Lavo

Update: February 15, 2012 | Revision: 709 Mandator has more squadrons and costs more supply, Mon Remonda supply cost increased, Praetor's speed (aka. linear acceleration) decreased, Allegiance costs fixed and strings added.

Update: February 15, 2012 | Revision: 707 May I present to you, the Empire's newest supercap, the Imperial-class Super Star Destroyer! Known primarily for one of the lead vessels of it's class, the Allegiance, built upon experience from the Tector-class Star Destroyer and the Praetor Star Battlecruiser, it boasts massive firepower and can decimate opposing fleets. It lacks it's own starfighters, but has a powerful point defense network. It is a solid addition to any Imperial fleet and is a fearsome ship on it's own. As of now it lacks proper text/icons (using the Praetor's) and research, but this will be fixed soon. Model courtesy of Warb and EJ. Also tweaked some supercap weapon ranges, and bumped down the Torp Sphere one research level.

Do not forget that you can make pre-requisites across sections and trees; I highly suggest that you treat sections simply as more space for their respective trees, for now anyways. Or, we can edit the background to "enlarge" the single section. I'm fairly sure this would work, though I don't think I'd be able to edit it personally. It should be able to handle it fine; thanks to the AI tweaks I put in it will basically research everything. In fact, under such a system, the AI might research things much more cohesively. Once you finish this I'll be able to fix up the AI research forcers. I'm very interested in seeing how this goes, and would like to put out a general warning to be careful about how difficult you make it to unlock ships and change around with allegiance. The former as, for example, you have ships such as the Lancer, which while they were only used later on in the Imperial's history, they are the only dedicated anti-fighter unit the Empire has, and thus making them harder to research would put in a notable disadvantage. As for the latter, even a single percentage makes a very large difference in this mod, more so than vanilla Sins.

Yeah, I think I'll go that route. The Malevolence is really much more suited to being the stronger supercap, it even has the CnC ability, which imo is a stronger supercap ability. I have a surprise in the works for you all...

I don't mind at all. Heck, that's how I got started on my path personally; making unofficial updates for the beta. I like the sound of this. Assuming you mean the armor value itself, this could work. While I agree with the Alliance, I have to strongly disagree with the Republic. The latter is geared towards mass-production and firepower, if anything they'd have stronger weapons to complement their massive fleets. This definitely could work for the Vong, CIS could as well. Mind you, I must mention that as is the Vong's ships have a higher hull strength on average. Makes total sense; this is somewhat what I tried to do with the limited research "paths" that I put in (balanced, firepower, and shielding). I would be very interested in seeing this! While I see where you are going with this, it doesn't really work. The CIS for example, has very strong capital ships, and are even on par with the Empire/NR/Vong. Even their supercaps are pretty powerful, in my personal opinion the Malevolence is the best supercap after the Viscount/Executor, and with proper leveling and support can even take one of those on. The stock capital ships aren't all too different from each other, each is pretty powerful, though the Republic are at a clear disadvantage in this category. Perhaps supply should be inversely proportional to capital ships? That is, less supply means more possible capital ships. Though as is, there's already a lot of capital ship slots, these could probably use some reducing regardless. There are some really solid ideas here, and definitely has potential. Keep up the good work!

Update: February 13, 2012 | Revision: 706 Independence, Mon Remonda TargetCountPerBank for all banks increased; this should fix the issue of underpowered Alliance supercaps. Cost and build time of supercaps with a TargetCountPerBank value of 5 have been reduced; when I calculated supercap costs I was entirely unaware of this and did not take it into account. This should make it clear which supercap is a "lower tier" ship. Also increased Mediator's speed and maneuverability. I am considering lowering the Malevolence's TargetCountPerBank to 5 and reducing it's cost, but this would be unfitting for something which was touted as the one of the CIS' best warships. As it is, in the tech tree it's listed as being the CIS' weaker supercap, but with the CnC boost and volley fire it's at worst equal to the Geo SDN. Perhaps I should change the Geo SDN instead? Looking for comments/suggestions on this.

Update: February 12, 2012 | Revision: 705 Added more HUD icons, unit pictures, and mainview icons.

GameInfo; that's the only folder with entity files. :v

While I don't remember offhand which units have it disabled/enabled, you can turn it off by opening the entity file and changing "autoJoinFleetDefault" to FALSE.

Awesome, thanks for this fix! Though, I notice that as you didn't maintain the same proportions for the "main" portion of Galaxy.dds that it looks pixelated ingame. Is there any way to change this? Also, if you're interested, you can convert meshes to bin using the "sinstextbinner.exe" found in harpo's utilities pack. Or you can just ask me to convert 'em for you, which ever works.

Update: February 9, 2012 | Revision: 704 Added some HUD icons and unit pictures.

They work best when set to fire off after getting some shield damage, rather than firing off the moment they get any damage, like Sensor Scramble does. Both abilities reduce damage, the former by a flat out DamageAsDamageTarget reduction, and the latter by increasing Shield Mitigation (plus the retargeting). As well, Sacrifice and Backup Shields have always had the same autocast conditions.

Update: February 9, 2012 | Revision: 703 Fixed Brace for Impact and Sacrifice autocast conditions based off of Backup Shields; kudos for the fix psychoak! Also fixed up the Imp's Heavy Corvette so it correctly functions as a scout.

Oh boy, more rigging! A 3ds Max script from myfist0's site, which seems to be down. Mirror here; it requires the .mesh to be in bin format (rather than the txt format used in the beta). Edit: Found the galaxy backdrop file; it's Galaxy.dds in the Textures folder. Upon further research, it seems the black hole bug is likely occurring due to how Sins renders the backdrop.

So I heard from Burntstrobe, thanks for these. They look really nice! Send 'em off to Nova once you're finished with them, as he's running the planets mod/portion and such. I actually have no idea how Sins renders planets. I will get you the stock planet meshes, but that's really all I am capable of doing. I don't know what mesh is used for this, unfortunately. I actually would like to leave the rose skin on the Roik Chuan Mara, Malatok, and Ro'ik Va'lh. It looks fairly nice on them. However, the skin you made for the Ro'ik Va'lh, would fit very well on the Cluster Ship. I will send you it's mesh. Speaking of the Ro'ik Va'lh, for some reason, it's right side does not render well ingame, but the left does. I believe I know the reason for this however, it has to do with the UV mesh somehow. Here's the two sides in XSI, under the "Constant" view mode: left and right. As you can see, the right side is very smooth and consistent with the blue, but the left side is a mess. Plus, the Scout Ship and Gunboat are still messed up. The former still has holes. For the latter, I believe the issue is related to the UV map. When you gave me the fixed Gunboat, I noticed on both of them that you had changed the UV map from it's original form, for some reason. With the original UV map/mesh, the model displays fine, and as such I believe that if you can slap the UV map of the original Gunboat onto the fixed one, that it will stop being warped.

I would simply avoid using the tech. It's impossible to fix, and this is admittedly something which has bugged me as well. At the end of the day though, it's a good tech for MP matches, and there isn't an issue if a player simply decides to not to use it. Making it a stronger planetary shield really would not work well from a Star Wars viewpoint. As it is, I'm trying to figure out a way to integrate the planetary shield as a planet-upgrade and thus take out the structure altogether. I know this is possible, just need to figure out how. In addition, I have also been considering making an optional patch for 2.0 (to be released after the next real patch), which strips a bunch of frigates/cruisers of their planet bombing capabilities, but leaving one ship that has them, so that the AI properly bombs stuff.

This is already the case. Each faction has at least one of these ships that has auto-join disabled. If you are talking about say, the Mon Cal Heavy Carrier or Botajef, you can turn it off yourself. I refuse to turn off auto-join for every single ship which has these abilities as it would hamper the AI.

Update: February 7, 2012 | Revision: 701 Fixed/added some strings, increased cooldown for frigate Ionblast (this won't effect most frigates, was done to bring it more in line with the cruiser variant), some abilities now have autocast off by default (this was done so the AI does not drain that ship's antimatter quickly), Diamond Boron Missiles have a longer duration but longer cooldown now (overall boosts the ability), Probots now only autocasts outside of combat and are now featured on the Scout Ship instead of Spy, Cluster Warheads now requires research for some ships (this was done so I could implement an AI-only version that has less antimatter usage, longer cooldown, and is "activated" by AI exclusive research), increased Trafed II frigate's rate of turn, gave CIS' Trafed II frigate Diamond Boron Missiles, new skins for Suuv Ban D'Krid and Uumflah, plus fixed models for Vua'spar and Vong BB, courtesy of Warb!

Awesome, thanks for this! Edited OP.

I wouldn't worry too much about this, as the AI will always research no matter what. I've set it up that way on purpose. If anything, you could make it so that one can have an advantage by merely spending resources on research, versus early expansion, which to an extent is what I've tried to do with the current cost set up. With the notable exception of the first two research tiers, which can be thought of as the "bare essentials" for players.

I was only opposed to the Sith Holocron's large negative bonus; that thing has a profound effect. For players, they can choose to keep or scuttle the planet sure, but the AI not so much. Of course, if it brought both positive and negative effects, I would be less opposed to it. I don't mind artifacts being game changers, in fact that's what they're supposed to be, but I don't want them to utterly cripple players either. You can always repurpose some vanilla artifacts, just because we're making them Star Wars-y doesn't mean we can't build upon what's already present. Of course, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't put in new artifacts either. Totally different mechanisms; you can't have an artifact harm a planet, you are thinking of a planet characteristic. In addition, slowing growth can only be permanent when done via artifact (until the artifact is disposed of at least), time interval ones only work via ability. In addition, I'm not willing to put in new planet characteristics at this time, mainly as it would take a helluva long time to edit every single planet entity to have them. Not possible, due to Sins hardcoding. The best thing you get is the announcement that an artifact has been found at planet X. Arrows are placed automatically, based on their pre-requisite techs. You cannot place arrows automatically, though you can somewhat mess with how they "appear" by your placement of the tech items themselves. Instead of you having to play with things, here's how the placement of techs work in Sins: researchWindowLocation block 0 1 pos [ 4 , 4 ] 2 ResearchField "Combat" 3 1) This indicates whether a tech is placed in the first, second, or third "block" of a tech tree. For reference, the military tree has three of these blocks, for reference. 2) pos, aka. position, are the X and Y coordinates of the research item. This, along with the block, determines the placement of the tech. 3) This determines what field the tech is placed in. There are four fields; Combat (military tree), NonCombat (civilian tree), Defense, and Fleet (capital ship crews/supply).

On Golan Platforms: While they do start off weak, with maxed out upgrades, they have power on the scale of high level capital ships. The sizing is, believe it or not, fairly good; it's length is larger than an ISD's. I'll double check this however, as I might not have made it large enough. Plus, upgrades are cheap, most of the cost for them is in the constructor's cost. On Research: This is something that needs change, without question. I've made minor changes so far, in the second half (levels 5- of the military tree to create minor differences, though this truly isn't much to speak of. I would appreciate any and all input on this, and on artifacts as well. I would also be willing to help teach you the basics of the research's coding, and other coding if you wish, so that you can even start to look at and make changes yourself. Eventually if/when your skills grow, you could even join the staff as a coder. On Star Base upgrades and abilities: Lay it all on me. I very much enjoyed reading your large and in depth OP, and would be very pleased to get more feedback and suggestions from you.

I'll get you the Roik Chuan Mara in a bit, that's the only other ship which has such a skin. Also I tried getting the fixed Gunboat ingame, something tells me the UV change did not end well.

Update: January 24, 2012 | Revision: 696 Added unique Imperial trade station mesh, Ro'ik Va'lh now has the capital ship version of Siege Torpedoes as it should, and new Vong skins, courtesy of myself and Warb.

That skin looks awesome; tweaked it's color, made the bump map, and it looks great. I wouldn't mind using different textures; more of this sort of rock-like texture would be great. Plus I would love to see the various coral skins you have, and an alternative and/or compliment to the current coral used. Also, while I only used the Scout Ship and Gunboats as examples of the "oddness", it's something that was sadly present in all of the models that you sent me previously.