The SVN Overhaul

[Lavo]

Or in other words, what I've been doing to the SVN for the past number of days. If any of you have had the misfortune of attempting to update since the last "real" update, I apologize for all the weirdness that must have come about due to this.

 

That being said, I believe everyone deserves an explanation of what I did and why. If you prefer to skip the explanation and just get the update, skip to the second to last paragraph of this post.

 

Over the past few months, SoGE has been growing. Maturing into something more fully fledged, or however you wish to call it. Notably, it has acquired large amounts of new models and skins, such as when Novus Universum was added, and more recently with the arrival of Warb_Null. These models, being of high quality, demand large amounts of resources. Due to the nature of Sins' 32-bit engine, this leads to a CPU bottleneck and the game begins to lag very early on in a new game. Recently, it has also become unstable, and has begun mini-dumping, or flat out crashing, mid-game due to high resource usage. This is entirely unacceptable and was not something I would personally allow.

 

To alleviate this issue, there are three possible solutions, at least to my knowledge.

1) Compress/lower the quality of existing textures.

2) Remove content.

3) Split up the races into stackable mini-mods, in a fashion similar to Sins of the Fallen and the abortive Sins of the Creator.

 

I decided that, due to my refusal to decrease the quality of the mod, and flat out the impossibility of #2, to go with the third option. Now you might be wondering, "Well that sounds nice and all, but what did you actually do, and what does this mean to me?".

 

It means a few things, first off is you will have to download more stuff. Second is, if you choose to fully utilize this, is to choose which races you wish to play with before you start the game. Of course you can choose to use them all, but this means the instability and crashes will continue, unless you feel like lowering settings, which may or may not help. To put it more visually, here is an example of an EnabledMods.txt with all races enabled. To play with only the CIS and Republic for example, you would remove the Alliance, NR, and Vong folders from that list, as they are not necessary, and changing the enabledModNameCount to 3. The Empire is integrated into the CORE of the mod, as their ship models are widely used in militias and by pirates, making the benefits of splitting them off minimal. As for what order you should stack the mods in, it does not matter, as long as CORE is on the bottom, and if you are playing multiplayer matches, that all players have the same order. I've done some slight tweaks to the SVN, namely some minor pirate tweaks, giving the Procurator a new ability, beefing up the Procurator's Front/Left/Right missile banks while dicing the Back banks, decreasing the power of the Miid Ro'ik (capital) and Cluster Ship's missiles, and some other little changes.

 

As for installation, the instructions for the beta installation, here, are still valid. However, the url name, needs to be changed. The url name is the same as the folder names in the EnabledMods.txt I linked earlier (i.e. "SoGE Beta Ent - CORE", etc), and change the checkout directory names appropriately (I personally have my folders named "SoGE Beta Ent - CIS" and such). In addition, I have a neat little trick to reduce the amount you will have to download (please note, this is all optional, you can just ignore it all). Right-click your current SoGE beta folder, go TortoiseSVN -> Export then make/choose the folder you wish to use for SoGE Beta Ent - CORE and export to there. After, when you are using SVN Checkout, export to that new folder, even though there are files currently present. Once that is done, right-click the new folder, go TortoiseSVN -> Clean Up. Check "Delete unversioned files and folders", uncheck "Include externals" and hit okay. If you are really low on bandwidth/slow speed/etc, you can copy over each races' Meshes and Textures to their respective folders before you Clean Up the CORE folder. Then do the Checkout -> Clean Up trick on those folders.

[Evaders99]

Makes sense to me. Wonder if anyone has made a simple mod enabler utility. That would be neat

[Lavo]

Makes sense to me. Wonder if anyone has made a simple mod enabler utility. That would be neat

Technically, the game itself has that. But it can't handle a mod the size of SoGE that well unfortunately.

[01lude]

so we have to update each mini mod individually now? for example we have to right-click each folder for each race and click on "SVN update?"

 

edit: when i moved to update "core" it said the remote connection was closed by the host and now the folder is locked. sorry im really new to all of this as im sure a lot of other people are as well. tried running the cleanup also, it's still not updating correctly.

[Snowba11]

Sounds a very good idea, tbh whenever I play I never use all races at once, at the very most 4.

 

If Im honest I have seen much lower lag in recent games (some extra ram probably helps), and now it becomes stable when shutting the game down and not minidumping, but fully understand and agree with the changes.

 

Based on what your doing I might go and try make some different time scaled versions of maps, as they would probably fit better now.

 

Good work, keep it up

[Lavo]

so we have to update each mini mod individually now? for example we have to right-click each folder for each race and click on "SVN update?"

Yes. You can also just select all six folders at once and then hit SVN Update.

edit: when i moved to update "core" it said the remote connection was closed by the host and now the folder is locked. sorry im really new to all of this as im sure a lot of other people are as well. tried running the cleanup also, it's still not updating correctly.

Forgot to mention, for whatever reason you might need to run SVN Checkout multiple times before it installs completely.

 

If you get a lockup, try checking out again. If that does not work, go to the main folder and, assuming you can see hidden folders/files, delete the '.svn' folder and run SVN Checkout again. This way you will pick up from where you left off in a sense, as the already present/downloaded files will be versioned already.

 

Sounds a very good idea, tbh whenever I play I never use all races at once, at the very most 4.

This was pretty much what I figured.

If Im honest I have seen much lower lag in recent games (some extra ram probably helps), and now it becomes stable when shutting the game down and not minidumping, but fully understand and agree with the changes.

Thanks for a lot of that goes to psychoak, his ability fixes helped stop buffs from piling up and sticking around endlessly. For example, in my testing, I had a medium or medium-large (forget which) map going on with the Imps/NR/Reps, an hour and forty minutes in Sins was only using a little under 900 MB of RAM.

[wbino]

Dump the Vong? And leave be.......

[Lavo]

Dump the Vong? And leave be.......

That alone would not solve the problem.

[01lude]

Forgot to mention, for whatever reason you might need to run SVN Checkout multiple times before it installs completely.

 

If you get a lockup, try checking out again. If that does not work, go to the main folder and, assuming you can see hidden folders/files, delete the '.svn' folder and run SVN Checkout again. This way you will pick up from where you left off in a sense, as the already present/downloaded files will be versioned already.

 

hooray that fixed it. time for some pew pew pew now, thanks for the hard work!

 

edit: now it keeps minidumping when trying to enable "core." maybe some kind of checksum issue? searching the forum suggests that i might need to reinstall from scratch if it is indeed a checksum issue? maybe i need to run "large address aware" again too. i can play normal sins just fine as well, it's just that core mod that won't activate for some reason.

 

edit: tried a clean install from scratch. only updated the "core" mini mod and it still minidumps when trying to activate. i noticed that impulse installed entrenchment 1.053, could the version have changed something from 1.04 or 1.051 that causes it to minidump?

 

edit (24hrs later): activated successfully this morning. how? i have no idea because i didn't change anything on my end. o well at least it works.

[jester17]

I can't seem to update the folder. For some reason, it keeps locking and nothing gets saved in the textures folder. I think it is all in the .svn folder, since it is over 1.2 GB. If I delete the .svn folder, I'm back to square 1.

[Lavo]

edit (24hrs later): activated successfully this morning. how? i have no idea because i didn't change anything on my end. o well at least it works.

Some people on 2.0/2.1 reported that they previously had issues with 1.051 but somehow updated to 1.053 fixed them. I cannot confirm this as I personally have a crappy netbook on 1.051 that is able to play the beta.

 

I can't seem to update the folder. For some reason, it keeps locking and nothing gets saved in the textures folder. I think it is all in the .svn folder, since it is over 1.2 GB. If I delete the .svn folder, I'm back to square 1.

Deleting the .svn folder won't put you back at square one as you will have downloaded some of the files; when you re-checkout it will version said files instead of re-downloading them entirely.

 

Due to SWR's server migration the SVN is acting a bit odd/is down; it'll be back to full duty after the move.

[DarkWolf_V]

mine says when to svn checkout:

 

checkout failed:

 

Command: Checkout from svn://swrebellion.com/warlords/SINS/SoGE Beta Ent - CORE, revision HEAD, Fully recursive, Externals included

Error: Unable to connect to a repository at URL

Error: 'svn://swrebellion.com/warlords/SINS/SoGE%20Beta%20Ent%20-%20CORE'

Error: Can't connect to host 'swrebellion.com': No connection could be made because

Error: the target machine actively refused it.

[Lavo]

As I said in the post above yours, due to the SWR server migration, the SVN is down currently.

[soul0reaper]

Any news on when it will be back up?