[Turey]

and snail, that is brilliant. cheating without cheating. but cheating eventually gets boring.

Yeah, except it wouldn't work unless you were host, and people might get suspicious at the level of your home field advantage.

[Flaser]

I see two problems and two "coder requests" for the custom-skinned player ships:

1) In Multi everyone has to download the said skins from each other --> not yet implemented in the code, so you'd need to manually distribute 'skin packs'.

1.1) --> Code request for automatic skin distribution through the host. May be a late 3.7 feature, but since you already have media for it, the coders will likely take the request seriously.

2) How do you make a mission use your own skin? It can already do this with squadron insignas, but so far only specifically FRED-ed mission with the texture-replacement sexp give you the ship you want...

...hmm, I think multi missions could be FREDed/scripted to use a "skin menu". You do an eval, key-pressed sexp, and if the player presses the appropriate button you display a menu with a list of availible skins. Press another key, and the game does a texture-replace sexp on the player's ships...

...now, does this sexp actually work on a ship already in the mission?
...and does it work in multi?

So many questions.

2.1) --> Another code request, also probably late 3.7 feature.

[Titan]

i don't have any way to try what i said, can one of use guys see if it works?

if it does, we could have every one of your squadmates have selectable textures...

[Colonol Dekker]

Is there any way to extend the multiplayer squad logo code to support texture replacement? Or just increase the size of the squad logo to cover the whole craft using the existing UV
map? This is a query as i know coders hate non-code people forcing unviable suggestions on them with a whole "this'll work" attitude.

[Titan]

I talked like that? (yes) dang, sorry.

[Colonol Dekker]

Not at all i'm just covering myself. <- disclaimer)

[maje]

maje, I don't normally speak for Brand, but he'll _probably_ be ok making the normal maps for the Z-95.  If you just leave most of the detail that's needed to go in them off of the model.  You said you restarted the headhunter right?

Going to restart the model, probably this weekend.  I had been thinking of trying to go via the high res model for normal mapping, but if Brand would rather do the normal map in PS, he's more then welcome.  I'll probably still want to do the color and spec maps though as I'm going to be doing a variety of custom and standard designs.  Since Rogue Squadron's customs seem to be in order, I'll do the 6 Coruscant fighters, along with the standard red line work.

[chief1983]

By all means, do as much as you want.  You just seemed to hint that you were more impressed with Brand's normal maps than your own   But practice makes perfect of course.

[maje]

Well, honestly, I messed up the normal map on the old one because I had built the color map first.  I want to do a test on the normal map work-flow via the high res model method, though I'm thinking I'll really wind up with about 3 models.  The initial medium res model, which will have all supporting bevels and chamfers necessary for the turbosmooth to high res (I think everything should be knocked into quads from that).  The medium res will have UV mapping coordinates to be traced over later on.

Next step will to be generate the normal map, and then I'll be able to build the low-res game model, and trace the medium res UVs as much as possible, with some fudging in Photoshop.

Meanwhile, I'll probably be exporting each little piece of the low res into PCS via POF exporter to check for exporting issues.

When I had made the shadowbolt for terran emperor's Crusade campaign, I had to literally export the model everytime I did something to it to make sure I didn't do something the POF Exporter didn't like.

[brandx0]

I simply went and built the normal maps in photoshop by hand.  I experimented with trying to do it via a high poly source, but it never seemed to work out right, there's probably something I was doing wrong.

Ya know, as I look over these, some I'm very proud of (Corran's police-style, Tycho's Char custom, and Inyri's goth inspired one) and some I'm not too proud of (Nawara's boring brown, Aril's Blue Angel, and Asyr's random crap)

Anyone have any suggestions or other ideas for theirs?  Nawara's has to stay at least brown toned (it's mentioned in the novels) but the rest are up to whoever.

[jr2]

See if DaBrain can give you some pointers with those normal map auto-gens (I think it was him that brought normal maps up in the Celebration of FS thread)

[brandx0]

Just as a celebration of normal maps, yay!

[Alan Bolte]

Looking good. I think the cylinder within the engine is rather too noticeably a cylinder rather than a cone, you should change it. Here's a cross section for reference.

[brandx0]

Alas, you'll have to talk to Turambar about that, it's his model.

[Turambar]

the solution involves grabbing 16 vertices and moving them backwards a bit.

not a huge problem. (and it was a known one)

[Topgun]

what if we sexp it?
something like:

IF: player ship = TIE; change texture to playertie
OR: IF: plyership = x-wing.......
you get the idea.

[chief1983]

No, I don't.  What does that solve?

[colecampbell666]

The textures.

[Galemp]

It works now, Taylor fixed the bug.