot quicker (within the reach of a normal game). The same can be said about stock diplomacy, as it too increases the textures and models loaded up within the game. So that being said, the main problem with porting it over to diplomacy is just plain old hard work- the next full revision of the mod has to be rebuilt from scratch, leaving the mod team and community help to fix the 2 gig limit.

Right now the issue seems to be the massive amount of data sins loads up every time- sheets and sheets of unoptimized graphics, and some quirky coding. To be fair to them, IC is an indie company (or was when they made this game), and I'd hardly expect them to have a full team of modellers, texturers, and an optimizing team or any of the like. Unfortunately, what this does mean is that the mod team (and feel free to check up on things and point them out to the mod team) needs to look through all the data that sins loads up, and try to figure out how to optimise it so that it takes up less ram, but still maintains the high standards stress, jtaylorpcs, loki and the others set for this mod.

If you've had any experience playing with the sins code, or any experience you think may help (ie photoshopping model textures etc) then feel free to say, the mod team is great with advice, and they value any contribution that's made. At the end of the day, it saves them work, and gives us a better game to play.

Wow that's a big post lol. Night!

I KNOW, RIGHT !

Trade (as in supply) is important to the borg, and also their culture "we will assimilate you" is needed- don't forget that if they didn't have culture their planets could still be cultured.

Regarding removing ships, Stress and the others have made quite clear in the past (go back oh about 20 pages) that they want fully fledged factions, and not just "lots for Feds/Klingons, nothing for everyone else.

And yeah, Avatar good- you see it in 2D or 3D?

I think (and I'm not one of the mod team here) that we can sort out the 2gig problem by having models which fit the right poly count, and by optimising all the unoptimised graphics data stock sins leaves us with, such as the pointlessly unoptimised planets- I'm sorry but they just *don't* look good enough to imagine they're the actual size they are, and the other problems I mentioned earlier (16 bit graphics saved on 32 bit sheets).

Regarding the borg, they're meant to be overpowered- they're designed for 4v1 games.

The idea's not to cut down on anything at all, just to find a way to make it all fit- I think most people would prefer if the models were 1k poly's less, and they were all in there, than we cut out some models. And the way sins works, it wouldn't make a difference if you put identical ship models in instead, as they't still use poly/texture ram space. Sorry to keep putting your ideas down, but yeah.

Yes I agree on not wanting to reuse models, where we can.  Also we have used some models withing  soa2 with no issues. We might address this with a case by case basis, but doubt we will be reusing structure mesh and or ships mesh , unless its something small such as trade ship etc.  Also the game engine needs the following rescources or spazz's out , All strucural  assests that are ingame for soa2 0.4.2e with the exception of the antiwarp inhibitors are needed.   Also i agree on the borg being economical already. 

thanks jtaylorpcs

Hmmm, I was just wondering...  do the Klingons have any anti-structure vessels?

Have to say Iv been playing borg for 8 hours now on a 171 planet map and it rocks!!!!

They way you have them balanced is peferfect! I love warping in with a cube and laying waste to entire fleets. I had one battle with one cube against 70 odd miranda and excelors and they where uttly destroyed! It felt just right and startreky unlike the start trek amada games   Nothing beats when the decemated fleet trys to retreat and you turn on tractor beams and stop the suvivors retreating   You can almost imagine the terror in those ships as they realise  they about to become drones 

One thing I do suggest is scaleig the unimatrix complex up. It just seems alittle small and understated.  When you warp in and see it you wanna feel terror.

Yeah I kind like that idea alot more. Have a super strong unicomplex home base. But have less strong trans warp hubs to act as starbases.  I would still make them petty strong though enough to hold off a sizable fleet.

Something you may not have considerd but could you do away with all borg bases and maybe have all borg planets start with a basic uni complex which you can add research labs and influance bases into?

O another idea. I vanilla sins you have the ability on the egg ship that sucks resources from the planet. I thik it would fit in rather well on a borg ship or two. Reason I suggest this is in the TNG it was stated the borg would come along and sco0p coloneys up. This ability would simulate that, scooping up the coloneys resources.