I've being playing around chiefly with mesh particle effects. The main ones are 1. Ancient's planet 2. Fortified plaent 3. Aura planet 4. Binary 5. Stellar Anomaly also particle effects for Dark Star and White Star Any suggestions and improvements welcome.
soase-maelstrom
Check your PM's. The optimizations are complete.
[quote]Tell me what you think.[/quote] They look good. Thanks. PS: have you had a chance to look at the particle effects for the new planets in the (Entrenchment) beta I sent you?
The Dreadnoughts are only in the mod SoaSE Maelstrom Expansion v1.191 (Original SoaSE)
PS: if in doubt as to what to make the alpha channel just copy and past the RGB channels to your alphs. Have a look at other dds textures as examples.
ZombiesRus5 recommended in a previous reply "In regards to how to convert tga to compressed dds you can simply use Gimp and the Nvidia DDS plugin" I use Photoshop so I can't help you with particulars. Basically there are your 3 color channel RGB, the alpha is just a 4 th and is a grayscale. Download GIMP and the Nvidia plugin and have a play around, I'm sure it will be straightforward.
[quote]I didn't want to tell you that because I didn't want you to go on a crusade... [/quote] Your mod is still being expanded, I understand.
In the future when you make/use textures (dds) for your particle the TSOP has this to say: Texture size: height and width should be a factor of 4. Preferably a power of 2. Alpha channel: textures require a alpha channel. Alpha channel: alpha channel should not be all white - it would cause graphic errors.
[quote]I shall now delete filepaths before saving particle effects.[/quote] I'm pretty sure it does help speed things up. One final point before I can complete. In your Diplomacy mod you have 222 textures in your Entrenchment mod you have 218 textures the difference is cirrus_01.dds el_0004_35.dds el_0006_56.dds gl0006_44.dds Can you confirm that the 218 common files are identical across the mods, i.e you haven't got uniqu
No problem, consider it done. I can now delete all filepath references.
[quote]if you make the ability dependent on having maxed out capital support research that would be no issue, as you would run out of fleet support before capital ship support (at least on normal fleet size settings) [/quote] spawning is dependent on FleetPoints not capitalship FleetPoints. Spawning Dreads will mostly likely mean you won't be able to build other capitals, or at least for the AI. [quote]The problem with AI is that they don't seam to use up capital s
Yes the animations in your TotalEffects dir are brightfire.texanim burst.texanim tricity.texanim vividpyro.texanim Let me put it another way. You have changed fireyflair.texanim, I searched your .particle files and you have used it in CapitalAbility_Meltdown.particle Flair_PirateTorch.particle Now the relevant lines in those particle files are as follows textureAnimationName "C:\Documents and Settings\Paul\Desktop
Also I have looked at your TextureAnimations and there is also the same possible issue. In a number of your particle files (in the directories we have been discussing) the "textureAnimationName"s are in those directories but not in your TotalEffects mods directories chaosbolt sparks sparksphase sparkspsi plasma_heavy plasma_muzzle plasma_heavyhit plasma_lighthit tricity vividpyro fireyflair burst in actual fact a n
I know how and why they are used as I have used them several times (ref: the beta I just sent you) I thought that Bailknight modified some null points in his meshes to re-orient the particle effects. In other words on your systems which has Bailknight's mod installed the particle effects will work fine. However, on another system, which doesn't have Bailknight's mod installed, the meshes will be unmodified and not be correctly positioned. Possibly the same for
There is a potential problem with some of your meshes in your particle files. Here is a list of meshes with (erroneous) filepath names Weapon_TechCruiserMissile StarBasePhase CapitalShip_PsiBattlePsionic AsteroidSmall05 rock AsteroidSmall02 TechDroid2 TechDroid1 StarBaseTech-TradeWeapon2 CapitalShip_PsiColony CapitalShip_TechCarrier PlanetModule_PsiOrbitalAntiMatterRecharger Weapon_TechSupportMissile Weapon_Phase
Sounds like you have been having fun. [quote]It worked better than expected cause it does not take capital ship limits into account[/quote] Can you build other capital ships i.e does the spawned Dreadnoughts take up capital ship logistic slots? I like the idea of having a Dreadnought Factory to build Dreadnoughts exclusively. Maybe you can try some re-balancing ... another thing to try is to make the cooldown times very long. Of course a human player can build
No attempt ... mostly done. PS: your Diplomacy mod references 219 tga files
The problem is that I can't use batch texture replacement (i.e tga to dds). If I do then your particles will look for dds files that don't exist and I assume the Emitter will be blank. Most of the referenced textures are in tga format also. So if you want to optimize you need to convert them also. PS: to give you some idea: you have at least 311 particle files that reference non-optimized (Sins reference) textures. Of the 60 files I've looked at so far there are 60 unique non-
You have 3 .xcf files and 2 jpeg files in your textures dir, for both the Diplomacy and Entrenchment versions of your mod. I can't find any references to them anywhere within your mod. Before I delete them can you confirm you don't use them. I wasn't aware that Sins could use Gimp (xcf) or jpg formatted texture files. Also, unfortunately, you use a number of textures from Sins that aren't in your textures dir. Hence I will need to check all your particle files, find, copy and
The SpawnShipsAtPlanet buffInstantActionType. Yes I use it for the Replicators. Not sure I like the idea, it is completely random, the AI does not choose. I'll give it sometime and see if the idea grows on me.
[quote]I had to go off to school before I could reply...[/quote] I concluded as much. [quote]Sure, if it isn't too much of a problem...[/quote] I'll crank the handle.
Hi Syneptus, Had a quick look at the Entrenchment version of your mod ... no surprises. If you can wait a day or two I'll do the optimisation for you: both for filepath removal and tga to dds conversion (Entrenchment and Diplomacy). You can do something more creative in the interim. I'm all setup to do both, so it will be quick ... unless you want to g
Send me your files I'll do it for you ... it will take me less than an hour. I've recently gone through the process for the Maelstrom Mod for all 6 races and for the 4 different mods, i.e 800x4 particle files. Yes, as you can imagine there were a number of different unique path names in the collection.
How many filepath variants do you have? It's not about how many particles you have or lines to replace, its about how many unique filepath names in all your particle files.
The filepaths referring to your textures should not have a filepath as they will be in your textures dir (i.e texture name only), which is the first place Sins will look ... hence optimized.