Any news on the new version for Diplomacy?  I'd like to get back into Sins again, but vanilla Diplomacy just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Will be after the official update.

Hello Gentlemen. I have 2 questions related to the DS mod. I noticed the original planets (Terran, Desert, Ice, Volcanic) only have one texture look. The original unmodded game has two different texture looks. I want to make a personal modification where all the planet textures show up with the DS Mod. How would I go about doing this while keeping the DS Mod? I already know how to convert the bin files to txt in order to make the needed changes.

Secondly, I wanted to do the same thing to the planets provided from Uzii's Sins Plus Mod that DS uses. The Paradise and City/Urban planets had 3 different textures and the Industrial planets had two textures. I wanted to return them to the DS Mod for my own use. Hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle to do this but I'm willing to give it a shot. I realize it may be more likely to crash with the changes since Sins has the lovely 2 gig limit. Any information or even a point in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

First you need to verify that all of the textures and meshes are all present, or more appropriately which ones are missing since some may still be included even though they're not linked to by anything.  Once you've done that, then you need to open up the entity file for each planet that has multiple looks to them and add in the necessary information at the top of the file.

This is an example of the industrial planet that has 2 meshes.  The differences are slight so I highlighted them for you.

meshInfoCount 2
meshInfo
    typeNameStringID "IDS_PLANETTYPE_INDUSTRIAL"
    asteroidTemplate "Sparse"
    dustCloudTemplate "Sparse"
    meshName "Planet_Industrial_0"
    cloudColor ff999999
    nullMeshRadius 0.000000
    nullMeshParticleEffect ""
    hudIcon "HUDICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    smallHudIcon "HUDICONSMALL_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    infoCardIcon "INFOCARDICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    mainViewIcon "MAINVIEWICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    undetectedMainViewIcon "MAINVIEWUNDETECTEDICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    picture "PICTURE_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
meshInfo
    typeNameStringID "IDS_PLANETTYPE_INDUSTRIAL"
    asteroidTemplate "Sparse"
    dustCloudTemplate "Sparse"
    meshName "Planet_Industrial_1"
    cloudColor ffa07b35
    nullMeshRadius 0.000000
    nullMeshParticleEffect ""
    hudIcon "HUDICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    smallHudIcon "HUDICONSMALL_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    infoCardIcon "INFOCARDICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    mainViewIcon "MAINVIEWICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    undetectedMainViewIcon "MAINVIEWUNDETECTEDICON_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"
    picture "PICTURE_PLANET_INDUSTRIAL0"

Outside of that, you should be good to go.

Edit:  Probably should cover the meshes a little bit...

Anyway, this shouldn't be an issue, but it might be, so just have a quick look inside each mesh and verify that they point to different textures.  Again the info is at the top.  This is for the industrial planet's second set of meshes and images:

    NumMaterials 1
    Material
        DiffuseTextureFileName "PlanetIndustrial02-cl.dds"
        SelfIlluminationTextureFileName "PlanetIndustrial02-da.dds"
        NormalTextureFileName ""
        DisplacementTextureFileName ""
        TeamColorTextureFileName ""
        Diffuse ffffffff
        Ambient ffffffff
        Specular ffe5e5e5
        Emissive ff000000
        Glossiness 20.000000

Alright! I managed to get all of the different planet textures working. Thank you Stant for the information and your time. It was very helpful! I'm looking forward to trying out a few random map games to see how smoothly it runs.   

During combat the screen will freeze up, combat will continue. after a few seconds images will start to flicker. Then Combat will resume. The second time this happened i had a mini dump happen. This never happened with entrenchment, i only recently got the diplomacy and the mod for this expansion.

There are issues with memory usage from Diplomacy. They are working on a patch that will fix the issue.

In the mean time you can turn down your graphics settings and restart your game to reduce memory demands if you haven't already done so.  Unpinning things from the empire tree helps sometimes too.  Other then that, you may just have to zoom out from the intense battles and let them play out then zoom back in once your frame rate picks back up.

@Ace - NP.  That's one of the easier things to go over.

the battle wasn't even intense it was just 1 capital ship and 4 smaller ones. i have 12 gb of memory also.

The mem in the computer is not the issue. Ironically I find the best results with only 2 gb in the computer as the game has a 2 gb limit (32-bit issue). The extra ten will do nothing for you, and personally I find I will always get mini-dumps and severe lags when I go over 2 gb.

dang, i hope they make a 64 bit version eventually then.

Black holes are they in your mod? just curios would like to have a random black hole in a skirmish.

They are, but you have to put them into your map via GalaxyForge. The computer tends to fall into them, so we leave them out of the random generated maps.

They won't make a 64bit version of Sins. Too costly to redo the whole engine. That's something they'll do for Sins2 if it's ever decided to make a second one.

Black holes, like Draak said, yes, but you have to use the Forge.  However, I did make an updated GalaxyScenarioDef file that allowed them to show up as a random anomoly or planet but it is extremely rare so that you don't have the worry of one showing up all of the time causing computer players to always die there.  It also allows you to use them in the in-game map designer.  That can be found here.  (Complete with new fancy options and the icons that come with them.) As a bonus it also puts Ocean Planets back into the game since they were left off of the lists for whatever reason and fixes a lot of other little things not really worth the time to mention.  If you make a map with it, you and everyone else who uses your map have to put the GalScenDef file into your mod folder as well so that the game knows what the options you used are and doesn't crash when you load the map.  This changes the game's checksum, so I always run it as a mod on top of DS so that I can quickly disable it should I want to play someone online without it.

Fixed the issues with the ocean planet icons too while I was at it so that they didn't point to paradise planets.  Made a new set for them as well.  Both are interchangeable and do not affect the checksum of the game as long as you overwrite the files in the mod folder which is highly recommended.

Also made an update to the Gas Giants to make them have a lot more resource asteroids and really worth finding and hanging on to.  As before this changes the checksum, so I run this as a mod on top of DS so it can be disabled quickly to play someone without it.

If you get all of these and run the forge update and the gas giants change as mods on top of DS Diplo version 0.7 your enabled mods list should look like this:

Better Giants
Update Test
Distant Stars (D) Beta 0.7

(or whatever names you gave the folders when you put them into the mod folder)

Their combined checksum in that order is 111345474.

Cool, thanks

So... do black holes actually suck ships in, or is it more like a white star, in that you're damaged whenever you're in its grav well?