Feedback of any kind is always welcome. Ideas, balance changes, and bug reporting of any kind is always useful!
Version 1.00 Released!
Make sure to ask for permission before republishing any part of this mod to the public!
Downloads
1.05 + DLC Compatible:
0.12 ALPHA Release:Full Download:http://distantstars.mmobase.com/rebellion/Distant_Stars_(R)_ALPHA_0.13_[45189661].7z
Full Download MIRROR:http://www.moddb.com/downloads/distant-stars-rebellion-alpha-013
MD5: 69486D2FCD3F35E46E6F5EF8C9F1634A
1.34 Compatible:
1.01 Release:Full Download:http://distantstars.mmobase.com/diplomacy/Distant_Stars_(D)_1.01_[45685832].7z
1.051 Compatible:
Beta 0.9951 Release:Full Download:http://distantstars.mmobase.com/entrenchment/DS_Entrenchment_Beta_0.9951_[36672852].7z
1.14 - 1.181 Compatible:
Version 1.01:Full Download:http://distantstars.mmobase.com/soase/Distant_Stars_v1.01_[453701567].7z
Multiplayer Games:We've setup a thread for everyone to organise their multiplayer games in and also setup example times and dates for most people to meet up and start games. These are what we hope to be the main times for people to be around and want to play games together.
The times are:4pm EST (9pm GMT) Saturdays & Sundays9pm EST (2am GMT) Saturdays & SundaysIf you want to organise other games please go ahead using the same topic to consolidate all the information in one place and hopefully get more games together within our community. These games are for PvP, PvAI & PvPvAIso come along and we'll get some games going!
Screenshots:We've setup a thread so you can all post your screenshots to share with us the Distant Stars team and its players. Im sure we're all intrigued to see what kinds of battles and events you've all been having on the mod aswell.
Lore:We know some of you guys love to role play whilst using Distant Stars, and here's a topic for you guys to post all of your role playing stories, character profiles and anything else you can imagine.
Maps:Some of you avid map makers out there have produced some great maps but never really had them recognised because they've got lost. Well here's a topic for you to post a link to the download (we can even provide mirrors if necessary) a screenshot or two of the map for us all the preview and if enough people like it we'll even include the map in with the actual mod!
Please visit our website and for more information, change logs, downloads, and to report bugs. Our website can be found here: http://distantstars.mmobase.com
Bug Reporting
If you want to report a bug please use the Bug Report feature on our website:http://distantstars.mmobase.com/?m=reportabug
Please include as much information as possible, if you have an error log feel free to post it on these forums and we'll take it from there. If you can reproduce the error please include the error log (read below to find out how to enable error logs) and include as much detail on how to reproduce the problem.
To enable logging:Windows Vista/Windows 7:C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\SettingorWindows XP:C:\Documents and settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting
Open the user.setting file (using Notepad, Wordpad or any text editor) and scroll down to the bottom 7 lines from the bottom is the line:LogOutput FALSEChange FALSE to TRUELogOutput TRUE
and from then on any Log files will be saved to the debug folder:Windows Vista/Windows 7: C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Debug or Windows XP: C:\Documents and settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Debug
If you get these log files to us (you can just paste them in to a forum post) we can hopefully get your issues sorted.
Frequently Asked Questions
All files are compressed using 7Zip to shrink the download filesize. To extract these files you must use WinRAR or 7Zip.Any Patches should overwrite the original install directory, either by extracting over the original folder, or cut/copy & pasting over the existing file/folder structure.
1) My game keeps crashing, is there anything I can do to stop it?i) Are you running the game on maximum (highest) settings? if so, lower them to High or Medium, there is a known issue with the game using up too much memory, there is nothing we can do about this, also no matter how powerful your pc is, it is affected by this issue no matter the pc it is not above this crashing issue, it is a game problem not a hardware one, so quite simply lower your settings. If you still have an issue with crashing see point two.ii) Give us as detailed information as possible about the crash, what was happening at the time of the crash, what races, ships, abilities were involved. If you can supply a Debug Log (see above for more information about logging) and post a bug report on our website.
2) The loading screens and portrait pictures dont appear properly, whats wrong?i) This is an issue with ATI based graphics cards (rarely affects Nvidia based cards) we're looking in to the issue.
3) Why dont you support converting Distant Stars in to TXT format?i) Quite simply many things can go wrong with converting your mod to TXT, we cant help you with something you've probably broken yourself.
4) Can I mod Distant Stars for myself?i) Yes you can however please do not distribute our mod or our mod that you have edited to the public. You must ask for permission to do so, we will regrettably stop distributing our mod to all if users abuse our work.
5) Your mod is in BIN format I can't edit the files, what can I do?i) You can convert the mod to TXT format however we wont offer any support to versions of the mod that have been converted to TXT.
6) Why is Distant Stars distributed in BIN format? i) Mods load faster in BIN format and are less likely to have issues in this format.
7) I'm having trouble installing the MOD, do you have any more instructions?i) Carbon was kind enough to do some more advanced instructions out here.
8) Is there any way to make new maps for Distant Stars using GalaxyForge?i) Within the Distant Stars Extras folder there is a folder called Galaxy Forge, Copy and Paste this folder (or its contents) over your original Galaxy Forge folder (or its contents) replacing any files if it asks you to. When you start Galaxy Forge next you'll be able to use all of our planets.
Or, the DIY approach (without custom icons):
ii) The GalaxyForge supplied by the devs will still work with our Mod, however to be able to access all of our planetary bonuses, templates, planet types and stars you will need to take our GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef (found in the GameInfo folder of the mod) and place it in to your GalaxyForge folder, overwriting the original GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef (if you still wish to make maps for the original game keep a backup of the original file). This will allow you to use all of the Galaxy changes included in our mod.
Note: Any maps made for Distant Stars will not work with other Mods. See #8.2 for DIY instructions for map making or take the appropriate files from Entrenchment, they're cross-client compatible.
Some statistics...
Since August 2009 to February 2011 we have had over...
400,000 Unique visits to the website12,000GB (12TB) of data transferred from our website
That equates to over 60,000 Unique downloads of the entire mod, excluding the excess of 20,000 Patches downloaded.
Thanks to everyone that has supported us this far and making our mod as popular as it is!
oh my god... its been a day since the last post, i have to bump it.
I win, 287
Regarding large map slow down, does it always happen on the big maps, like on Kingdom of Heaven or Balanced Resources I notice a massive slowdown as the game reaches mid game, even though I have a rather powerful system.(550 GTX graphics card, windows 7, and 8 gb ram) even with the efficiency pack installed. Is this normal?
Yeah, 32 bit game systems and all the pre-loaded material pretty much ensures it'll get weighed down once enough ships are present.
I believe Stant123 might have posted a few pages back what components of your machine have the most significant impact on your game as far as hardware goes.
To help reduce lag a little bit, completely un-pin all items from your Empire Tree (on the left hand side of the screen) and set all graphics settings to Low.
and skyboxes/bloom/etc. eat up memory too. skyboxes and bloom alone slow me down a good bit compared to otherwise.
from MY personal experience, the sytem specs that have the MOST effect for sins/entrenchment/diplomacy ARE
1 cpu SINGLE core GHZ (the more the better)
2 RAM access SPEED again the MORE mhz the better
ie if you have a 4ghz cpu & 2ghz ram you should be more lag immune than a player with a 3ghz cpu & 1.333ghz ram
harpo
you can also look this over again boshimi https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/408207 seeing as how you were reply #1 =P
it took me a while to map it out, but after cutting some of the fat out of that, it shuts down a lot of unnecessary processes the game starts up with that FOR SOME REASON persist throughout the game(like the title images, and the memory used to show the "front end" or background galaxy at the menu
after tinkering with these options I got the game to load 10x faster on my old dimension d3 something or other, and I never loaded the game on this laptop without having those options changed to start anyway lol (updates and the dev.exe kinda wipe it though, I keep a backup of it floating around in my mod backup folder )
I can't wait for SINS:DS:R
I can wait for as long as it takes for there to be a non steam version of Rebellion... =|
Which is never.
Well aren't you just a party pooper ...
Well it is the truth.
*hacks steam core server, removes one line of code.....entire system crashes* yaaay I'm a hero!
I think the map orion's belt should have at least a couple planets around the secondary stars. Mind if I throw some things around about a couple maps and show you uys the results?
go for it.
okay thank you stant.
Also see this thread for other DS fan maps: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/372059
okay, I will get the orion's belt 3.0 posted on deviantart as a scrap, my da name is embarrising (cuz I was dumb back then, go figure) and I hope you like it.
[EDIT] turns owt DA doesnt allow .GALAXY files (the w in owt was intentional, go figure again)
[EDIT[EDIT]] Got the map here. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/sins_maps/350/
Hey Guys, got a PM here to share. I'm pretty much leaning toward no, not so much because it wouldn't be cool as much as it would be a lotta work and make the game drag on and on.
____
I the DS mod.
Its only missing one thing to make it the perfect playable experience in my opinion: To scale planets.
I know that there are other mods out there that have HUGE planets so that the ships look like a tiny spec next to them, but none of those aspects are incorporated into DS.
I know nothing about modding, unfortunately. Come this summer, I should have a respectable amount of time to do whatever with. I am hoping to have the time to figure out how to go into each file and tweak a few lines of code here and there to rescale the game entirely.
Ships would effectively move through a gravity well in the same time as they would normally, but the gravity wells are massive. The planets are humongous. Stars are so big that when you look at a ship against it, it is a speck. Same with gas giants. Weapons ranges would be increased to account for the scaling--particularly static defenses. Less so for mobile forces.
I was curious to see if anyone in the DS team would be interested in assisting with this endeavor in case anything blows up.
Thanks Draak
So you guys respond as you will.
We will help by giving advice and if they want to do it to their own PERSONAL DS mod they are welcome. We will not be doing it for the official mod though.
It's actually very easy to scale everything to approximately the right size and it isn't really all that much work... I believe Teal had created a little utility to easily resize any planet desired a couple of years ago. The problem is the time involved to actually play the game at the proposed scale. That aside, my largest concern would be the outer galaxy bubble that displays all of the stars and skyboxes. I'm not sure how dynamic it actually is, if it's predetermined by the number of stars and planets or if it just makes itself large enough to accommodate everything inside. Probably the latter, but no one has ever really tried to cram a bunch of over sized objects in to see if it errors out or crashes.
Most people already play the current ranges with the speeds turned up and shy away from the larger maps because it's just too much ground to cover. Now super size it. What took roughly 20 seconds to cross now would take 5 to 6 minutes... Forget the time it would take to cross a gas giant, or the truly massive to scale star gravity well unless you also up scaled the speeds on all of the ships to accommodate the now much larger sizes of everything. Also very easy to accomplish, but could very well be a turn off to people like Carbon who like the slower speeds, or it could be a non issue since you still have to cover lots of distance to make anything happen.
I personally would like to see something made to put everything to scale (officially the ships were said to be from 10 meters to 1 kilometer in length, pre entrenchment) and rebalance the speeds of everything to match the new sizes just to see how it looks and feels. It shouldn't effect system resources gameplay wise because the resources required to run it would be the same no matter the size if you didn't care how it looked, but the low res look of the planets and any artifacts in the images would be mega sized and overly apparent, thus forcing everyone to have to use higher quality settings the larger things start to become which would add stress on already stressed systems. Unfortunately planets and stars would have to be on the highest settings, and possibly structures too since the ship yards would have to be bigger then the ships they build, which then means that little baby structures like mines and hangers and defense guns would unnecessarily be high res as well.
If someone wants to do it, have at it... I'd use caution since it could end up just being one frustrating mess of a project.
I think that there should be a scaling facot that adds auto res to everything, as for planets, there would be auto res fixed at certain latitudes/longitudes. Google earth uses auto res, the closer you are, the higher the ship/planet resolution. MY vision is pretty cool when you think about it, but a big fat pain to mod
Also can I make a lore map that has the birth of the advent?
[EDIT} sorry for the double post DX
Depends. If you're participating in the lore, you can create a lore map, otherwise, it's not a lore map even if you take names of stuff from the lore. There are rules that have to be followed with those maps. If you're just making a map, so be it, knock yourself out, have fun, go wild.
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