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.

Ohh interesting.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

No... just no. 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.

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*.

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.

I assume this is meant as two completely different thoughts.

My steam 'hostility' is the simple fact that I will not support them until they restore former accounts of mine that under current policies should never have been locked out, and technically should have never been locked out according to the old policies save for the 'we can do whatever we like' clause that may or may not still exist.  But Valve refuses to even revisit the issue.  I don't talk down about them as their current management is much better then their previous management, nor do I tell anyone else to avoid them as the 'tools' provided by the software are worthwhile and even valuable in my opinion, I merely say I will not buy anything tied to them, and the same can be said for stardock after I was told I can go fuck myself when I voiced my opinion over the move to make Rebellion a steamworks game and absolutely NONE of the reasons for going that route were put in the final release.  Remember ladder matches?  Achievements (different from the ones that came with the original game that a bunch of us gave ideas and criteria for)?  Auto match making?  HAH!  Even the 'excuse' that it has decent copy protection is bullshit considering ('pirates' crack it within seconds of release) the original was released without it and it made many fans out of 'pirates' who then turned around and purchased legit copies because they liked the fact that the company was treating people like people first rather then criminals first.  No, the whole move to steam was purely a financial one.  Maybe one that was made when Trinity became available for sale on Steam, I don't know, but I do know that I cancelled my Rebellion pre order, and I also refused to buy fallen enchantress when that was finished even though I was very interested in it at the time.  I'm an adult.  I will voice my opinion when I believe I will be listened to, and I will vote with my wallet when my opinions won't be listened to.

As for the game instability with the mod, I've never accepted it as my fault.  I know I had a good clean mod at one point and the only errors produced were because of the original game.  I just can't prove it other then what the dev.exe tells me, and the only real evidence I have is that no mods loaded, game never crashes, mod loaded, it's like Russian Roulette.  Hence, whether or not you want to blame the original or the mod is of no consequence because the facts are (or they are to me anyway) that even though the mod can be put together well and clean, something that we have done, even though it may be completely legitimate coding that the game should have no problems dealing with, it has issues.  Thus, I blame the mod itself as the general experience is no mods loaded, things run just fine, mods loaded, issues show up.

It is unfortunate. I have had similar experiences in the past and had been forced to just live with them. I find it amazing that despite going through all of this that you are still working on the project. I had to ditch more than a few extremely large projects in the past due to similar issues. I am lucky in that I don't need Black Sun to be stable for any more than that 1/10 tries. I hope you can get it solved one of these days.

I would inquire as to what kind of issues lead to the closure of your steam account but seeing as I can't do anything about it, there's little point pursuing that discussion. At least you have a reason - I see a lot of bandwagon anti-steam (particularly anti-workshop) attitudes in some communities and, though I would never use a public distribution service myself, I often have to wonder where it all originates from, which is why I was curious.

Can we take the discussion of different mods and game issues to a different thread please.

The current discussion is about this mod.  It just references other things.

is this compatible with rebellion v1.1 yet?