Sins of the Fallen is a massive enhancement for the critically acclaimed Sins of a Solar Empire.
New Races with new strategiesNew PlanetsGameplay Enhancing AddonsAI Enhancements
Journals: [SotF] Diplomacy Pacts & Bonuses, [SotF] Improving the AI, [SotF] Cosmos Ad Infinitum
What version of Sins of a Solar Empire is supported? Sins of the Fallen is a modification for Diplomacy and Rebellion.
How do you install Sins of the Fallen? Please read How to install Sins of the Fallen.
Why does your mod have so many folders? As Sins of a Solar Empire is a 32bit game it is restricted to 2GB of ram utilization as well as other various hard coded limitations. The stacking structure used with this mod allows more than 2GB of content by allowing portions of the mod to be loaded.
Will you support Entrenchment or Vanilla? No, I did have previous versions that supported Entrenchment (See Release History), but have decided the it was too much effort for one person to try and maintain both.
Yes it did turn out well. My first thought when I saw the model was "uh oh!, time to make the donuts"
It's an amazingly simple design that looks really good against the other structures in the game. Nice Job!
I think I have a look and feel now for the Nephilim structures that I need to apply to the others I have in game. I really like how this one turned out.
Sometime the simplest design can be the most beautiful design and with the right pain job it makes a more profound impact.That model only took me about 20 minutes to make but hot damn, might be a simple design but man... it came out so well. I surprised myself with it really and now that I see a real paint job on it I realize now that, that design was the right one to go with. Granted a lot of my other more complex designs are extremely good, but the simple design for the frigate and cruiser shipyard is just... well... lol AWESOME to simply put it I aim to please
Okay Zombie since I got those last model batches to you what other models do you need for what else there is to fill in for the Nephilim? Should be fairly easy for me to get the rest of the models to you in the next few days. I know some more of the tactical structures come to mind, though I assume we can just keep the jump inhibitor structure as is. There is also the fact that we could also create a structure for each race that suits there needs and makes it sort of a racial tactical structure, not just like the super weapon structure but a smaller structure that benefits the race in question for any ship in the gravity well or any structure
Ok Eternal, I believe we are down to needing the Holy Pilgrimage Vessel (Trade Ship) and a Refinery Vessel for ships and a gunship strikecraft model and possibly a combat or bomber model.
In terms of orbital modules we are pretty good excluding a racial specific tactical structure. At the moment I don't have any specific ideas on a Nephilim specific tactical structure, not because I don't want one... I'm just out of ideas at the moment.
I still need to pull in the Templar Elite and Nephilim Constructor models that you previously sent.
I made soem tweaks to the Bliss Tree moving around some of the research levels and fixing some of the issues.
A couple of other items.
I need to tie in the super weapon ability to the Ascension Weapon.
Nephilim starbase still has the missing polygons.
I can't find the message you sent about the starbase ability you suggested. Can you resend that idea?
I've changed some of the balance items for hull, shield, slot points, etc on Nephilim frigates.
I have some abilities I'm going to change, specifically Mask Presence and Immunity.
I've also made several general fixes that were causing debugger issues with Nephilim mainly dealing with weapon null points that didn't match to an actual weapon definition.
I plan on doing a lot more play testing this weekend with the Nephilim race to verify the current elements all work as intended and hopefully fixing the remaining items listed above.
I'll promote what I have done to you this afternoon as I will be on a camping trip this evening.
Right, I'll start with the Starbase ability, which is suppose to be called HOLY LIGHT, it's an ability that affects all enemy ships in the vicinity of the Starbases area. It's a AOE ability, we weren't sure if it would be just a ability that would put some debuffs on the enemy ships and do damage or just some damage done to them. Think of it as something that could cleanse the enemy of sin. I think that is as far as I remember about it.
figured there be something needed for the trade vessel, I'll see what I can do, gunship model I might have already done, I just need to check my models again, refinery vessel I'll also look into. If you haven't already looked into the bomber and fighter models I can look into those more deeply and get you some, not that they don't need to be extremely high poly (one of the reasons why the game goes crazy and does a minidump)
Okay, something I can point out about stuff so far is particle trails for ships aren't exactly aligned right with some of the ships engine points, also some of the engine particle trail effects overlap as well, I don't know if it has to do with how deep I made the engines on my ships or if it's just the particles itself, might want to look into that when you get the chance. As I have been testing mostly only Nephilim race so far... lol I really should test out Plague at some point instead of over my own ships
I noticed you removed the tactical structure that made the gravity well wide shield for all structures, but the build units retain that ability which makes it possible that those builder units are more important as they serve two purposes, building and keeping that protective shield up, which makes they key targets for any invading fleet, Nicely done with that. Also nicely done with the Holy Shrine and turning it into a dual culture spread structure and trade structure
at the moment I'm still thinking up ideas for the two races special racial tactical structure. For either race it could be a tactical buff structure or debuff structure that affects ships in the gravity well or the area it has affect over.
Edit: okay just hit a minidump it happened after the plague activated there super weapon, about five seconds after I got the in game message the game minidumped
Cool, I need to go through some of my old notes and see if anything jumps out at me too.
I'll take a look. I'll try and wire up the Nephilim super weapon this weekend too.
The Holy Shrine is really neat with the dual culture/trade (Nice idea!). I kind of like giving the constructor a different role for Nephilim, but we will probably need to beef up it's staying power to make it a little harder to take down.
Yep, I've noted exhaust trails need to be adjusted on the second iteration through the models. No worries on Plague. I've been focusing almost 90% on Nephilim. I'd like to have a complete race we could release for play testing.
Also, I've been stacking with the Sins optimization project and it seems to work really well at keeping the memory usage down. I'm going to look through the shared files between the two mods when I get a chance and see if I can keep this as a recommended stackable option or if I will need to directly incorporate the optimization mod into our mod.
Any order you suggest with the Optimization mod with this until you get around to merging?
...
If I make effects, that WILL cause a little more memory usage.
...Don't throw them out, please...
Exactly what effect or effects are we talking about Syneptus?
Currently there are only Plague weapon effects...
I am waiting for more instruction as to what more is needed.
Oh, I see well Zombie will get around to it I guess for the effects for the Nephilim unless he plans on using the base PSI effects for the Nephilim
Yep, I still plan on using some custom effects. This will need to be balanced though with the memory limitiations due to adding the two new races. I'll test the limits and then possibly pull it back in if needed.
[quote who="EternalRequiem" reply="109" id="2799368"]Any order you suggest with the Optimization mod with this until you get around to merging?[/quote]
You need to list Sins of the Fallen first (i.e. on top) and then have the Sins optimization listed second. I've been running my testing this way and the memory usage is noticeably lower.
Right I'll do that, besides the minidump I had earlier, any word on that to see if I was correct or if it was just a random thing? It was only about 20 to 30 mins in game why the heck would the plague get their super weapon up and running that quickly? If anything the super weapon is suppose to be the end of the research tree
Got to playing a bit more and I noticed some of the polygons on some of my models sticking out more then others, did some of the polygons get moved around when you triangulated them? Some seem to stick out more then others and make the models look a little funny. I also noticed something odd. The order for which Capital ships and frigates and cruisers are set up in the empire tree is messed up. Capital ships should always show up first on the list not the frigates.
Capitals > then frigates
right now it's
frigates > capitals
another thing you might want to look into since it's the same way if they are fleeted, and if you click the group via the empire list you get the frigates being the one chosen instead of the highest level capital class ship
Edit: here's a bit more info on the polygon thing, it's only noticeable with the graphics set to medium or low on ships and structures
Well, I did have a chance to wire up the Nephilim super weapon. It works now in my build (not been promoted yet to you). I also looked at the Plague super weapon and it's ability isn't set yet. So I'm wondering if it was maybe the Plague Colony capital ship. Right now it has the ability to fire a culture shot at the local gravity wel. I'll try and setup a test this evening and see if that is what mini-dump for the AI. Might be it works for the player but has an issue if the AI tries it.
...Edit: here's a bit more info on the polygon thing, it's only noticeable with the graphics set to medium or low on ships and structures
The models have mainly only gone through a polygon reduction. I've actually only modified a few to add some basic weapons. You can open any of the meshes through a free program called 3D Object Converter to check them out. As a lot of the models had pretty high final triangle counts, I tried to get them down closer to levels most people agree on such as 500 to 1k for strikecraft, 1k-3k for frigates and 4k-6k for capital ships. Some are still slightly higher than this as I did not want to lose to any detail so it was a balance between looks and final polygon count.
I believe some of the models have polygons that are more noticeable is due to either the uv map or tangents or a combination of both. For the more obvious models, I've been successful on some previous models reworking the uvmaps to reduce artifacts like this. I know for sure the battleship will need some rework on the uvmap due to this and I was planning on it being the first re-texture candidate as it's still my favorite ship.
What would be good feedback is if you could identify the ships that you notice with Medium settings on all three levels and prioritize which ones you think are more critical to fix (I'll do the same on my side too). I plan on playing with High settings but it will be good to use Medium settings on all three levels as a quality baseline and decide what is acceptable and what needs to be put in queue to fix.
This has been reported with other mods too. It is really frustrating and I don't see anyway to correct it through moddable files. I'm assuming ironclad broke something with the fleet tree with the diplomacy release and modded elements.
As always great feedback!
Right, I'll do that with the ships, very glad you like the battelship model that much I believe there is a way to reduce the polys to a point where it won't do much damage to the shape of the ship and there is also a way to make the polys line up correctly so they don't look so out of place. myfist put up a link in one of the threads showing exactly what to do for reducing polygons in XSI
Right..., I'll look and see if what he had posted is different from what I am doing. Again, I believe the issue has more to do with uv-map and tangents than the model itself.
In XSI there is a tool called Polygon Reduction which I am using to reduce the overal triangle count on the models. It can be done on a sliding scale so if I notice the model is damaged during the reduction I can scale it back to a higher polygon count very easily. Again the goal is to keep the shape of the ship without noticeable defects or damage to the design.
There are also other techniques we can do to smooth out the ships using the normal map by burning the high poly original model to the low poly (reduced) model. This can also help with some of the loss in quality from the polygon reduction.
Additionally, in previous models I've done, modifying the uv-map to create a more uniform surface around the problem areas tends to resolve these issues.
Okay here's the link to the vid Myfist put up, I went to the trouble of PMing him since I couldn't find it and well he provided it, gotta love the guy.
Softimage|XSI Polygon Reduction Tool
Right, keep getting minidumps, usually happens around 30 mins into the game or a little over it
Ok, I noted one thing is this tutorial that I did not do. I will give the battleship another whirl soon and see what happens.
Do you have an auto-save for this you can send? I'm suspecting an issue with some mid-game tech popping up.
I'm assuming one of our custom races was controlled by the AI?
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