Thank you!

Here's a link if anyone wants to see the announcement.

Oh, and I guess we need some screenshots here.

Congrats to the 2nd place.

Ah, is that the reason why i have to lower the graphical settings to prevent a minidump? Settings are fine in other mods but for this mod i have to change them.

Have seen the effect in SoaGE and i think it would be ok.

I thought about the reason why there are no shield effects on ships in Star Wars. I think it is only because at the time episode 4-6 came out they looked ugly or wasnt possible at all. They had no problem to integrate a visible shield for ground combat in the first episode. I think the only reason why there arent visible shields on ships yet is the lack of shield effects in the old movies. Would look strange if you watch the movies one after the other and at some point there are effects without explanation.

Thank you!

Partly. Bizzarely to get it to look like there is no shields, we have to double our ship mesh sizes. :p

SoGE does basically the same thing, but has a shield effect. To save RAM, we'd use a sphere around the ship more like Sins shields are.

I would assume it's indeed a RAM issue, because one would assume my gtx 765m is more than capable of running a smooth, medium-sized game.

Actually its more due to the game engine. Its only a 32 bit system so you can only use 2 GB of RAM. LAA helps a little but RAM usage is still an issue with mods.

It does but other bottlenecks exist as well. Single core usage. No multi threading. Sins was not really designed with long-term operation in mind but rather as a way for Ironclad to break into the gaming business. It's gone long past that and sadly it's poor internal design holds it back. Hopefully Ironclad gets back to its roots and puts out a Sins 2 with better internal design like 64 bit and multi core processing.

I would pay for Sins of a solar empire rebellion remastered 40 bucks.  Same everything except 64 multi thread no ram limit.  They can add trinity rebellion and rebellion hd as a bundle with a sins 2 announcement.  

This a a game that, in its most basic vanilla form is nearly a decade old now, and yet, it still has a sizeable player base that I would consider most impressive for a ageing strategy game. Its setting can also allow it to directly tap into the similar (perhaps even larger) Homeworld player base. It also has the attraction among PC games of being pretty unique, arguably to the point of being a genre in and of itself. It has plenty of potential buyers.

I have no doubt that only rebuilding the engine for modern 64bit systems is a mammoth task on its own, but with the amount of interest still left in the game, and the lack of direct competitors, I would imagine it would be a very sound investment to make, as far as I can tell.

I'm not entirely sure the community even particularly wants developmentally time-consuming things like new ships, new game modes, or a different play-style from a possible future Sins release. Even a graphical update is largely undesired, it seems to me. The one thing people invariably mention are the technical issues such as the lack of multi-core support, 2GB RAM limit, etc.

Ironclad have outdone themselves with the long term support they have provided in the form of patches and so on, but I think it is incredibly foolish of them and their publishers to let such a game languish on an ancient engine, that is wholly unfit for realising the full potential scope of the game. 

One can only hope that they took notice of the succulent gravy train that the Homeworld Remastered Collection provided for Gearbox (despite GBX releasing it in a sorry state), and make an engine remaster of their own game.

tl;dr for ironclad devs: Make a SoaSE engine remaster, and we will all throw money at you.

I was playing on the new territories map as the Galactic Empire vs Advent and Alliance, and a planet I owned nearest the star was randomly attacked by a bloody lone Visari loyalist titan that hyperspaced from the star.

Was this a random event added by your mods, or is it map-specific? Congrats in either case; it caught me with my pants very much down...

Random attacks like that should be expanded upon I think, especially the Visari loyalist faction, who should act as a sort of elite pirate raid that only happens once a game at random. 

It would be nice, but almost certainly won't happen for Rebellion. Maybe Sins 2.

Unofficially it sounds like they are taking the route of making Sins 2, rather than reworking the game with a better engine. Which is what they always said they would do anyways.

Actually it is one of the standard events from the Stellar Phenomenon DLC. Just an incredibly rare one. :p E4X does add some new random events like property bubbles or a rogue pirate captain, but Interregnum itself doesn't have any right now. When it does they will definitely be Star Wars themed.

The Moddell Sector map is the only one that has a little (or not so little) Easter egg for those that have kept up with the lore.

You might see more such things, though not exactly what you're saying. Something more Star Warsy... and dangerous! :p

Coming back on topic though, I would like to make a (potentially irritating) request. Could you please release future versions of Interregnum with just an update version to install over the current build, along with the standalone release for new downloaders? The reason for which I ask is an entirely selfish one: I haven't kept track of all of the small edits I have made to the mod, and so I will lose much of the changes when downloading a completely new version.

If you can't/won't do that, then an in-depth changelog that, at the very least, listed all of the files that you altered in the new version would be immensely helpful!

Edit: Well...steam decided to purge my ironclad games folder where I had all of my mod edits during a re-installation of Sins today, so I suppose I care a little less about this request now, at least until I start editing and mini-modding again :'(

While I'm on the subject of my edits, I would like to suggest a slight alteration to E4X/Interregnum solely for the benefit of the AI. The AI cannot take full advantage of the capital ship upgrade system, as I'm sure you're aware. My simple remedy was to make all of the upgrades autocast by default, slightly increase their range, and increase the amount of time your E4X "ShipUpgradeDisable" buff lasts on the target ship, essentially ensuring the factory has enough time to autocast the other upgrades on the ship while it is in range.

I personally think that the advantage of the AI having fully upgraded capital ships and titans more than outweighs the disadvantage that having the two paid upgrades set on autocast has for the player. I feel similarly towards the 'abilities' that the imperial strike cruiser has.

The CEO of Stardock posted in a random thread on the Rebellion Steam forums that a sequel was in the works, but it would be some time yet. There's been no official announcement yet but I'd say that's trust worthy. Makes sense I suppose, they probably just started when Ironclad abandoned Sins of a Dark Age.

In many cases this actually impossible to do. It is not uncommon for me to delete files in new versions, and since my mods do not come with an installer, it would no doubt cause plenty of issues when people don't read the instructions to manually delete files. So I'm afraid I'm not able to do that. Since each version is clearly labeled (in a different folder), I would keep any old versions you download around so that you can go back to them as needed.

If you check this thread out and don't mind making a moddb account, you might get access to such a list. 

The reason two of the upgrades do not autocast is because they cost resources, and in general it is a very bad idea to give the AI autocasting abilities that consume resources (plus as you mentioned the annoyance for the players). Granted in this case they'd only apply to cap ships that don't have the upgrade yet, but still. The reason one upgrade is one autocast is because that one is free for the AI.

Now that you mention it there might be a way to make it more accessible to the AI, but it wouldn't be a high priority.

Seeing as I play your mod regularly and am more than willing to sniff out what I perceive to be problems and inconsistencies, I would like to also apply to be an alpha tester for your mod (here if you don't mind, just because I hate the moddb forums :D)

1. Obviously, I accept your terms on not sharing the mod's contents and keeping the fact that I'm a tester private.
2. I have all official DLC and will keep the game updated via Steam.
3. I am completely unaffiliated with any other Sins mod.

Additionally:

• Screen resolution is standard 1920x1080; 8GB RAM; Intel Core i7-4700MQ 2.4GHz Processor; 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 765M Graphics card.
• Yes, E4X is the only Sins mod I played for a time
• Other than knowing that "Ctrl + Shift + ." brings up a helpful menu in-game, I am unfamiliar with the Dev.exe
• Unfamiliar with git.
• Completely unlettered in the expanded Star Wars universe I'm afraid.

If scrawling through entity and string files for whatever reason is your desire, then I'm your guy!

Popping back in to say Hi @Goa. The Rebel Alliance seems to be just right with 3.1. I see that you quietly updated the list of upcoming New Republic ships at some point. That was a nice little surprise for me and I still eagerly await it. I recognize that it will take as long as it takes, so I am swallowing the temptation to fall into some of the more annoying commentary that an excited mod consumer can lapse into. Thank you for the ongoing work and support from you and your team.

I have had an email notification for at least a couple years on your mod and I thoroughly enjoy all your work.  Never want you or your team rushed for time.  Ditto to everything faceless said, I thank you very much your mod is the sole reason I still keep sins on one of my SSDs.  That is the highest honor I can offer to a developer lol.  And a message to Ironclad, thank you too.  Sins is one of the best games of all time.

You noticed that quickly. It might not even be the final list (I.e., there might be more). 

All commentary is welcome. Annoying commentary just may not be replied to if its really bad. 

Thank you for the kind words. 

When are you going to release the new minimods?

I'm waiting for the one you mentioned that will restore the omitted skyboxes from the lastest version of E4X, because I cannot seem to figure out how to restore them myself. Copying and pasting meshes and altering the skybox.manifest doesn't seem to work for me

I've decided to wait until the 1.83 patch is up and running for everyone. Because I don't want to update things every month or every few weeks when it is obvious the 1.83 patch out right now isn't going to be the final version.

Fair enough. I keep forgetting about the sort of purgatory you're in with the different versions of the game that people have right now 

In any case, I finally figured out what I was missing to restore the old skyboxes. 

Something I just noticed btw: On top of the AI being a little bit slow at using the Imperial's disposable colony frigate (as in they usually don't replace them frequently enough), it seems their VSD I doesn't bother colonising a lot of the time also. When I checked the entity file, you have marked the ship's role as "invalid". While all other capital ships seem to have been marked as this, the base game marks the colony capital ships of each faction as "COLONY". 

I haven't tested yet in-game myself, but would this make a difference with how the AI behaves with the VSD I?

I don't think anyone understands much about why the AI does anything (slight exaggeration, but sadly true). 

But I'll try it out. Technically the Victory is more complicated since it is also a Siege capitalship, but it can't hurt I guess.

Also check out the first revealed New Republic Cruiser, the Majestic.

Perhaps the best mid-sized weapon platform produced by any side in the Galactic Civil War, the Majestic was an extremely potent ship armed with a powerful trifecta of Turbolasers, Ion Cannons, and Warhead Launches. The New Republic designed the 700m ship as the most offensively oriented in a series of powerful cruiser sized vessels, capable of obliterating small Imperial frigates and cruisers on its own and providing impressive fire support for capitalships in fleet actions.

The Majestic also boasted some of the most advanced auxiliary systems on any New Republic warship. These include an anti-missile system and the most accurate fire control system in the galaxy, allowing it to rip apart enemies at long range with little risk or at least enable the Majestic to get the first strike on an enemy. However, all these powerful systems and weapons left the Majestic with relatively little power for its engines and shields. As such, wise New Republic commanders should try to make sure these ships are always accompanied by more durable units, who can take the bulk of enemy fire while the Majestic cleans up the mess.

Very nice. Can't wait for the fully functioning New Republic faction to be released 

I have since tested the difference made by adding "COLONY" to the VSD I's ship role, and I believe it is worth adding; it pretty much never ignored uncolonised planets that it was orbiting, whereas it did before I added it. I didn't notice any new problems with its siege behaviour after adding the colony role, but I never really went looking tbh.

While I'm on the topic of entity classifications, did you intend on the neutral trade station in E4X being classed as a starbase?

Seems a bit weird to me...

Starbases can have weapons and upgrades and can easily be restricted to a unique presence in a well, there are multiple reasons to use one for a trade port.

Yes. Sins likes to dump if you spawn certain civic structures like trade ports in an uncolonizeable gravity well. I had a very different solution before, but it turned out that it subtly but severely screwed up the AI. So I scrapped that and went with the Starbase approach.

You should still be able to build your own starbases in such uncolonizeable planets however.