Sinperium Sinperium

Modder's "Get-an-Answer" Thread

Modder's "Get-an-Answer" Thread

Answers from Modders, for Modders who "Ask a Question"

This is the place to ask and recieve specific modding (mod making) questions and answers. If you have a mod making question, post it here.

If your question involves long snippets of entity files and the like, please don't paste the entire file contents here but put them at the incredibly easy to use http://pastebin.com and then provide the link to your paste in your question posted here.

Please do limit  "just comments" here to brief posts please.  If you don't know the answer or can't point to help--don't post.  Please note that a random, uninformed guess isn't an actual answer.  

You can refer people to another source--IF it actually helps answer their question.  This could be in the form of links, outside sites, specific modding-useful programs, direction towards another post or poster, etc., etc.

Remember--specific questions, specific answers.  Only respond to the ones you can help solve.  Also, feel free to amplify, clarify, suggest alternatives to or correct answers seen here if such actions are merited and help provide a real solution. No flaming, insults or put downs here in the answers or other posts please.

Thanks in advance for your help and cooperation.  The reason for the rigid rules here is those this thread becomes a usable resource in the future to new people looking for answers.

NOTE: If an answer resolves your issue, please share it here.  These answers will help others coming along later too.  Karma is a great way to respond to people providing help without clogging the thread or bombing their forum mailbox here. Thanks!

 

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

 

7,606,757 views 2,761 replies
Reply #1901 Top

Quoting Terminatorvaler, reply 1900
And what about ignoring shield mitigation but still dealing damage to shield?

Nope, though you might be able to give a -100% shield mitigation debuff, but that would affect all weapons. This doesn't work for armor because you can have armor values higher than 100 as well as negative armor values.

Quoting Terminatorvaler, reply 1900
Or some how make weapon or ability damage shield and hull different way?

You can make weapons deal damage only to hull via each ship's entity file, but the damage will be fully affected by armor and mitigation. You can also specify with ability damage if you want only the hull or the shields to be damaged, but same case, armor and mitigation will be applied.

+1 Loading…
Reply #1902 Top

Quoting GoaFan77, reply 1901


Nope, though you might be able to give a -100% shield mitigation debuff, but that would affect all weapons. This doesn't work for armor because you can have armor values higher than 100 as well as negative armor values.

 

Like Shield Disruption ability?

What I see is that creating such a weapon is posible.So the only way to do this is to create an ability that give a -100% shield mitigation debuff to a target, deals some damage and then brings it's shield mitigation back.But it's still looks like a hard thing to do.If any other ship and/or weapon will shoot while this debuff is still active is will also benefit from it.Only solution a have in mind right now is to make all this happen so quickly that others will hardly be able hit on time.

Reply #1903 Top

Quoting Terminatorvaler, reply 1902


Like Shield Disruption ability?

What I see is that creating such a weapon is posible.So the only way to do this is to create an ability that give a -100% shield mitigation debuff to a target, deals some damage and then brings it's shield mitigation back.But it's still looks like a hard thing to do.If any other ship and/or weapon will shoot while this debuff is still active is will also benefit from it.Only solution a have in mind right now is to make all this happen so quickly that others will hardly be able hit on time.

Yes, assuming that I'm right in assuming that shield mitigation cannot go below 0% (I've never actually tried it).

For say a capitalship ability, this would probably be used infrequently enough that any extra shots that hit at the same time would not matter much (just make the damage a little bit less than normal to compensate). If however, you tried to make this a regular weapon, it may happen enough to be noticeable.

 

Reply #1905 Top

Hi i get this exact error "

Failed to convert '' to an enum value.

"

when trying to load my mod in developer mod to work on my mod to update it.

 

 

here is the minidump file

Reply #1906 Top

Quoting palaisy, reply 1905

Hi i get this exact error "

Failed to convert '' to an enum value.

"

when trying to load my mod in developer mod to work on my mod to update it.

 

 

here is the minidump file

Sounds like a syntax error. You probably have an extra/missing/misplaced parenthesis somewhere, like """ when you meant "", I.e. nothing in a line.

Reply #1907 Top

most likely cause of the failed to convert error is differences between the versions of the convertdata.exe used to bin the files and the one you are using to txt the files.

 I see this exact error when running the convertdatas on files from older versions. you could try my txtbin gui

harpo

Reply #1908 Top

Quoting GoaFan77, reply 1906

Sounds like a syntax error. You probably have an extra/missing/misplaced parenthesis somewhere, like """ when you meant "", I.e. nothing in a line.

Quoting harpo99999, reply 1907

most likely cause of the failed to convert error is differences between the versions of the convertdata.exe used to bin the files and the one you are using to txt the files.

 I see this exact error when running the convertdatas on files from older versions. you could try my txtbin gui

harpo

Thanks guys ill have to search my code for that and ill use that now harpo thanks

 

 

also with further inspection this pops up after the error i earlier posted about

"

Assert @ C:\Projects\P4\SinsRebellion\Release\CodeSource\Engine/DataStructures/FixedVector.h(157)

m_CurrentSize < MAX_SIZE

"

Reply #1909 Top

Hey just a quick question is the Weapon type limit per faction or for the entire mod?

Reply #1910 Top

Quoting palaisy, reply 1909

Hey just a quick question is the Weapon type limit per faction or for the entire mod?

You mean like "laser" and "missile" and stuff? You cannot add any new weapon types, though there are some unused or duplicates. That's a game level hardcode, only the devs can change it with an engine update.

Reply #1911 Top

Quoting GoaFan77, reply 1910

You mean like "laser" and "missile" and stuff? You cannot add any new weapon types, though there are some unused or duplicates. That's a game level hardcode, only the devs can change it with an engine update.

 

 

So for instance i can have lance (laser) and such but i am hardcoded to use those 5 types in total? and what are the types?

Reply #1912 Top

Quoting palaisy, reply 1911

 

So for instance i can have lance (laser) and such but i am hardcoded to use those 5 types in total? and what are the types?

I'm still not confident we are talking about the same thing, but there are way more than 5 types. Those syntax links up there in the OP are your friend (though Sinperium really needs to add the Rebellion section).  ;)

 

https://code.google.com/p/soaseplugin/wiki/RebellionWeaponClassType

Reply #1913 Top

Interestingly, someone has figured out why Rebellion likes to kill particle effects all the time, unlike Trinity. The problem is anti-aliasing; turns out disabling that fixes the issue, and at least for SoGE, has also resulted in better stability.

Reply #1914 Top

Quoting Lavo_2, reply 1913

Interestingly, someone has figured out why Rebellion likes to kill particle effects all the time, unlike Trinity. The problem is anti-aliasing; turns out disabling that fixes the issue, and at least for SoGE, has also resulted in better stability.

 

Good to know!

Reply #1915 Top

Quoting Lavo_2, reply 1913

Interestingly, someone has figured out why Rebellion likes to kill particle effects all the time, unlike Trinity. The problem is anti-aliasing; turns out disabling that fixes the issue, and at least for SoGE, has also resulted in better stability.

Sounds like this is a side effect of updating the renderer in the engine for this iteration of Sins.  Somebody should let Yarlen know.

Reply #1916 Top

That bug happens regardless of AA active or not. It's a result of the particles hitting the limit defined in the settings file.

It has existed in sins as long as I can remember.

I am in a test right this moment and turning AA off or on has literally no effect on the vanishing particles.

Reply #1917 Top

Quoting Lavo_2, reply 1913
Interestingly, someone has figured out why Rebellion likes to kill particle effects all the time, unlike Trinity.

Sorry Iska, pretty sure Lavo is correct here. I have a cloak particle that works no problem in Diplomacy, I tried everything in Rebellion and it still disappears after about 5-10  seconds. Have another does the same, just can't remember which now, so it's not the particle I made. And this testing is at game start in a 2 player small map.

They killed off a lot of stuff from Trinity to fit all the Reb c*^% in I think.  :annoyed:

Reply #1918 Top

I have never experienced anything like that. Can you give very specific details in how exactly it behaves?

 

Something I just managed to do was make sins corrupt its memory somehow and it wasn't loading any strings or infodata. I accomplished that just by restarting games without restarting the application.

Reply #1919 Top

I have also heard that using your GPU to render AA also causes particle effect to no longer render properly, though it does not have the same adverse stability effects.

Reply #1920 Top

In my experience the GPU AA causes a huge performance hit in sins, probably because it's applying to particles and ui. And this is on a pretty powerful system. I only enforce AF because of that.

I have no stability issues in sins whatsoever except for that startup crash that requires me to rerun and reload the game around 5-10 times before it stops dumping, after that it won't crash again until I restart it. The particle bug I encounter with vanishing particles seems directly related to FPS and particle counts. It also causes animated textures to drop frames, which is retarded beyond words and looks really busted on my particles. You can see it a lot in Salvation because I wasn't nearly as strict in my recordings as I will be in Retribution. Although I've tremendously alleviated the issue by switching most of my particles to being based on animated textures and massively optimizing everything over the past half-year, it is still a big issue. The sins default particles use tons more than mine do and run into the problem a lot faster.

Reply #1921 Top

Quoting IskatuMesk, reply 1918
Can you give very specific details in how exactly it behaves?

If you have the latest SOA2 for Reb, the ROM battleships wip cloak accidently made it into the release. I run everything on the install defaults as I dont think people should need to change their settings to play our mod.

When the ship runs the cloak ability, it triggers the isInvisible and starts a persistent particle of the ships mesh with no texture, looks great till it disappears. It does not disappear in Dip, but dip has no isInvisible so it was a no go for adding there.

Reply #1922 Top

I don't have that stuff on hand immediately, but does that problem only occur for that specific particle effect? Do you have another persistent effect that also does that?

There's no real way to know how exactly sins works internally, only that it's a horrific mess.

I was kind of hoping you guys might have had a trail on figuring out what causes animated textures to drop frames... but this sounds very different.

I have ships with big glowing effects on them that are attached via a flair and they do not ever vanish.

Reply #1923 Top

Does anyone know where the icons for the Pirates gets set? I'd like to change the symbol without simply replacing the old pirate logo in the RaceLogos.tga file.

Reply #1924 Top

Quoting GoaFan77, reply 1923

Does anyone know where the icons for the Pirates gets set? I'd like to change the symbol without simply replacing the old pirate logo in the RaceLogos.tga file.

SpecialNPC.playerThemes

 

Reply #1925 Top

NumWeapons exceeds the maximum allowed. 1631592 requested but only 5 allowed. If a larger number is needed bug a programmer!

 

I don't know if I can word this as a question, but I'd really like to be able to use my remaining 1631587 weapons.