ST A2 Upgrade Project 2019 Vanilla Ultimate

[Rifraf]

Hi all. I wanted to see if anyone had any interest in play testing the next version of the original Upgrade Project 2014 mod? I've been going through it for quite some time, but could use an extra eye for missing textures, game play issues and the like. I have two versions, one for stock Armada 2 and one as a mod inside Fleet Ops.

If interested please let me know. Also let me know if you have download size restrictions as I can break it up into smaller sizes for you.

 

[Rifraf]

Would anyone happen to have a nifty shield hit texture they'd be willing to share for this mod? I can't use the ones from FO for a mod in stock A2 and I'd like to update the original to make it look better.

 

[Hath]

Have you looked in ArmadaFiles.com ? If I remember right there is a blue shield glow in there that I thought was sweet.

 

[Rifraf]

I have and I've scoured all my saved downloads. I wonder if you're referring to Cabal's blue shields mod? His is cool. I am using his shield down effect in the mod. I actually found a shield hit texture though that I think I'll use for now. Thanks for posting though.

 

[Rifraf]

I have another question if anyone knows the answer. In my admirals log at the end of a game where it shows all the ships built/destroyed, points, etc. mine is blank. It doesn't show any information at all. Does anyone know what file controls what is shown? I must have changed something from the mod when copying it into a stock install, but I can't for the life of me figure out what.

The AdmiralsLog.odf is unchanged. Could it be a sprite or a global.cfg file?

 

[Rifraf]

Disregard above. It was the teamcolor.odf file. Someone on FO posted it in my mod post over there years ago and it turns out that file messed up the admirals log screen.

 

[Jetfreak]

Little late to the party, I've attached a shield hit texture from one my old A2 builds, compare and contrast if you wish.

Also related to the A2 upgrade project, did you guys ever find a fix to the multiplayer LAN save? I'm also interested if you guys did more AI tweaking, very keen on checking out the Borg and Klingon AIPs.

 

[Rifraf]

I'll check it out. I'm not sure about the MP Lan saves? I think Ctrl-S is how you save singleplayer since it was broke in FO IIRC? Maybe try that?

I'd be happy to send you the other races build lists. If not tonight it'll be over the weekend. All races were generally the same. Build up to battleships ASAP and build only the most functional ships and stations, no turrets and gather resources ASAP as well. At least for stock play.

 

[Rifraf]

Wow, Jet. That shield texture looks great. Did you make it? If so may I use it in the stock release of the next Upgrade Project?

I also sent you the other races build lists. These were the ones I made for the 2014 version of the Upgrade Project. I'm trying to improve them, but it's a good start. Any ideas are welcome.

 

[Jetfreak]

Reporting back with the AI scripts you sent me, they were roughly the same with the Cardie ones too.

Gotta hand it to you, even master Freyr would be proud. It's a solid base for a persistent AI, although admittedly I reduced the build and resource slider to 0.2 in the Instant Action slider for a quicker AI build up. I'm also manually adding a few entries for the missing ships and some modded ones from my personal build. I'm swapping out a lot of my hi-poly ships to get some Art of War style ship swarms. Maybe I just got tired of having too much quality ships and it was starting to feel like my personal install was "Star Trek: Fleet" rather then "Armada".

Same result overall, they're quickly moving on the battleships and swarming the hell out of my base. The distribution of resource posts at the beginning also makes sure they never run out of gas.

 

[Rifraf]

Hi Jetfreak. Thanks for the info. Freyr deserves most of the credit and some also to JanB over at Fleet Ops as he sent me his AI personality files recently and I adapted some of his findings with Freyr's and my own. I'm still experimenting and play testing so hope to make them better.

I've spent the last week or 2 rebuilding the Upgrade Project from scratch for stock A2 and although there's probably not much interest anymore will release it when it's done.

You mentioned swapping out hi-poly stuff which leads me to a question. May I ask what your specs are? Reason being is that the mod uses Chiletrek's 8472 (which are large textures), Dan's Cardassian stations and every thing else is Aad's for the Borg, Feds, Klings, and Cardassian ships basically (which are moderate size textures) with a small exception here or there. I've deleted all the extra _1 and _2 lod textures and just use the main full size texture in my build in the interest of keeping the download size smaller.

I know stock A2 won't have the fleet sizes of AOW or a custom modded game, but do you see a lot of slow down with Aad's work with your large fleets?

 

[Jetfreak]

Mad props either way Rif, my setup for my main personal install from 2012 is roughly the same, a mixture of Aad's ships, Dan's Cardies and some mid to high poly stuff from p81 and others. Textures are mostly 512-1024 res, with a few 2048's. My HP Envy can handle fleet battles but it gets sticky with 50-60 ships on screen. It's mostly the Fed stuff that's giving baggage. p81's Galaxy is 4000 polys as I recall.

I also started a lite version of my 2012 build. Very stock based with modestly re-textured ships, since there was lot of baggage and useless fluff that gathered through the years. I have a 1500+ poly cap and did updates here and there. So everything is low detail since retro is cool again. This is where I'm really testing out your AI scripts. It's mad fun seeing 100 ships on screen and no lag whatsoever.

 

[Rifraf]

That's good info Jet I appreciate it. I ultimately want to save download size so left out all the _1 and _2 LOD textures. If anyone downloads it they'll probably mod it all to their own liking anyway. I'm basically done with it now and just doing final play testing.

I can't wait to start building my personal mod from it again and will go the route you did so I can have the nice huge fleet battles. Those pics are great by the way.

 

[Rifraf]

Hey Jet, I forgot to ask, did you change the IntrinsicValue of your ships to 0 or did you leave stock? Reason I ask is because I'm doing some experimenting with leaving the stock values. Freyr advocated for most all ships having no intrinsic value and I tended to agree, but I've been thinking of stock and wanted to flesh out some stuff.

I know Starblade did an experiment back in the day with AttackPower and IntrinsicValue, his post thread titled "An Experiment" if anyone remembers, but I still wanted to see what I could come up with. Just checked and it's here on this site and was over on FF as well. Anyway, I'll pass on more files if I can it to play better.

 

[Jetfreak]

I'm keen to hear about the IntrinsicValue edits. I noticed that in stock, it's always the Akiras that bite the dust first before the AI shoots the other ships.

My current setup is mostly stock otherwise. I wish there was a way to really randomize how the AI does combat. A limit of A2 is fleets concentrate fire on one ship at a time.

 

[Rifraf]

Let me do some tests and I'll let you know. As to the randomized combat you can do this by using ForceInvalidateTarget = 1. IIRC you put that in the weapon and ordinance files then 50 ships don't all attack the same target.

It does still happen to some degree, but far less than stock. Makes the battles last a lot longer.

 

[Rifraf]

Let me do some tests and I'll let you know. As to the randomized combat you can do this by using ForceInvalidateTarget = 1. IIRC you put that in the weapon and ordinance files then 50 ships don't all attack the same target.

It does still happen to some degree, but far less than stock. Makes the battles last a lot longer.

 

[Rifraf]

Let me do some tests and I'll let you know. As to the randomized combat you can do this by using ForceInvalidateTarget = 1. IIRC you put that in the weapon and ordinance files then 50 ships don't all attack the same target.

It does still happen to some degree, but far less than stock. Makes the battles last a lot longer.

 

[Hath]

Hey that's cool I've been looking for a way to get my ships to shoot at different targets. Does this still force say a 16 ship group to fire at different targets if you manual target one ship? Also if you have 16 ship group going up against say a borg fusion cube what happens?

 

[Rifraf]

It's been a while since I used it, but IIRC if there is more than one target then all your ships rotate between targets. You'll still get more than one ship firing on a target though.

If there is only one target in range I believe they all attack it. You'll have to experiment as I said it's been a while.

 

[Archonon]

The only way I have managed to get my fleets to target multiple targets is a combination of tricks and random variables.

The method that has worked for me deals with restricting the fire arcs on the HPs; with a fleet that has targets spread out, you will see ships firing at different targets depending on the position and angle of the ship and its targets. It also helps that I custom weapons to use pulse phasers with a relatively short firing delay.

Another thing that has worked for me is a special weapon that allows for multi-targeting. Of course this kind of weapon is severely overpowered and I leave it as a special in my hero ship only.

Aside from those tricks, I generally see ships concentrating fire on a single target. Sometimes due to formations or positioning, ships will engage the nearest target to them, thereby having attacks in multiple directions at once but this happens very randomly, usually if my ships are allowed to engage fights on their own and any enemy group approaches their maximum range of fire. If I order my fleet to assault an enemy fleet, my ships focus on the specific ship I click on to commence the attack.

If two fleets go head to head against each other in formation, usually each focuses on a single ship guided by the importance or threat level listed in the odf and only moves on to the next biggest target after it is destroyed.

It would be great if ships could spread their fire more evenly but I think that might involve some coding of how the AI targeting works within the game code or something like that. But I might be wrong, I'm not much of a coder to understand how much this can be bent or changed.

 

[CABAL]

Another thing that has worked for me is a special weapon that allows for multi-targeting. Of course this kind of weapon is severely overpowered and I leave it as a special in my hero ship only.

I've tried the multi-targeting phasers, too, and they get hilariously OP.

FO's cannonimp does have a feature where burst fire can easily be made to cycle targets, though. If there's only one target available then the entire burst will be directed at them, but otherwise it will be divided between all available targets, up to the number of shots in the burst, and starting with the ship or station the ships's AI is currently targeting. It would be something like

targetLoop = 1
shotDelay0 = 0.1
shotDelay1 = 0.1
shotDelay2 = 2

That should result in a three round burst where all three shots are divided among the available targets. The primary target would get the first shot, then the game would find the next best target who would get the second shot, then a third target. In the even there are only two targets, the primary should get the first and third shots, while the other target gets the second shot. With only one target, that ship or station will get all three hits.

 

[Rifraf]

Not to mention how the game is set to attack the weakest ships first, scout, destroyer, cruiser, etc.

I seem to have run into a problem and hope someone can help. I am all of a sudden getting the "out of memory: increase swap file size" error. It's happening at random times as well. Sometimes I play for 5 minutes and sometimes I play for 20 minutes. I've checked the last few files I edited according to date stamp and cannot find any missing " marks. Everything looks proper so I'm a bit puzzled. Any thoughts?

I've tried running as admin, I've tried running in compatibility mode. Sometimes the game just freezes then 15 seconds later it continues playing like a hiccup or something. Could it be a graphic setting with my vid card?

 

[Rifraf]

I've seen reference to an ODF editor plugin for Notepad ++. Do any of you use something special to check your ODF"s in notepad++?

 

[Archonon]

The out of memory swap is almost always either a mislabeled entry in an odf or a ".

Check your weapons, do any of your newly added ships have any weapons that you didn't add, either the physical odfs or a reference in the weapons.spr? If it isn't weapons, it could be mislabeling your ships in the build list in your yard/station or forgetting to add the ship to your tech1.tt. Otherwise it's a missing odf.

If it is none of those issues, then the likely culprit is either a missing " or a " that has been typo'd somewhere in any line of any of your new odfs.

Not sure, but it could also be an hp that you list in an odf (For a weapon, for instance) that the ship doesn't actually have. IE. You have a phaser listed at hp38 when your ship only has 30 hps.

Those are the only things that immediately pop to mind. Backtrack to the last stable version of the game you had and then look at what was added immediately after.

 

[Rifraf]

Much appreciated. I'm going over everything one by one. All the crash documentation tells me what it is, but darned if I can find it. Perhaps I accidentally opened something saved a change without realizing it.

 

[Hath]

Sorry for jumping back a few posts but back to the random targeting thing. Do you need the ForceInvalidateTarget = 1 in both weapon and ordinance files or can you get by with it just in one of them? Thanks again.

 

[kjc733]

Regarding the error, it could be something very subtle. I once had a burst of inspiration at work, wrote out the basis of an odf and emailed it to myself. Then at home cut and paste the lines into the relevent odf files. It didn't work but initially couldn't find anything wrong. I eventually discovered that the email software I was using used a different speech mark to the odf file - one was curly the other straight. Just something to be aware of.

 

[Rifraf]

Sorry for jumping back a few posts but back to the random targeting thing. Do you need the ForceInvalidateTarget = 1 in both weapon and ordinance files or can you get by with it just in one of them? Thanks again.

I was positive I put that line in both the weapon and ordinance files to get it to work. You could try doing just the weapon file and if that's not it then add to the other?

Unless I've completely lost my mind I'm sure that's how it was done.

 

[Rifraf]

Regarding the error, it could be something very subtle. I once had a burst of inspiration at work, wrote out the basis of an odf and emailed it to myself. Then at home cut and paste the lines into the relevent odf files. It didn't work but initially couldn't find anything wrong. I eventually discovered that the email software I was using used a different speech mark to the odf file - one was curly the other straight. Just something to be aware of.

I appreciate that. What had happened was I tried a new build list for a race. Things were going fine. I think then I may have changed 1 or 2 files, something very minor I think and then I started getting the crashes. So I put the original build list back, put the original files back that I edited, but now it continues crashing.
I'm going through the map editor by each race building everything, testing every weapon, explosion, build, etc. I also feel it's something very subtle, but can't put my finger on it.