[MOD] Distant Stars - Rebellion Alpha 0.13 Released! [17/06/13]

Nacey

Join Date 02/2008

+57

[MOD] Distant Stars - Rebellion Alpha 0.13 Released! [17/06/13]

External Link

Feedback of any kind is always welcome. Ideas, balance changes, and bug reporting of any kind is always useful!

Version 1.00 Released!

Make sure to ask for permission before republishing any part of this mod to the public!

Downloads

Rebellion Logo

1.05 + DLC Compatible:

0.12 ALPHA Release:
Full Download:
http://distantstars.mmobase.com/rebellion/Distant_Stars_(R)_ALPHA_0.13_[45189661].7z

Full Download MIRROR:
http://www.moddb.com/downloads/distant-stars-rebellion-alpha-013

MD5: 69486D2FCD3F35E46E6F5EF8C9F1634A

Diplomacy Logo

1.34 Compatible:

1.01 Release:
Full Download:
http://distantstars.mmobase.com/diplomacy/Distant_Stars_(D)_1.01_[45685832].7z

1.051 Compatible:

Beta 0.9951 Release:
Full Download:
http://distantstars.mmobase.com/entrenchment/DS_Entrenchment_Beta_0.9951_[36672852].7z

1.14 - 1.181 Compatible:

Version 1.01:
Full Download:
http://distantstars.mmobase.com/soase/Distant_Stars_v1.01_[453701567].7z

Make sure to ask for permission before republishing any part of this mod to the public!

Multiplayer Games:
We've setup a thread for everyone to organise their multiplayer games in and also setup example times and dates for most people to meet up and start games. These are what we hope to be the main times for people to be around and want to play games together.

The times are:
4pm EST (9pm GMT) Saturdays & Sundays
9pm EST (2am GMT) Saturdays & Sundays

If you want to organise other games please go ahead using the same topic to consolidate all the information in one place and hopefully get more games together within our community. These games are for PvP, PvAI & PvPvAIso come along and we'll get some games going!

Screenshots:
We've setup a thread so you can all post your screenshots to share with us the Distant Stars team and its players. Im sure we're all intrigued to see what kinds of battles and events you've all been having on the mod aswell.

Lore:
We know some of you guys love to role play whilst using Distant Stars, and here's a topic for you guys to post all of your role playing stories, character profiles and anything else you can imagine.

Maps:
Some of you avid map makers out there have produced some great maps but never really had them recognised because they've got lost. Well here's a topic for you to post a link to the download (we can even provide mirrors if necessary) a screenshot or two of the map for us all the preview and if enough people like it we'll even include the map in with the actual mod!

Please visit our website and for more information, change logs, downloads, and to report bugs. Our website can be found here: http://distantstars.mmobase.com

Bug Reporting

If you want to report a bug please use the Bug Report feature on our website:
http://distantstars.mmobase.com/?m=reportabug

Please include as much information as possible, if you have an error log feel free to post it on these forums and we'll take it from there. If you can reproduce the error please include the error log (read below to find out how to enable error logs) and include as much detail on how to reproduce the problem.

To enable logging:
Windows Vista/Windows 7:
C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting
or
Windows XP:
C:\Documents and settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Setting

Open the user.setting file (using Notepad, Wordpad or any text editor) and scroll down to the bottom 7 lines from the bottom is the line:
LogOutput FALSE
Change FALSE to TRUE
LogOutput TRUE

and from then on any Log files will be saved to the debug folder:
Windows Vista/Windows 7:
C:\Documents and Settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Debug
or
Windows XP:
C:\Documents and settings\<Your Windows Username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire\Debug

If you get these log files to us (you can just paste them in to a forum post) we can hopefully get your issues sorted.

Frequently Asked Questions

All files are compressed using 7Zip to shrink the download filesize. To extract these files you must use WinRAR or 7Zip.
Any Patches should overwrite the original install directory, either by extracting over the original folder, or cut/copy & pasting over the existing file/folder structure.

1) My game keeps crashing, is there anything I can do to stop it?
i) Are you running the game on maximum (highest) settings? if so, lower them to High or Medium, there is a known issue with the game using up too much memory, there is nothing we can do about this, also no matter how powerful your pc is, it is affected by this issue no matter the pc it is not above this crashing issue, it is a game problem not a hardware one, so quite simply lower your settings. If you still have an issue with crashing see point two.
ii) Give us as detailed information as possible about the crash, what was happening at the time of the crash, what races, ships, abilities were involved. If you can supply a Debug Log (see above for more information about logging) and post a bug report on our website.

2) The loading screens and portrait pictures dont appear properly, whats wrong?
i) This is an issue with ATI based graphics cards (rarely affects Nvidia based cards) we're looking in to the issue.

3) Why dont you support converting Distant Stars in to TXT format?
i) Quite simply many things can go wrong with converting your mod to TXT, we cant help you with something you've probably broken yourself.

4) Can I mod Distant Stars for myself?
i) Yes you can however please do not distribute our mod or our mod that you have edited to the public. You must ask for permission to do so, we will regrettably stop distributing our mod to all if users abuse our work.

5) Your mod is in BIN format I can't edit the files, what can I do?
i) You can convert the mod to TXT format however we wont offer any support to versions of the mod that have been converted to TXT.

6) Why is Distant Stars distributed in BIN format?
i) Mods load faster in BIN format and are less likely to have issues in this format.

7) I'm having trouble installing the MOD, do you have any more instructions?
i) Carbon was kind enough to do some more advanced instructions out here.

8) Is there any way to make new maps for Distant Stars using GalaxyForge?
i) Within the Distant Stars Extras folder there is a folder called Galaxy Forge, Copy and Paste this folder (or its contents) over your original Galaxy Forge folder (or its contents) replacing any files if it asks you to. When you start Galaxy Forge next you'll be able to use all of our planets.

Or, the DIY approach (without custom icons):

ii) The GalaxyForge supplied by the devs will still work with our Mod, however to be able to access all of our planetary bonuses, templates, planet types and stars you will need to take our GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef (found in the GameInfo folder of the mod) and place it in to your GalaxyForge folder, overwriting the original GalaxyScenarioDef.galaxyScenarioDef (if you still wish to make maps for the original game keep a backup of the original file). This will allow you to use all of the Galaxy changes included in our mod.

Note: Any maps made for Distant Stars will not work with other Mods. See #8.2 for DIY instructions for map making or take the appropriate files from Entrenchment, they're cross-client compatible.

Some statistics...

Since August 2009 to February 2011 we have had over...

400,000 Unique visits to the website
12,000GB (12TB) of data transferred from our website

That equates to over 60,000 Unique downloads of the entire mod, excluding the excess of 20,000 Patches downloaded.

Thanks to everyone that has supported us this far and making our mod as popular as it is!

dyMRNwSFh9gw

modding

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

Quoting Stant123,

reply 8175

Great... Next you're gonna be telling me that powerful pirates and flagships are redone and ready for public consumption...

Lets not get too crazy.

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Too bad you didn't post your announcement on April 1st. That would have made my day.

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We all would have cried.

-Huzzah!

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Which is why it would have made my day. =P

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Hey guys hope you are well.

I haven't been able to finish a game in what seems like years. I know I know you guys want specific data. Times etc. I can't pinpoint it.

I put the computers whether its 1 computer or 11 on the hardest red level difficulty. I get to a point where I have a semblance of a fleet and BOOM minidump. The game is unplayable. What gives?

I used to be able to actually finish games. Have huge battles. Now I cant even kill one computer before I get a minidump. It's BEYOND frustrating because I used to absolutely love playing this game.

I don't know much about computers so if you have any questions I could try to answer them but I would love to be able to play this game again. I also realize there are certain restrictions but this has NEVER been this bad....ever....

Thanks

Tim

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I also want to add I have every affect set to low, anti aliasing off.........everything as low as humanly possible.

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Quoting Stant123,

reply 8148

Quoting , reply 8145
I just opened the gameplay.constants file with note pad and changed -

cannonsPerGravityWellRatio 1

to

cannonsPerGravityWellRatio 0

seems to have worked fine.

Except that one of the TEC factions has a research item that allows them to add one to that count so basically, by doing that, you do in fact neuter 5 of the playable races into no super weapons, but the 6th one can still get and build them. Editing the super weapons out of the (race).player files is the easiest method.

I'd like to try this but don't know how LOL

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[s]Using it for 1.1 on steam. It Detects the mod, doesn't crash when I hit 'enable' or 'apply', but checksum stays at 0 and it doesn't actually apply the Mod.

Is this one of the known bugs with Reb 1.1? (I followed the instructions to the T, and have installed DS before on Trinity without problems).[/s]

Nvm, I'm a moron, didn't take into account the folders within the folder.

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Quoting Ryat,

reply 8174

Update Coming. Have been in contact with Nacey and he says almost has all issues corrected and finished. He had to take apart some of the code down to the line but hopefully it will be coming soon.

That's spectacular news! I just wanted to mention how much I appreciate everyone who spends their time on this mod. It makes a great game so much greater. Thank you, all.

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

Quoting Hegemon76,

reply 8180

Hey guys hope you are well.

I haven't been able to finish a game in what seems like years. I know I know you guys want specific data. Times etc. I can't pinpoint it.

I put the computers whether its 1 computer or 11 on the hardest red level difficulty. I get to a point where I have a semblance of a fleet and BOOM minidump. The game is unplayable. What gives?

I used to be able to actually finish games. Have huge battles. Now I cant even kill one computer before I get a minidump. It's BEYOND frustrating because I used to absolutely love playing this game.

I don't know much about computers so if you have any questions I could try to answer them but I would love to be able to play this game again. I also realize there are certain restrictions but this has NEVER been this bad....ever....

Thanks

Tim

There are a lot of issues right now with the mod. We are still ironing out the bugs. The 1.04 to 1.1 build is not very stable.

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Ryat any idea how I can get rid of the super weapons? That seems to have helped others....

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Glad to hear there'll be a new version soon!

Ryat - will there be a new version of your awesome Powerful Pirates mini-mod? I keep telling all my friends who play Sins about the old version and how the pirates could destroy a whole AI-faction if you just paid them enough - but no one believes me

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

Quoting Hegemon76,

reply 8186

Ryat any idea how I can get rid of the super weapons? That seems to have helped others....

Go to this file
:\My Games\Ironclad Games\Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellion\Mods-Rebellion 1.1\Distant Stars (r) ALPHA 0.11\GameInfo
Find the Gameplay file. It will be CONSTANTS file.
Open it with Notepad. Or just double click on it.

gravWellThickness 1.0
cannonsPerGravityWellRatio 1 <---------- Find this line. Change 1 to 0.
cannonGravityWellRatioDenominator 4
preferNewAssetsGameCountThreshold 5
EconomyData

Save.
Load up and enjoyl

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

Quoting Cat Empire,

reply 8187

Glad to hear there'll be a new version soon!

Ryat - will there be a new version of your awesome Powerful Pirates mini-mod? I keep telling all my friends who play Sins about the old version and how the pirates could destroy a whole AI-faction if you just paid them enough - but no one believes me

When we get the base mod fixed I will work on getting the mini mods fixed.

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Hey thanks Ryat!

I successfully did that. I am curious though....I opened a game and it looks like I can still upgrade to a novalith cannon and place it in the gravity well?

Is that normal? Should you be able to upgrade it?

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Changing the number of allowable in the gravity well does NOT mean that the research goes away as well. As I said before, there is a faction, TEC Loyalists if I'm not mistaken, that has a research that allows them to +1 Novaliths in a gravity well, so even by zeroing it out, you're basically fucking over everyone who plays against that faction. Also as I've said before, a better way to do it would be to go into the player faction files and remove the research note for each super weapon. This way, no one can even research them and you won't have to worry about that +1 upgrade.

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Ohh interesting.

Where can I do that Stant? that sounds more realistic!

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Game info folder, search for the files that are named something like player(faction).entity I don't have rebellion so I can't be specific about the names, but I assume it's going to still be phase psi and tech with something to differentiate between the two sub factions. Once inside the files, there will be a section for research. Reduce the count by one and delete the line that has the words planetmoduleaccess_cannon. There's going to be words before and after that, but a search for that section of the line should take you right to it. You'll have to do this with all six playable factions. Once that's done, no one can build them because no one can even research them, and those specific researches won't even show up. For the TEC faction that can +1 them in the gravity well, you can also reduce it's research count by one more and remove the upgrade. I wish I could be specific about that one, but I can't.

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ok has ANYONE done some testing using large address aware? my system doesn't liek it that much (i think its related to crossfire profiles) but i have only minidumped twice in the 800 hours using it. on some of my friends single GPU computers the performance increase is insane.

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Don't bring it up, it was fought over back in 2008, it was fought over back in 2009, it was fought over back in 2010, it was fought over back in 2011... Do a forum search next time, you'll find plenty of messages about it.

Edit:

To address your points specifically since, well, since I'm me and this bugs the shit out of me...

"ok has ANYONE done some testing using large address aware?"

Yes, yes I have, on both 32 bit and 64 bit systems.

"my system doesn't liek it that much (i think its related to crossfire profiles)"

Probably has nothing to do with that, more then likely it's because of something else you have going on.

"but i have only minidumped twice in the 800 hours using it."

You have 800 hours of game time and only minidumped twice? I find that hard to believe since the current build of DS isn't stable. Regardless of system performance, there are errors in DS that will kill your game after a while (like the current issue with the Advent super weapon), even in the trinity versions. I can play many many short 2 or 3 hour games and not dump, but then I can go through episodes of Sins not even loading without crashing five or six times in a row. Thus is the nature of a mod like this one.

"on some of my friends single GPU computers the performance increase is insane."

LAA has nothing, I repeat, NOTHING to do with GPU performance. (Or CPU performance) It is merely the amount of RAM allowed to be used up by the program, a program which wasn't designed for 64 bit or multi core or multi GPU or more then 4GB of RAM systems. It was a game finally released in 2008 with 2004 standards in mind.

Here's the overall issue with LAA. If you're on a 32 bit system, nothing you do will make it work unless you modify system files to allow it, but then you screw up the stability of your system and cause many other programs to crash and have performance issues, so it's not something that any sane person would recommend doing. You may as well just save yourself weeks of configuration issues and hair pulling aggravation and just upgrade to a 64 bit OS. If you're on a 64 bit system, the improvement by allowing the program to use more RAM only provides relieve from hitting the 2GB limit, a limit that thanks to improvements in the game engine as well as work done with TSOP, isn't something that people have issues with any more. Using LAA on Sins at this point in it's maturity is, for the most part, completely unnecessary, and any gains are slight, no matter how much a person wants to testify how much things have improved on their end. On multiple GPU computers, turning off SLI will improve Sins performance. Turning of background programs, like RAID monitors, auto updaters for programs like adobe and divx, shutting down auto back up software will increase your system's ability to run Sins. Playing it on a single core computer with a high clock speed will have better performance then on a multicore system with slower clock speeds. Thus is the nature of the game.

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Quoting urfullofshit,

reply 8194

ok has ANYONE done some testing using large address aware?

Oh snap, run for the hills if Stant sees this. Damn, too late!!!!

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Quoting Stant123,

reply 8195

I can go through episodes of Sins not even loading without crashing five or six times in a row. Thus is the nature of a mod like this one.

No... just no. You should never accept this of being the fault of the mod.

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Quoting IskatuMesk,

reply 8197

You should never accept this of being the fault of the mod.

But it is the fault of the mod because there are things that cause the game to crash that are very difficult to track down. Without DS loaded I've never crashed. With DS loaded, it happens. For the non rebellion versions, I've done my best to weed these things out, but it still happens. At one point in the DS timeline, I believe it was diplomacy 0.7, Nacey and I had it so streamlined that there wasn't a single error on load and the only crashes were the result of neutral trade ports. At some point the devs need to release something that allows us to view crash reports generated by the minidumps and these errors will go away, I'd see to it myself. But like my hopes for a nonSteam version of Rebellion, I'm not holding my breath waiting because I know it'll never happen.

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Ryat

Join Date 06/2006

+429

Quoting IskatuMesk,

reply 8197

Quoting Stant123, reply 8195
I can go through episodes of Sins not even loading without crashing five or six times in a row. Thus is the nature of a mod like this one.

No... just no. You should never accept this of being the fault of the mod.

Agreed. Nacey was able to get the devs to read some of the minidumps. Its tied to something in our random map generator that occasionally goes *boink*.

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For me, sins is entirely unplayable. The game has desynced from day 1 to day 69. Its performance is quite possibly the worst of any game I have ever played, and I come from Blizzard games, so I know my piss performance when I see it. The game is so heavily hardcoded and nested in archaic design ideals that I doubt any of the current devs even know what the minidumps even mean. It is perfectly possible for them to not even contain any valuable data to begin with - usually just memory dumps aren't enough to solve bugs, particularly for inexperienced programmers such as stardock's. We truly have little idea what is going on when we plug X many extra entity files with Y interactions, because so many factors beyond our vision can collide in a sea of urban sorcery.

If a company like Blizzard runs regularly into problems with their reliance on middleware and ancient code that wasn't even theirs to begin with making their games a disaster, I cannot even imagine what the code for sins must look like. As a modder, you can only work with what you get. At some point it becomes less about what you have done and more about how the game acts in unreliable and unpredictable ways. Sins doesn't work properly regardless of mods. Abstraction on top of abstraction leads to a spoiled bucket of lard indeed. I spent over a decade trying to figure out the ins and outs of Starcraft's AI who, again, was heavily reliant on hardcode. At the end of the day I had become a master of my craft but could do little more than tell you "well, it all depends on what the hardcode decides to do - you have almost no control". Then BWAPI came out - something that takes advantage of code injection and makes its own AI bot, so to speak. A huge hack in itself, but the lesson is there - you have to bypass the game to get results.

Black Sun crashes within 30 seconds of game start 9/10 tests. If it doesn't crash immediately, it *never* crashes after that. The crash is entirely unreliable and unreproducible in any controlled means, produces no dev errors, and happens regardless of constants or scenario definitions, races, ships, graphics settings or whatever. The mod itself is incredibly simple and I've gone through painstaking means to isolate the cause of the crashes to no avail. I've just learned to accept that something within the game doesn't like something I have done, and I don't have the tools or means, nor desire, to pursue research any further than I have. Yes, the existence of the mod causes the crash so clearly this variable is responsible, but at this point I can safely say it is not entirely the project's fault. It is the fault of building data on a weak foundation - sins - to begin with. This is a curse of modding, surely enough, but not one you should blame yourself for.

You'll have to forgive me as I really don't "get" the steam hostility in this forum. But I don't think you should accept that, at this point, this kind of ludicrous instability is exclusively your fault.

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