Stress,
Working on a database for you which is re-based on Roletype. This should help you rebuild alittle faster with the stats for all the ships and future ships you plan to add. If its successful i'll release it to the general public for any mod.
What's going on with this mod? Did people quit making it, or is it getting a big makeover?
I know there are still some team members on this project. I just noticed that the posts have been coming slower on this forum, and the patches seem for some reason to be going backwards?
I remember the good ole days when I could play all races that were going to be in the final release. Now I'm stuck with 2 races. The ships in this were absolutely beautiful. Now they seem to be just an odd tone. Not sure if thats my graphics card or the mod itsself.
They are remaking the mod cause the patch destroied it.
The mod is still running at a pretty fast pace, actually.
The reason the patches seem to be going "backwards" is that they had to convert the game to entrenchment, and that was taking a toll when it came down to all of the races. So they gave us an "early" release with feds and klinks so we could play, and now they are finishing up the rommies. The next update after that might have the dominion and later we will have borg .
As for the ships, i believe they said they are using third party placeholders until they can get their own original models into the game.
Right now there seems to be a fuss over getting the mod to work with the latest vanilla sins update, so they had to scrap what they had and now they are completely rebuilding it.
Though i know it's very difficult for them and i dont want to rush them, i can hardly say i dont want a release now but all i can say is Good luck SoA2 Team!
The latest patch screwed the mod up, so they tried to resolve the problems and just had more troubles on top of that. Therefor, Stress nuked the old one from orbit and is rebuilding it from scratch.
1.041 literally destroyed the mod, but it was partially our own ignorance of things as well. Which we all learned about the hard way. Like about the mesh/texture hardcode limits, and unmodded older files in the mod folder that didnt need to be there. The re-build is well within all of the limits and i am hoping when i am done with the romulan foundation that there will be enough mesh/texture space for 2 more factions. With room to spare since i am eliminating all of the vanilla factions.
The klingon foundation is almost done. Just have a few more units to do, and to re-import all of 0.3e's voice's Then we will be almost at the point before 1.041 broke the mod. Jaylrpcs is working on re-incorporating the researches.
The 0.3e.9 beta will be much leaner, and meaner than any of the other mod releases, because no vanilla files will load except for what is needed to run the sins engine itself, and the maps.
Before on average settings i would use over a gig of ram on startup. Now i cut that down to 700 megs (this is if you use sins default video settings). Same ships, same textures, same effects. I Just got rid of the redundant "junk".
I may re-incorporate Manshooters volumetric stuff if i have the room for it, but i need to look over all his files. Manshooter did you mod every single one of those files in your mod? If you didnt they dont need to be there. For right now we are using nothing but vanilla explosions.
The way sins the patches broke the mods forced us to go backwards. It more than likely will be more of the same when Diplomacy is released. The difference is now i know what i am doing
Hello Stress & Team...
I've been trolling this forum for some time now, and playing the SoA mod for Sins for the last few weeks. I've had a fair share of bugs, but through reading this forum I've sorted them out and/or written them off as issues due to the Beta state of this Mod. I've also played the Homeworld version of SoA and have been an avid Star Trek fan for a long long time...
First off, THANK YOU for making this Mod. The Star Trek universe has never been represented well in any RTS game, and I believe this Mod has the capability to change that...
That being said, I have noticed a number of "gripes" or "issues" with the Fed side of things, and I wanted to make some obeservations and/or recommendations.
1 - I have continuously ended up with the same fleet every time I play Feds. I research the max number of capitol ship slots, and probably 5 or 6 levels of fleet capacity. I built 15 Sov's and 1 Ambasador. The rest of my fleet is filled up with Intrepid class ships. Why? Maximizing firepower for a given amount of fleet capacity. The Intrepid has 85-90% of the Akiras firepower/shields for 1/4 of the fleet capacity. Meaning I can built 4 Treps for 1 Akira. This begs the question, why build an Akira at all? Besides the fact that it's a better looking ship... The more I thought about this the more I realized this applies for every ship. There is no defining characteristic of any ship that makes it more desireable than any other (save for the Ambasador's Colony function and the Neb's Gemini Effect). I don't know if it is planned at some point to add abilities to all classes, but if not there should be some other changes made to make the capability versus fleet capacity usage more reasonable. One suggestion, and I don't know if it is possible, but can there be a "chancetohit" function assigned to the ships, and the smaller/faster ships can dodge enemy fire more than the larger ships? This would make Mirandas and Defiants more desireable, because even though they pack less of a punch and have less life, they can still cause havoc on the larger, slower ships.
2 - The starbases... The Klink starbase, when fully upgraded, is an absolute b%^&& to destroy. I literally come at it with 15 Sov's and 20-24 treps and I will leave the battle with no treps and all of my Sovs, but 1/2 of them just clinging to life. This is all well and good since I win the battle, but it seems unrealistic. And when combined with the slow repair rates it makes rebuilding my fleet difficult. It's almost easier to skuttle the heavily damaged ships and build new ones than it is to wait for repairs...
3 - Repairs... when I first played the Mod I was overwhelmed with how slow the fleet self heals. I was put off by it, but then I came to understand the realism added by it. The ships should need to find a drydock to get repairs, since that is an accurate representation of the Star Trek Universe. I came to be fine with that, just please make the Shield Restore and Repair functions autocast. I tried adding the code suggested a few slides ago, but it still didn't fix the problem. Micromanaging repairs is entirely too cumbersome.
4 - Hull/Shield... again, if a table was made to cross reference Hull/Shield/Weapon to fleet capacity, and the FC was the equalized so that 2 Mirandas use the same FC as one Steamrunner, but they each have half the life/firepower. It actually becomes a strategic tradeoff. Do I want two less capable ships that I can move in two directions with two fleets, or one heavier hitter to stay with one fleet, but is more likely to survive a firefight? Tactically it makes more sense. Right now, frigates don't even get purchased, ever, unless I want to look at the nice models.
All in all, the Mod has exceeded my expectations, but I still feel there is room for improvement. I would be more than happy to consult on these issues, but I've sure you've got plenty of "experts" giving you advice already... Keep up the great work!!!
I have intended from day one to give ships ability's that would make the weaker "cannon fodder" units more useful in the later game, and to distinguish them so that when you did build a sovvie, negh' var, or d'deridex it wouldnt be just a bigger version of the same thing.
The plan for the early game was to have nothing but "tmp" era units. With the exception of your first "elite" unit. which should be the ambassador for the feds. Similary powered units for the other factions. Then research, and work your way up to the newest, or most powerful units. You will notice that most of the mid to late tng ships are almost at the highest tiers. We are the only mod AFAIK that makes you research elite units (capitals). That is designed as well to make you use your lower end units until you meet all the pre-req's.
By the end game you "should" have every unit available. The TMP era stuff "should" be obsolete, but still useful in a background support role for your elite units. However you are right, the end game is all about the elites. That is by design. We did however tone down the "instapopping" of the fodder units. You will notice though one on one fights last damn near forever.
The Starbases are WIP's until we get everything in the mod. We know they need work.
Like what was said above. The way the sins patches lately have been breaking the mods we wound up moving backwards instead of forward. We do have many more abilitys planned. Once we get the foundation working error free again. The important thing right now is to get the foundation working again. For those that dont know what i am talking about. The "Foundation" is the bare bones version of the mod. Just the ships, sounds, and effects. Then we add on the rest of the mod (researches and abilitys) to the foundation. I plan on keeping several backups of the foundation just in case another patch pulls yet another catastrophic failure of the mod.
I am glad i am not the only one that noticed the lack of "good" trek RTS's. The current "professional" games seem targetted toward the "Tween", or the 10, and under crowd. They are annoying to play as well as look at. Especially for someone my age. I dont like games where there is no "thinking" involved. I am trying to avoid the typical research the most powerful unit, and spam it untill doomsday. In the mods present state unfortunetly thats is what its turning out to be. At least until we get all of the researches and abilitys in. Then we can tweak things some more.
Status of the rebuild..
Klingon foundation is finished. Ill re-upload both feds and klinks on sync tonight since i had to fix a few things i forgot to add to the feds (like armor types, and formation settings). Will FINALLY start on the Romulans, and get them back into the game.
woo exciting!
Go Stress, go!
STRESS dumps on load b/c of alabative armour reference link! please reset permissions and re-upload base , cant load mod to work on it thanks josh
Nice to see things progressing, thanks for sticking with it! I was wondering if there will be a patch coming before the next update for the klink/fed build with the newest changes or if you guys will not worry about that hassle and have the next release be the rom update? Just curious since the initial plan was to not do the patch, then it got changed to patching the current build, then shimmer(iirc) needed a break(quit?) from the mod. Either way, keep up the excellent work guys.
Ablative Armor was removed 2 updates ago. try re-sync. The foundation Ships shouldnt have any abilitys except what is required for the AI to function (colonize, explore etc).
There will be no patch, or fix of 0.3e 102. That whole build was scrapped. The only reason i havent taken it offline is because it works for "some" people, but not all.
0.3e.9 will be an "FRK" build of the mod. Feds, Roms, and Klinks will be in it. If another surprise patch doesnt break the mod again we just might be able to get the dominion in as well.
ohh no stress you just jinxed it lol
With the game needing every type of slot for ship and structure types would make an issue..
i think the idea of the tec hanger bay may be the way to go, list it as a hanger give it a weapon and give it the ability to spawn fighters.. like some of the cap ships had in the older versions of this mod.. they had squads listed but had no squads to choose from
The AI needs the hangar defense to build. So we are leaving them in. Most ships you can get away with changing their behavior in the roletype lines. For example an antimodule frigate can be made into a long range frigate. but it must be flagged as an antimodule frigate in its statcounttype line, or the AI starts having siezures. Every faction must have every roletype. I am basically duplicating sins in that respect. Just as the question "what would ironclad do?"
Romulan faction 1/3rd done. Should be finished re-importing all the ships by tonight barring any more setbacks. Then we can focus on re-incorporating the researches.
Forgot to mention the feds and klinks already have strike craft for thier hangar defenses, and starbases... they are nasty little buggers too
edited: wrong thread
I figured that there were still a lot of changes being incorporated, I'm just glad to see so much effort being put into a proper mod.
I've been playign as klinks for a few days now. I find them more enjoyable overall, not really sure why yet. Fed starbases are a lot easier to kill, maybe thats why.
Keep up the awesome work. I can't wait for the FRK version...
Just a quick update..
Romulan foundation finished.. just need to do voices. I am not sure if the rommie stats are 0.3e, or 0.03c stats. I know we just started working on them before the 1.041 failure. Regardless they work great. and some of the fights with the feds have been long slugfests. Havent tested them with klingons yet. nor are any researches/ability's re-incorporated yet. I am using the vanilla research trees, and "blank" abilitys (no abilitys at all) for now. Once i get the voices for the romies in i am turning over the "FRK" foundation to the team so that the researches, and ability's can be added. I will then work on the Dominion, and Borg foundations, and getting them back into the mod. The dominion, and borg will be "new" factions where as the "FRK" factions completely replaced vanilla tech phase, and psi. I only had to add a few extra lines to the manifest, and i copied over existing lines in the english string, sound, music, and galaxydef. in the effort to force the game NOT to load vanilla stuff that isnt needed. The reason i am doing the dominion and borg now is because i need to know how much room i have left. I want to re-incorporate manshooters volumetric mod. we must not go over the limits.
So far not ONE error (crosses fingers)
Ill make a video of the 3 factions slugging it out n post it later.
BTW i FINALLY got a job interview (how do u think i am getting all this work done.. i am unemployed)
nice work
stardock should give you a job stress
Stress, you are the man!!!
And Best of Luck on the interview
Hey guys, just wanted to say that I'm very glad that you guys are still working on this great mod that I just can't wait to play the finished version of, and that you are not letting the setbacks stop this work of art. Keep up the good work!!!
Hello, loving the mod. However, i get mini dumps when i press quit, and then click on main menu (exiting from a game). Its not a big problem and doesn't happen all the time. The other mini dump I get is when I play the large maps, even though they have very little planets or triumvirate(sp?) which was in the "medium" map.
My settings are at high instead of highest and I have 4 gigs running on Vista with ati 4850.
0.3e in its present state has proven to be unstable since the 1.041 update. Hence the total rebuild of the mod. Enjoy what you can of it before the dumps. We are on a fresh build. No ETA for release. It depends on how much free time we get to work on it.
stress, the stats for roms are up to date for release
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