Rebellion.. The Fourth, and Final Expansion for SotSE....
For all that do not know what TSOP is, or have not been keeping up with current events at all for the last four years. Check this topic. The Original TSOP for Trinity topic.
TSOP was originally created to fix the very annoying 2 gig hard coded crash bug that plagued Trinity. IT WORKED. Without changing any game play aspects of Sins. Without changing the quality of the game itself. During the time we worked on TSOP we found many bugs, and errors that the Dev's missed over time, or that were created with the relentless Sins patches of the past, and new expansions. With the Diplomacy 1.32-1.34 series of patches some elements of TSOP: Trinity were incorporated into Diplomacy. Mainly the Errors, Typo's, and Particle fix's. We are all human, and we all make mistakes. A company as small as Ironclad was bound to make some mistakes. Especially on their first game. I want to make it clear once again that this project in no way is a disrespect of Ironclad, or Stardock. Quite the opposite. You guys made a great game! There is no denying that. We wouldn't be here right now if you did make a bad game.
The goal of TSOP:R Is to add what was NOT incorporated from the Diplomacy TSOP incorporation. We will Bug Hunt, Look for errors, and typos that were not seen before, and Fix it. Just like we did for Trinity. We will convert the TGA formatted textures to the highest quality DDS format possible (This includes the UI textures). Just like we did for Trinity. We will try to put back into Rebellion what was taken out from Trinity (the varying planet types). We will also look into optimizing the new rebellion shadow system some more (if it is at all possible).
Rebellion reduced the size of the ship textures (mainly all of the frigates) to the next size down (by a power of 2). So frigates that had a 2048 resolution texture now have a 1024 resolution texture in Rebellion. Which is brilliant, It is hardly noticeable, and it made lots of room for more Rebellion features. TSOP:R will expand upon that, and bring back the "Strategic Particle Texture Reduction" of TSOP Trinity. There is much more we can do to optimize if we look for it. However, the goal is to optimize without changing the quality of the game, or if there is to be a loss of quality. make it as minimal as humanly possible. Just like we did for Trinity.
We also plan on bringing the Trinity versions of TSOP up to date.
All of this, and more that TSOP:R will do will free up more Ram, and improve your Graphic Performance. So you should be able to run Rebellion on a slightly lower end system, or a not so hot video card. CPU lag is still, and will always be a problem. We tried to deal with it by reducing poly counts on meshes in Trinity. That failed. Poly counts surprisingly have very little impact in Sins. It is the sheer number of units on the map that a Single Core of your CPU has to deal with that causes the lag. The only way i can think of to deal with the Late Game CPU Lag issue is to remove, and/or lower the number of units on the map. We WILL NOT do that. We WILL NOT change any game play, or balancing aspect of Rebellion. Just like we did not change it for Trinity. Let the developers deal with the Game Play, and Balance. We only wish to improve upon the game itself. We Bring..
The Sins Optimization Project: Rebellion
So.. Here we are once again..
TSOP for Rebellion is more of a Graphic Optimization mod than it was for Trinity. Many of the issues that plagued Trinity were fixed by Ironclad/Stardock for Rebellion. So there is no need for any GameInfo folders any more. Also the 2 gig crash issue that TSOP was originally created for has also been fixed. TSOP:R is more intended as a performance improvement mod than anything else.
TSOP, and TSOP:R is an open community project. Anyone who wishes to contribute is welcome to do so. Also anyone who wishes to use TSOP/TSOP:R in their mods, or other projects are also more than welcome to do so. No Questions Asked. This project is for you. Use it!
Do not run TSOP with other mods. TSOP is intended to be a Stand Alone mod. Running other mods with TSOP. Especially Graphic Enhancement mods. Will defeat the entire purpose of TSOP. TSOP is intended to improve your Vanilla Sins experience. Other mods like Distant Stars have incorporated elements of TSOP into their mods.
I will ask that we please DO NOT discuss Multi Core support, 64 bit, or LAA on this topic. It is a dead horse issue that has been beaten down so many times that people are beating the dust on the ground where the dead horse was laying. Its not gonna happen! EVER! The Dev's said its not gonna happen. DO NOT DISCUSS THE ISSUE!!... please.
TSOP:R Release 1.1
All mesh, and particle bad file path names fixed.
Mesh fix's (Unnecessary team color entry's removed)
GameInfo files fixed by Stardock/Ironclad so it is no longer needed in TSOP
All particle, and UI textures converted to DDS format. Some very large texture resolutions reduced.
Optimized Sounds, Music ported from TSOP Trinity.
Optimized Trade ship, Strike Craft, and Constructor meshes ported from TSOP Trinity.
Game holds steady at 1.6-1.7 gigs ram usage using Random Vast Competitive map. Max settings for everything. 9 vicious AI's Results may differ for you depending on your system. No Dev.exe errors were present. No crashes. Late game lag still an issue, but game is playable much longer than vanilla.
See various "Fixed" text's for complete list of changes, and fixes.
Thank you Myfist0 for ModDB link
Posting so this appears in my replies list.
I haven't gone through the convertdata for 1.04 but using the 1.03 era files I noticed that while many misdirected locations are fixed, in the particle files there are still points to entrenchment TGA files in several of the particles. Has anyone looked in 1.04 yet to see if they are all gone for real there?
Is there a way to make this compatible with multiplayer?
the sins engine requires all the players that are playing together to have the same game version, with the same mods activated in the same sequence with the same checksum, so if somebody you want to play is using a different mod or the mods are activated in a different sequence to you then you can NOT play together.
harpo
Would there be a way to make this shader only or something of the sort?
So we can keep the optimisation while being able to play multi?
the changes are NOT in the shader, but in the entity files, textures and meshes, so NO.
You could use the optimized textures in multiplayer. That will significantly help the game's RAM usage, though I'm not sure how big of a problem that is in most online games.
Thinking about getting this but...I saw that it changes the textures in ships and you said mainly frigates. I have my own edited textures for the capitals, titans, and starbases...Will my mod be fine if I enable this as well? >.>
bellgoriiing, if tsop is below your mod in the stack it should be fine as the search sequence for the file is
top mod
next mod
...
last mod
diplomacy program files (if diplomacy mod)
entrenchment program files (if diplomacy OR entrenchment mod)
vanilla sins files (if diplomacy or entrenchment mod)
but for vanilla sins it is either mod or vanilla,
and for rebellion it is
rebellion program files
hope this helps
or you can just put your textures in his texture directory and overwrite if it asks.
Always backup before overwriting
Don't encourage the noobs to overwrite stuff. That always causes huge problems when we modders try to debug installations.
LOL
Stress made this to be incorporated into peoples mods or to build a new mod from it.
Not sure if this is being caused by your mod or not...(it didn't happen last time) But when I try to start a new game (random 6 player map), I immediately get a "Military Defeat" with all factions lost. o_0 I don't know if AI difficulty and strategy have something to do with it, but I had them all on hard and fortifier.
Anyways it turns out it is your mod, as I just now disabled it and I'm able to start a game now.
the rebellion update BROKE most if not ALL mods
(good thing my simple mod is still working. )
Ah well, I'll keep an eye on this thread, hopefully they'll (or whoever is really working on this thing, lol) update this one soon.
Any mod with a custom gameplay.constants or any planet entities are broken. The latter has an extra line in SttC's data added, which is easy to put in if you have a total conversion that doesn't use SttC.
Sorry guys, RL has been crazy lately.
Ill try to update this to make it compatible with 1.04 asap.
I'll fix up gameplay.constants for you, assuming that's one of the files in TSOP. Will have it up in a few minutes. Edit: Here it is.
To make TSOP compatible with 1.04 you'll have to add in "extraScuttleTimeOnStrip #.###" line in each of the planet entities, after the crystalOnStrippedToTheCore line.
Ill have to use beyond compare with each of the edited files to see what if anything changed. However i think i copied the entire GameInfo folder into the mod. Only the planetary shield ability was updated there. Ill fix that next update.
Stress; how does beyond compare, compare to notepad++? it looks interesting.
I think that the five new maps in the rebellion 1.04 update cannot be played when this mod is enabled, probably because of all the optimisations done to the game files. If a small patch could be made (0.96 perhaps) that just enables those new maps it would be great.
Thanks for all your work guys and keep it up, sins needs its unofficial devs.
With the un-modded game, has anyone else noticed that you seem to get a lot less lag when you hold down the Alt key?
As this displays a tactical info, I'd expect an increase in lag not a reduction - may indicate an optimization that could be made to the engine.
Hey was wondering while waiting for the next update, wanting to try out this other mod, but it seems like it may have issues with other mods that edit the entity.manifest file. (its the Rebalanced Races mod btw)
DELETE the mods GameInfo folder! It is not needed. It was left it in the mod by mistake. Nothing in the GameInfo folder was changed for TSOP:R. That's what i get for staying up all night to get the release out. It "should" work for 1.04 after you delete the GameInfo folder.
TSOP is more of a graphic optimization than anything else. Since it is the graphics that use up most of the ram in game. The other stuff we found like the bad file path names, and errors which were supposedly fixed as of Diplomacy can effect CPU usage. We pretty much done all we can do on our end to help lessen the CPU load of the game. The rest is up to Ironclad. So far patch 1.04 did help a little. I dont think anything can be done about the late game lag issue.
...What about the manifest file?...Does the mod use that? >.>
EDIT: Also, Rebellion starts crashing after deleting that folder...
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