[xenthorious]

Darn, was hoping for something more...  thrilling.  I already knew about the export feature.  =(

Oh well.  Does the export give you automatic fead back when a model has a design not suitable for a pof file?  I already know most about the polygon count, but what about when you want to set something that rotates, how is this handled?

[Grug]

Um, I'm not entirely sure on certain details myself.
I'd check in the sample model first, see if you can figure it out going by how the turrets set up.
Otherwise either sift through the millions of posts in this thread or PM someone who uses it reguarly.

Sorry I can't be of more help. :|

I never used a heirarchy in max yet though. So I'm going to test that with the info StratComm put above.

[StratComm]

Max heirarchy is finiky at best for this; it preserves everything correctly but isn't all that useful for what you're working on.  What I was suggesting was for Truespace.  I'm back at my modeling PC now though, if you want to send me a (correctly scaled) .3ds of the shield mesh I'll see if I can't get you a working POF to import from.

[Grug]

As far as I can tell, it extracts the pof fine.
Its just when I go to import when it screws up.

I even tried importing a shield mesh from the hi-poly herc 1, and I still got the same problems.
So it might be the pof that is stuffed.

of the ships need to be rescaled, retextured etc, so I might give up on the shields for now.
Hopefully it was just the pof or a faulty build I was using.

Thanks for the help anyway.

[StratComm]

No problem  If I ever get around to learning how to map fighters (well) then I may get the chance to test this properly.

[Grug]

I think it might be a SCP bug rather than the exporter after all. I read a few places where the shield collision was playing up.

Hopefuly they fix it soonish...

[StratComm]

Can this thing do live debris?

[Cobra]

live debris?

[StratComm]

Yeah, turret debris and the like.  It can, by the way, and I was being an idiot, just make sure you name the live debris "submodelName-destroyed" and the game figures that out on its own.

[Grug]

I was trying to get the time to do this myself, but you might be interested anyway.
You can make 'invisible' subsystems now, that the player can't select.
So say on a fighter or corvette, in the highest lod seperate the nose, make it a 'subsystem' with a destroyable lod.
So then ingame, once that particular area takes a certain amount of damage it explodes and walla, a big chuck is taken out and you can see the damage on it.
Someone's yet to do a proof of concept for it, but I think it would look very cool if someone pulls it off correctly.

[StratComm]

Yeah I know about the hidden subsystems, the HTL Orion is designed to use a number of them if tables are set up correctly.  The Bodicea installation (the asteroid with the Iceni inside) makes extensive use of live debris, almost to the extent you are refering to, though the objects that can get blown off are targetable there.

[Hellbender]

Just a question about the live debris idea: is it really practical? At least without a bit of code change that is.

What I've seen in missions is that yep, the sub-objects get blasted off alright, but in missions where any repair work to the ships are carried out, the geometry does not revert back to the undamaged state.

This looks especially weird when there are invisible turrets shooting at you, or you've targetted a subsystem or hull that is showing 100% but still remains looking like the damage models. Since fighters and bombers often use repair craft during the course of a mission, it would seem rather odd.

I've used any number of scp builds so far and have not seen this change, unless I've missed something?

[Grug]

The idea would be for untargetable 'systems' which are basically just a damage lod for the ship.
So you shoot the wing, it blows a chunk off and you see the damage lod. Now even if the hull integrerty was restored back to full, you woulld not be able to repair a chunk of wing via a few seconds and a support ship, you'd have to wait till you get back to base.
So it just counts as if the support ship blowtorched any holes shut.

It might be easier, to just have one damage lod for fighters, so once a fighter is below 50% hull, it reverts to the damage lod.

[Sandwich]

Thread split; Java vs. C++ cra-err... stuff goes here.

[i90r]

MAX 7 WORKS

[Styxx]

* whistles innocently *

[Taristin]

Originally posted by i90r
MAX 7 WORKS

Yes. If you check the Wiki, You'll see that I wrote that ages ago...

[Grug]

What about the shield meshes do they work...?

[StratComm]

Some more relatively minor issues that I've noticed:
[list=1]

• MOI is just wrong.  I'm going to take a guess and say that you should be dividing each entry by mass and then inverting the matrix for it to get anywhere reasonably close to what we see in standard models.
• Mass is calculated to be way too high; I think about 1/100th the current number would be pretty close IIRC.
• The max radius is just wrong.  I'm going out on a limb and guess that it is either being set to be the primary hull's length, which will be twice too long in most cases, or that path primitives are being taken into consideration when radius is determined.  It should be restricted to at least geometry.  The pain with radius is that nothing lets you edit it, and when set too high, as is happening now, you can't zoom in close when you view the model as a target in external view.  I don't know what else that radius is used for, but it shouldn't be nearly as big as it is now.  The only way I've found to fix it is to manually hex-edit the correct radius in, and that's dicy at best.

EDIT: and fix the naming conventions.  Not only is turretxx more standard than gunturret-x, Freespace seems to have trouble differentiating between gunturret-1 and any gunturret-1x.  Took me ages to figure out why only half of my turrets worked correctly, but just renaming the subobjects worked wonders.

[Sandwich]

Originally posted by Styxx
* whistles innocently *

Would that be the innocent whistle of a new version in the works, by any chance??