[MOD] [TC/AP] X3 Rebalance Mod (XRM) - Total conversion - v1.29c (30.05.13)

[Sorkvild]

[Jumee]

[Slashman]

Was meaning to report this, but got busy with other stuff:

I have had 2 odd things happen since starting XRM.

Bear in mind that I have never fired up AP vanilla. I went right into XRM so I have no idea if this is related to XRM or AP itself. Since I never crashed in TC, I'd have to say my money is on AP...but I'm still unsure.

OK...first odd thing was a save game corruption on Sunday. I started the game up as normal and undocked from the Free Argon Trading Station in President's End. I saw a station offering a mission and I decided to save before accepting it. I had 7 salvage insurance and attempted to save.

The game paused for a bit and then told me that the save was unsuccessful. It did, however, use up a salvage insurance. I tried an in-space save about 3 more times, each using a salvage insurance and each unsuccessful.

I docked, tried to save and got the same message. Tried to reload my latest save and was told that the save was corrupted. I then exited the game and went back in. Used my last autosave and it worked fine. No further incidences of this since.

The second odd thing is a crash I had during an escort mission. I was almost to the gate when a yaki squadron jumped in. I started to engage and took out maybe two ships before another squad jumped in. As I switched targets, the sound started to loop and the game froze. I was able to alt-tab to windows and close it. And upon retrying the exact same mission it didn't happen again.

I have, in fact, not had a crash since.

Some folks have speculated that some of this is sound-related, but I'm not sure. I did notice that when I first start AP with XRM, I get a brief screeching sound at the menu screen. Updating to the latest sound drivers for my Realtek soundcard did not solve the problem. It did, however, give me a few more equalizer preset options.

[Handsomebbqman]

Thanks for the replys Jumee and Sorkvild. I'm getting a new graphics card this week and intend to play this. From the suggestions I'll go with AP.

Looked at IR, seems good. It works with AP correctly then right?

[Jumee]

[Sairaf]

[Slashman]

[Sairaf]

[BlackRain]

I cant get the M7M's to work properly. I read where you give instructions how to fire missiles with them but it is not working.

You said to get them to fire on a station, set the turrets to "attack target" except there is no "attack target" under the turret commands. There is "attack my target" but no "Attack target" There is also "attack enemies" and other options but not the one you specified. I set the turrets to attack enemies and I give the ship the attack target command and it does not fire any missiles at stations.

[Sairaf]

[Reliku]

[Sairaf]

Important

The cause of my crashes may have been the fact that I was using IR, not IR 2.0. I updated and no crashes so far.[/b]

[Slashman]

[swatti]

SUGGESTION DoT-effect to beams. MK2!

I was kinda haunted by Paul saying beams with dot produce lag.
My initial test of huge amount of fighters duking it out with dot-effects in their weapons did not produce noticable lag.
It may indeed be as you said, they fixed it in AP.

I re-did my test with capital ships on busy sector. I cloned my own beam-loaded Cyclops and Megaloldon both ten-fold and gave them to pirates in the middle of Argon/Terran fleet-battle. Saved the game and tested various Dot-effects: NO LAG WAS VISIBLE as long as the effect had somewhat "sane" properties.

The battle itself went somewhat better for the AI when they had the DoT-effect in their weapons.
Without it they simply "swiped" the enemies with their beams doing next to no dmg
WITH the DoT effect they cut down shields much faster and were able to do some decent dmg.

Weapons modded were ION-C, Plasma Beam Cannon and Fusion Beam Cannon.
My "final" setup was about 10-20% less shield dmg and that same amount as a dot. Effect lenght was 1-2s less then the re-fire rate of the weapon.

In my opinion other beams dont need the dot-effect so much as they fire much faster. Only exeption may be the IBL... Cause you know, fire, burns stuff for some time etc... Not tested tho.

So please, if you have time, do some testing. This could have some impressive results for AI beam-usage.

[greypanther]

I have played both TC and AP vannila and never had a crash.
Since using XRM I have had some issues, however feel the benefits from this great mod outweigh the pains; at least for now!

In TC XRM was rock solid for me until the bloody annoying M3 bombers turned up in a sector! Paul offered a fix, ( which is on page 1 and is just one file to replace, ) which partially fixed the problem, but not totaly. I still get crashes, but fewer than before. Paul thinks it is because of the missile boat script.

In AP ( with XRM ) it maybe seems a little smoother, but there is without a doubt an issue with the sounds. I have had one complete lock up on the sound of an explosion, noticed many times that the game hangs for less than a second when its playing certain sounds. I havn't pinned down which sounds and am looking to use a different sound device to see if its that. The main culprit seems to be the cap ship explosion sound.

Last night I also saw the problem others have had in Omicron Lyrae and Circle of Labour. ( XRM + AP ) I had a major slow down in Circle of Labour, whilst the two opposing fleets slugged it out. This even though I have seen much larger battles elsewhere, running smooth as you like. Whats wrong with this sector? The problem in OL was even worse and was an unplayable slide show, even though a battle smaller than the one in CoL! I never had any problems with vannila AP in these sectors!

Thing is I can cope with the TC + XRM problem by quickly cheating out the stupid M3 bombers as I see them. The same may not be the case with AP, the problem may be more wide spread.

This is a shame because the problems seem small, ( though I bet very hard to fix. ) This mod is just amazing in so many ways. When you consider the amount of time Paull and the rest of his team, ( ) have put in on it, it seems ungrateful to critisize it. However I think I may well stop playing AP + XRM and go back to TC + XRM. It runs smoother and doesn't have the annoying war going on!

I am afraid for me AP has been a bit of a disapointment. XRM + TC is better and Egosoft would have been better off getting behind this mod, than producing the flawed war!