Reducing polys on debris would be helpful though and I don't think anyone would care too much.

We're here to 'optimize' the game-play without inherently changing any values related to or that could affect the actual game balance.

I will continue to reiterate that if you mess with trade ships or SC as far as values etc are concerned, that you will inherently unbalance the game. The issue is not about by what value, but the simple fact that if you change the game balance, LESS people will adopt this mod project online. I remember that this was a huge point of debate with the original TSOP mod. A VERY big issue.

Simply put, if you buff the trade ships, do we need to also buff the pirates to compensate? They are already a great distraction tool for them, build a trade port. If you make less of them, they will either die faster (the pirates then target your ships and facilities faster) or, if they are built faster AND are tougher, the pirates may never actually kill a trade ship in the earlier waves, thus making Trade Ports more effective than ships as a pirate deterrent.

We could go onto modifying SC as well for buffing them, reducing squadron size, do we need to balance the Flak Burst abilities, or the flak weapons on the frigates so that the abilities and damage actually mean something? Buff the SC and suddenly flak burst becomes even more useless, same with flak frigates. Buff flak damage and suddenly Flak Frigates become OP, then we have to balance everything else ... let alone that each race has different squadron sizes and that we would change the rate at which they all die and the effectiveness of different weapons, plus their upgrades (6 races!!!) and the way that it affects the balance against SC. Kill rates, live rates, etc.

It's not a simple 'Change X and in response change Y', it is much more complex than that and can, and WILL, have long reaching implications. 

Many people will say, "Well I don't care about pirates, they're way to easy as it is!", or "the value it will change doesn't matter because on Fastest settings everything dies anyways." Some people do care and I would guess more than you think.

I should remind you that DPS does NOT SCALE between the game speeds. On slow games (or normal for that matter), changing the number of SC as well as Trade Ships, can have a HUGE impact on the game in terms of targeting priorities, how long it takes to kill a ship etc. Lets just assume that carriers jump in on a Normal ship speed game, on the other side of the gravity well. Before I can get there suddenly the tougher SC actually DO MAKE A DIFFERENCE to my shields and HP because I can't kill them fast enough with my flak frigates and anti SC abilities...

Does anyone see where I am going with this and the inherent problem with this approach? If items such as SC squadron size and damage values, same with trade ships, are messed with, they better sure as heck be 'optional mini-mods' because otherwise TSOP:R will be used less and ultimately adopted at a much slower rate by the community (most of which do not play online and are just looking for a game that runs better). My LAN group included, that was their biggest gripe about TSOP when we talked about some of the SC modifications that at the time were being discussed.

Do we truly understand the IMPLICATIONS of what we are discussing in relation to the time that will be placed into making those changes, balancing, etc etc.

Re-balance mods are already out there and will be made by other modders that likely will incorporate TSOP:R. We shouldn't waste our efforts on re-balancing the game. TSOP for Diplo made a huge difference in performance (and it sounds like we have the same pre .32 issues all over again so I'm expecting another performance increase.)

I want an optimization mod, not a SoaSE:R rebalanced mod that includes an optimization mod. Simple as that.

Whoa you two, your derailing the thread, I think it was right when someone stated that this is an optomisation mod only, and that modifying anything such as numbers of strike craft, reducing debris count or timers etc is beyond the "optomisation" change, therefore it won't happen as people will be less likely to use this mod and Ironclad will be less likely to implement this mod in a future patch.

Lets leave it at that and move on, we can always create small add on's later for the Optimisation mod.

@MajorStress are the TSOP optimisations still in the latest Diplomacy? I suppose its pointless asking why they didn't use them for Rebellion, do they work in Rebellion or do the optomised particles create errors/problems we aren't aware of?

Then lets meander on. I believe I'll have to eat pudding from this day forth.

Move along, these aren't the cookies you are looking for.

The debris will be looked at, and there are things that we can do with debris, but i don't think debris is a major cause of lag. It does disappear after a while, and the amount of debris generated in the various battles is nothing compared to the sheer number of actual units, and map objects in any given game.

Good eye on the ability's. The CPU has to keep track of every single units ability's, buff's, and debuff's on the map. A ridiculous amount of calculations. If they can be changed to a more efficient method of casting (Hence reducing CPU lag) without effecting the game play, or balance then i am all for it. I am not good with ability's Gofan. If you see anything else like this feel free to tweak it for testing.

EDIT: GUYS!!! I already said that we are NOT changing anything SC, or Trade Ship size/stat related.. Yet, and ONLY if all other options we try FAIL. If we can optimize rebellion plus keep the numbers, balance, and stats pure vanilla, then wonderful! Job done! Let the damn dev's worry about the balance for now. We are not here for that. We are here to make Rebellion Playable Without Minidumps.

By team color, do you mean when you have "team colors" enabled and all ships show up as either red, green, or blue?

Well, TechTransport is the code name for the Corsev. I'd guess its probably one of the "particle" ships it sends out for its abilities.

Wouldn't manifest issues be displayed when running the dev?

When we were working on trinity we found counts that were off but it didnt show on dev.exe. If someone already checked i didnt see the post. Wont hurt to double check.

EDIT: About 25% done with optimizing the particle files, and related textures. I am doing the textures for Rebellion a little different than i did with Trinity. In Trinity we reduced a lot of textures, because we needed to make lots of room back when Diplomacy used 1.9 gigs of ram, but there really is no need to go nuts with texture reduction in Rebellion since the game doesn't use over 1.7 gigs Vanilla on max settings. I am reducing the ridiculously sized textures (a freaking 1024 texture for a small particle.. riiiiight), but that is about it. The DDS conversion, and Mip Maps alone should be enough to greatly boost performance.

It was just as i feared. All of the particle files have the bad file path name issue. No worry's, since the particles have to be edited anyway to point to DDS textures that issue will be fixed.

Thank You ill edit that at once.

Just speculating here, but there may be some abilities that rely on periodic actions that could be made to do without now that we have conditional application of buffs.

Pretty much damn near everything that was unused in Trinity got carried over to Rebellion. There are unused particles, meshes, and textures. And we have the same Pre-TSOP issues in Rebellion that we had before we made TSOP for trinity. It is as if the dev's made Rebellion from a copy of Diplomacy before the TSOP fix's.

Does anyone remember who optimized the sounds and music for the original TSOP? The new rebellion sounds and music can use the same treatment.

YES! If you can make any ability perform better without screwing up the gameplay ill take it!

You can still do sounds right? I am sure no one would mind if you optimized a few rebellion sounds for the cause.