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OTHER SINS HELPFUL MODDING LINKS*
*Links are updated when requested.
The Soase Idiot's Guide
Confused? No idea where to even start?
Determined to work at it?
This is the place!
Sins Modding Wiki
ZombieRus's Eclipse Wizardry
Tutorials
MyFist0's full modding site.
Emphasis on modeling and
texturing.
REBELLION MODDING TOPICS
Rebellion Modding Q & A
Mesh Editing
Changing Diplomacy Files to Rebellion
IT REALLY HURTS MY BRAIN--HOW TO START
An Idiot's Guide To Getting Started
MyFist0's Modding Megasite!
MOD DOWNLOADS
ZombieRus5's Mod Yard
Directory of Planet Mods
STEAM
STEAM Sins Forums
DEVELOPERS
Sins Developer Journals Forum 2007 to Present
REFERENCE FILES
Research Modifier List
MyFist0's Exported Models & Files
Modifier List
Harpo's Converted Sins Reference Files 2011
THIRD PARTY TOOLS
3dS Texturing Toool & Tips
Ship Fleet Calculator
SoaSE Eclipse Plugin Project
Mesh Resizing Tool--courtesy of the Reqiuem team.
Harpo's Sins Utility Package -- Dropbox
The Sins Optimization Project (TSOP)
Artificial Unintelligence (Mod and AI info)
Sins Data Converter by BCXtreme
EXPLANATIONS & DISCUSSIONS
Rebellion Updates by Blair Frazier
How to Add a Fourth Race
User-updatable Ship Reference Chart
Sins Modding Dictionary
Adding phase Effects to other weapon types
Culture, Explanation/Discussion
Weapons, Explanation/Discusion
Shield Mitigation & Armor, Explanation/Discussion-1
Shield Mitigation & Armor, Explanation/Discussion -2
Graphic Chart of Sin's Counters
Annotated Guide to the Developer.exe
In-Game Map Creator
Weapons Banks & DPS
Combat Mechanics
Rebellion Shield Mitigation & Focus Fire testing
PARTICLE FORGE
Particle Forge Help Thread
GALAXY FORGE
Adding Artifacts
Working Template Examples
SemazRalan's Template Guide
Pirates Base Start Template
SOUND RESOURCES
[SFX] Black Sun SFX/Music Resource for Modders
MODELING & TEXTURING--SOFTIMAGE XSI, 3DS MAX
XSI Texturing, Tutorial
3dS Model Exporter
3DS Max Rigging, Texturing & Exporting, Guide
Modding/Modelling/Texturing/Converting, Tutorials
WIKI'S
Sins of a Solar Empire Official Wiki
iv'e been trying to remove the "bright white cloud" around the stars in "mid solar system view" im not talking about the glow directly around the star , our on the surface of the star. but the white cloud that goes over the star when you zoom in and out. it also dims when you put a planet between your prospective and a sun. its a bit of an eye strain and give me head aches.
i have tried some of the fowling files, im ether doing something wrong or i have the wrong file. (Cloud.dds, brightcenter.dds, lightcorona.dds, kay-smoothing.tga , and almost all tga/dds files associated with stars ) i also tried running the game with several different Pipeline Effect root and Mesh root files taken out of the games directory and i still can't seem to locate the appropriate file.
to reduce eye strain and head aches i did the "galaxy cloud mod", also reduced the brightness and added transparency to the "zoomed out" star images in the ICON_planet file. that helped a lot but the stars in mid solar system view is just too bright for me.
Could you post a screenshot of what exactly you're talking about?
Edit: Also Sinperium the Requiem servers have moved. Here's the new link for the mesh resize tool.
"Could you post a screenshot of what exactly you're talking about?" - GaoFan77 Screenshot with "bright white cloud" http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558692204732326891/17CCF33B17A975F64AFC4E96CED1FCCEE7081E76/ without "bright white cloud" http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558692204732334334/95E68133F4BBEA6D65E97C49017C41320A8B8312/
"Could you post a screenshot of what exactly you're talking about?" - GaoFan77
Screenshot with "bright white cloud" http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558692204732326891/17CCF33B17A975F64AFC4E96CED1FCCEE7081E76/
without "bright white cloud" http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/558692204732334334/95E68133F4BBEA6D65E97C49017C41320A8B8312/
Isn't that ambient or immesive lighting on the mesh face?
Two questions I would really be interested to know the answers to.
1) When playing on large maps and long games there can be a tipping point of when the game begins to get more and more laggy. I wondered if this lag isn't helped by the fact there can be dozens/hundreds of debris and/or missiles travelling through space that never seems to disappear.
Example, missiles are approaching a target, the target manages to jump out of the Grav Well and so the missiles decide to pursue there target through interstellar space at there normal pace... also when a ship is destroyed, a certain amount of debris is released, and I can find debris from past battles which took place a while ago, do these things never disappear (especially the missiles as they may never reach there target, or take a very very long time in doing so), also could this be affecting the late game lag (taking up more resources participating in the creation of the lag?).
2) I tried modding a new bomber/fighter entity in to my mod ages ago, the idea was to have a small mini gunship you could dock/undock which would have more damage than fighters/bombers have more hull points (maybe shields) and travel like a scout's sort of pace, but every time my creation spawned, it behaved like a fighter/bomber in the fact it did attack runs (which I didn't want) I can't find an option to turn this off for Fighters/Bombers, anyone know how?
Many thanks, Ben
I'm pretty sure the missles are a particle effect that has a finish condition that requires them to strike the target--so they persist until they do or a time condition is met.
Strike craft are hard coded to do target runs like that. The only compromise is to slow them down drastically while still leaving them a high turn rate--which obviously has it's own problems.
"Uses fighter attack" as FALSE will allow you to not have it chase other strike craft but I think that's about all you can do here.
I dont think I have seen a time condition, as far as I am aware they persist indefinately until they strike there target or where there target was destroyed. The same with debris, I believe that continues to persist, could these things contribute to late game lag?
Of course they would contribute. Everything in the galaxy contributes as it has to be taken into account, tracked, and calculated every second, even debris as there is a Vasari ability that absorbs debris and heals their ships. Many times, when a game is real laggy, I'll save it, restart Sins, and reload the save file, and the game is much faster. It's possible that all or most of these effects are not reloaded with the game.
I have seen missiles chase their targets out of the gravity well only to explode on their own 5 to 10 seconds later well outside of the gravity well. Perhaps if you see them chase their target after it's jumped clear, try to follow them and see if they are in fact chasing down the phase lane or popping on their own outside of the well.
Edit:
Nice Sinperium. Soon everyone will have animated avatars.
MechaLenin's thread made me do it.
I thought debris had a buff somewhere that makes it expire.
Debris does go away eventually. Plus you can disable show it in the options.
That might help with lag. Hmmmm.....
Lag would probably be best helped by reducing debris counts and reducing trade ship counts (and turning off dynamic shadowing)
what would cause a string not found error on ALL strings?
got that fixed
but now when picking a race the race names come up as string not founds
Ben asked me to pop-in and comment on this. Here's my 2 cents from my understanding:
Debris does vanish after a while and doesn't really hurt performance much (because you can't really interact with it, etc). Trade ships don't really have much impact at all. What tends to bog things down late game are strike craft (fighters/bombers). Each individual ship is its own entity that the game must track. When you start having hundreds/thousands of them going throughout a game, it can create issues.
We've optimized these a bit more during Rebellion's development. If it's still a major issue, I'll discuss it with Ironclad as I have some ideas that may help further. In Entrenchment/Diplomacy/Trinity, space mines were also a factor, but those have been optimized substantially in Rebellion as well.
So basically bomber spam really is the root of all evil in Sins lol.
Gives me some ideas.. "Signal Interference" each LC in a gravity well debuffs all SC in the gravity well slightly (I'm thinking .2% damage reduction per LC or some other incredibly small number). Anyways, thanks for the response!
Basically what my tests concluded a while ago. Nice to have official confirmation on it regardless.
I answered my own question with looking at the GameInfo / SoundEffects.sounddata , Explosions.explosiondata, and the appropriate ship gameinfo file.
This post helped alot! thanks for the post, Harpo99999. https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/378266
*note : im using rebellion .96 gameinfo files---
in the "Explosions.explosiondata" file it looks like they already wrote in 7 different frigate death explosions, but they all source the "FrigateshipDeath.OGG and FrigateshipDeath_Alt1.OGG. so ya! im going to add voice overs to individual ships and planet modules. start with one race and work from there.
i messed around adding voices to some of the explosion sounds. sounds really cool and dramatic. but as i just moded the root sound it did nothing but play the samples repetitively. since there was no separation from faction ships and modules it sounded like a mess. yet a good place to start.
im at a loss, at the moment with the Critical hit explosions. i thought they triggered when "shields down" or "server hull damage" but they seem to be going off all the time. adding voices to the Critical hits OGG and the Support ship Death explosions OGG made just a big looping mess.
loki I have just posted a link to the 1.01 refs for rebellion, so get them to start modding.
harpo
So I'm porting stuff over to Rebellion, and now I'm getting an error on the dev exe I can't figure out. The strange part was, it only started poping up after I moved over planet entity files (haven't brought over any other entity files yet) and properly inserted them into entity.manifest (the GSD isn't grabbing them, save for the few that overwrite base planet files). It seems to be a string error, maybe I'm missing string entries for some of these?
I noticed that extra values were added on the ship and research files when I tried moving over some into Rebellion. I imagine the same thing applies for planet files, too.
yes, quite a few files have new lines, though a lot are inconsequential.
I got a friend to write me a small program to help me convert stuff over... Let me get all the planet, star, research, capital ship, fighter, squad, and star base files in the new format. He's still working on it, putting in some stuff to handle wildcards, which will make it useful for abilities and buffs... For now it's just a glorified replace all in folders with limited wildcard support. Will post it up once he's done with it anyways.
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