Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Tempest on October 29, 2006, 01:53:49 am
-
Hi. I've run into a table problem that I can't seem to figure out. What I need is for a remote-detonated bomb to spawn entities that look exactly like a primary weapon, using the $laser bitmap, $laser glow, etc. fields. I assumed that this would work. It caused the game to crash as soon as the weapon was detonated (no parsing errors). Is there anyone who knows how to make secondaries or secondary children render like primary weapons using the $laser fields? (it complained about num_models > -1)
P.S. Also, anyone feeling generous with ship models that aren't being used in a mod, I *really* need models. ANY kind will do!
Thank you!
-
(it complained about num_models > -1)
I don't think your type of weapon is possible. I'm not too sure, but I ran into a similar error involving flak weapons before. Someone enlighten me if I'm wrong... :nervous:
For ship models, did you try Hades Combine already?
-
Not possible. Secondary weapons can not use laser rendering (which isnt that good anyway). However you can make model with textures named 'invisible' and then attach a glowpoint to it. In tables make it a non homing secondary with 'child' option and add a trail to the weapon and it almost looks like a laser shot.
Alternatives are to use special transparent maps with sort of x shaped models or to use particle spew (or scripted particles) with the invisible model.
-
Trying to make some of David Weber's 'laser head' missiles from his 'Honor Harrington' book series? :) (Which, IMHO, Freespace SCP would be a great engine to mod for that...)
-
Nope. This is for my Decent mod. I'm trying to make the smart missile. I've put in almost every other weapon, but I'd like to ask for help again for some other issues:
1. Adding the Homing ability to primary weapons causes them to rotate, but not to actually seek their target. Is there any way around this?
2. If you've ever played descent, is there any way to make a spreadfire or helix type weapon, where mutliple shots all come out of the same hard point, at the same time, at different angles?
I'll try the Hades Combine.
Thank you guys!
-
Primary weapons can not use homing field. So...
1) Not for primaries, use some sort of glowpointed or similar secondaries
2) Shotgun is possible.. setting weapon bank to fire on spreadfire pattern might also be possible when using the 'gun convergence' flag, but that is ship rather than weapon specific flag.
-
well you don't even need to use the gun convergance flag...
$FOF in combination with $Shots will do :yes:
i see that you have modded tbls, so this should be easy for you :P
-
Wohoo! Thanks Einstine909, I'll try it soon.
Anyway, I went to the Hades Combine and downloaded Aldo's model dump. I got the model to show up in freespace, but there is a serious problem: the ship doesnt move or shoot. It has the subsystems weapons, sensors, and engines defined and the turrets all have weapons and firing points. I'm really not sure whats wrong; I got a lot of it to work, but it seems to not respond to anything and just sit there, even if I sexp it orders. I can scroll through the turrets and subsystems and even destroy them. Anyone know what the problem is?
Oh, and does anyone know of a program that can open up and extract files from descent3's HOG file?
This mod is going to be soooo sick when I release it. I've already got a good 20 weapons that are close to completion if not completed. And four ships, soon to be six, with music and Sound effects. Still needs a campaign though, but the lack of (working) models is the big downside.
-
$FOF in combination with $Shots will do :yes:
:rolleyes: That is the shotgun.... But that is also very far from the spreadfire seen in Descent games. That is it doesnt use exact pattern but rather sets a cone where the shots are fired...
-
ok i didn't know that there was a pattern to the shots... i've never played Decent before
-
Descent mod?! :eek: How long have you been working on it? What ship models/weapons have you implemented so far? Have you been able to implement full 6DOF motion? Got any screenshots? Need any testing help?
*snaps out of rabid fanboy mode* :p
...Er, anyways, here's (http://www.planetdescent.com/site/files/d3/utilities/development.asp) a whole bunch of D3 utilities; as far as HOG extraction goes, I've always found Hogview32 (http://www.dfiles.de/download/d3/utilities/hogview32_v3b.zip) to be a good choice.
-
I've been working on it, little by little, since summer. I've implemented the following weapons:
Lasers 1-6
Vulcan
Gauss
Pheonix**
Plasma*
Fusion
Omega*
Microwave
EMD**
Concussion*
Homing*
Flash*
Guided*
Mercury*
Smart*
Mega*
Earthshaker*
Most of these weapons have there sounds, and in addition i found some great descent music that I've slapped into Freespace, like the briefing music, and some .ogg's i found of the ingame music. I don't like the ingame music fits in, but the menu and brifing stuff is good.
*No model or bitmap present, stats are there.
**Semi-implemented, needs a lot more stats and bitmap stuff.
The following ships also are implemented...
Pyro GL
Black Pyro GX
CED Pheonix
Magnum AHT
PTMC Cruiser***
***Does not DO anything, just sits there...
6DOF motion is well...possible. I havent been sure if I've actually wanted it, since it might screw up the gameplay of freespace. I've certainly looked into it, and I could implement it if I wanted, but again, it might be way too difficult to ever hit anything.
The mod isn't anything great, but it could be if I just had access to more models. I could email it to you, and I'd love ANY help you could provide, testing would be great too, since I've had a bit of trouble balancing the weapons. So here are the things I still need to do:
Give primaries their bitmaps
Give secondaries their models
Implement a few more d3 weapons
oh, and add about 100 ships too...
Thanks for those utilities. Mongoose, you got any skills you would like to donate? (or models, those would be good to). I can give you the .vp too.
-
I don't have any specific Freespace-related (or Descent-related, for that matter) modding skills, but I figure it's high time that I learned at least a little bit about the way things work. I don't have much in the way of creativity, but I'd like to think that I might be able to do something with tables, particularly if you do try to give 6DOF motion a shot. (On that subject, I know there was a recent thread made by someone who was able to implement most of what you'd need for it; I should try to dig that up.) I'd also be willing to help out on the Descent file side of things. If you're willing to send the .vp file, I'd love to take a look at it.
As far as models go, one right off the top of my head that I think would work great would be Eagle's 1500-poly Pyro-GX model from the defunct D4 project, which you can find here (http://www.planetdescent.com/site/files/d4/misc/models.asp). It's definitely a big improvement over the in-game D3 ship models, and I've always been curious as to how it would look in the FS engine.
-
How did you get the fusion gun working right? Or is it just firing the gun why you hit the fire button?
-
As you might guess, I couldnt get the fusion cannon to charge up. I still captured the "feel" of the weapon quite well, I think.
I would upload the .vp, except for the fact that it is, with all media, 113 mb. Even without sound effects OR music, it's still 21 mb. I'd need someone to host the files to share them.
Mongoose, what EXACTLY can you do? FREDing? Storyline? Conceptual artwork? Converting Descent2 bitmaps to Freespace2 bitmaps? POFing or Texturing models? Hmm... a balance tester would be nice. I'd LIKE the game to be perfectly balanced. Anyone got someplace to get free hosting?
Oh, and I still don't know why my Cruiser sits there and does nothing...
-
Ah ok... I'm waiting for charge up to for a fusion cannon on the Lance Dragon.
-
to make a shot for a smart missile, take the countermeasure pof (its small enough), open it up in pcs, and change its texture to invisible. then go to glowpoint and add one at the middle of the model. set it to typ 0 and do not give it a normal. set the bitmap to whatever your plasma effect is ans set the radius accordingly. that should home the way you want.
to make a helix/spreadfire cannon (in theory, ive never done this myself)
make a vwep model (just use a simple model with invisible, youre just using it to change the fire points). convert the model and open in pcs. now you need to add a set of firing points for each spread (for the spreadfire this will only need 6 points, the helix needs 20). the points will all occupy 1 point in space but their normals will need to be set to spread. for spreadfire youl probibly want your normals for each point set to 1'0'10, 0'0'10, -1'0'10, 0'1'10, 0'0'10 and 0'-1'10. if you fire 3 at a time youl get a spread proper. helix is more trickey, as you need to do some trig to calculate all the normals properly. then in the weapon entry, set $shots to 3 for spreadfire or 5 for helix. you also need to set $externam model file to one of the dummy models with the extra firing points. note in descent the helix fires from a single point so the shim model must have a single point bank which is compatable with helix weapons.
*edit* i take it back, that doesnt work, i just tried it. apparently freespace sees all the points on the vwep model, unfortunately it ignores their normals. you could actually spread the positions of the points but it would look less realistic.
as far as descent -> freespace modding goes, ive done some small amount of work in that area.
(http://www.game-warden.com/nukemod-cos/Images/nuts2.jpg)
theres a quake map i converted to pof, those textures suck
(http://www.game-warden.com/nukemod-cos//Images/pyro-ix.jpg)
pyro ix
-
That pyro-ix looks nice, maybe someone could do some textures for it...?
AS for an indoors level, that MAY happen, depending on how much other work i get done. I also want to give planetary battles a try, which could be fun.
The Helix and Spreadfire will be put into the mod, but in a way that is different from the way Descent does it. It will be more like a real "shotgun" effect. Unless I figure out a different way.
A big part of my mod is going to be "variety". I never felt that Freespace had enough variety in its weapons, and Freespace's way of doing capships always felt "off" to me. Players will have access to all sorts of different guns, from ballistic to beam to flak to shotgun, there's something for everyone. Plus, secondaries have been made more interesting, with a bunch of new weapons. Basically, you take the weapon variety from Descent and add it to the wonderful space combat model of Freespace .
Nuke, thanks for the tip on the Smart Missile. That is a great idea! I'm probably going to get a lot done this weekend, as I've found a source for those secondary models I was talking about. Again, if anyone wants to contribute anything, from hosting space to FREDing to testing, just let me know.
And if any coders want to code in a "charge" flag, or maybe a "pattern" flag for the fusion and spreadfire respectivley, I would be very, very grateful.
-
i am good at texturing you know, besides its not done yet. :D
levels are actually quite doable, doors have to be scripted but it can be done.
i probibly still could get the spreadfire helix working. unfortunately the shots wont actually spread, but it will, to a degree look just like descent 2. perhaps the coders can enable normals on the vwep model firing points (i sorta wanted this for somethingelse anyway).
i also got a merc pof laying around, its actually in numemod as sort of a nostalgia item. its just using the original texture but i modeled it myself. also if you want robots, you should be able to download a bunch od cob files for descent 1 and 2 robots from here (http://www.descent2.com/goodies/3dmodels/). for hostin im sure they will let you on at game warden. just post on the hosting request forum.
you could probibly cheat and implement the fusion cannon as a beam weapon. alternatively you could probibly script it in. there should be new hooks for collisions, so you can override game code with your own damage script.
-
Could you give me that merc pof by any chance?
Oh, and that link is taunting me. I went to it and it wouln't let me DL any of the items. If it is experiencing some problems at the moment, I look forward to downloading them in the future. Yay missiles.
-
Nuke.. how about using scripting? mn.createWeapon function and rotating the firing position and vectors with the ship. Seems like spreadfire might actually be possible
-
Anyone know how to contact those descent2.com people? It seems that the links to the descent1 weapons are broken, but all others work. *excellent*. I don't know much about scripting, but I am glad spreadfire is possible.
-
Nuke.. how about using scripting? mn.createWeapon function and rotating the firing position and vectors with the ship. Seems like spreadfire might actually be possible.
its possible. im still trying to figure out the new system. i wonder if scripting is capable of accsessing gunpoints that the engine cant handle in c (those more than the first 3). then you could use those. if you had a dedicated spreadfire and helix banks, then you could set up the normals and cycle and have the effect. this is one of the reasons id kill to have infinate bank limits :D
anyway tempest, i can send you the missile later on today. i gotta go fix somones computer in a couple minutes, il send it first thing when i get back. its got an eff explosion to go with it, but i still need to add an alpha channel, its kinda transparent without one.
*edit*
i decided to clean up the model abit, sence its older and was probibly compiled with one of the most ancient pof converters floating around. cleaned it up in max and added an lod. re-uv mapped it and smoothgrouped it as well. also added alpha to my merc explosion. i also included the merc sound in case you didnt have one. i think i just resampled the one from descent. its too big to attach so i just uploaded it to gw, you can get it here (http://www.game-warden.com/nukemod-cos/merc.zip)
-
I have all sounds and bitmaps from descent :)
Thanks for that merc. That's one less weapon that needs to be converted. Right now I'm primarily concerned with putting the weapon appearences into the game, so I need to convert the GIFs to .tga and then make a .eff. So far I've done the plasma and it looks cool.
Okay, the game is complaining about two errors:
mc->radius->0.0f, it said it failed the assertation or something like that, when I plug in the class 1 drone, and
null vec3d in vec3d normalize, when I try to run the PTMC cruiser with all of its subsystems. Anyone know how to fix these???!
Gah. I got the concussion ingame, but it's rotated and looks really silly when it's shot, it goes sideways. I can see the drone in the techroom but it crashes ingame. Hmm...nuke, you seem to know a lot about how this all works. What am I doing wrong here? I'm attaching a series of missiles, along with their textures. Perhaps you could help me out?
Those who have played descent will notice that the Smart and Mega missles are not present. This is because I can't find their models.
[attachment deleted by admin]
-
i think those models were modeled for rendering purposes, so theyre not very clean. truespace just sucks at making clean models, which is one of the reasons why i switched to max (ts7 was just plain crap). id recomend converting to 3ds, opening them in max and run em through optimize. might as well bake the textures too (not too sure how that works though) in order to save on the texture usage.
its important to know when working in truespace, x is forward/back (+x being front) y is left/right and z is up/down. also pcs defaults to 20x scale (1 unit ts = 20 fs), i like to set the pcs scale factor to 1 in order to make my ratio 1-1. this way you can get coords right from the modeling program, you just need to rotate the axes (x=z y=x z=y). also working on very small models in truespace (like missiles and descent robots :D) is a major pita. so model to scale and set the conversion factor to 1 in pcs.
you can try block intersecting the models, take a big cube and run and intersect on the individual parts of the robot. its important that the center of the cube be placed at the joint. id reccomend keeping the joints intact, as you can to a degree have submodel animation (although for this case youl probibly need to use scripting to link positions to ai behavior).
but really if you want to fix the models up the best and fastest way to do that is get em in to max and link, weld, optimise them to hell. maybe i can do a few. i wanted to remodel the bots for d2xxl, but never had the time. maybe i can kill two birds with one stone here. nukemods still my priority but sence i always wanted a descent mod for freespace id be glad to lend some technical/modeling assistance.
-
I'm no modeller. Quite frankly, I don't have the skills to do it. I've been working on converting the graphics and am about halfway through. Any help you would like to give is apreciated; I have found that I have been able to do everything except make clean, working POFS. I got my hands on some quite sexy models but they just would not clean up to go ingame.
This is also my first and only mod I've ever done, and my only experience before was editing tables, and doing MINOR pof changes. Im learning a lot. I also wish I had photoshop and max, I'm stuck with paint and truespace :).
I'm sure Diedel would be very happy about remodeled bots...but right now I want that nice PyroGX ingame first. ANY model would be great, but I want that ship in ASAP. I'll probably be releasing my first pack of stuff soon, it's all the weapon bitmaps from Descent in .tga and .eff form. Oh, and by the way, I love .eff. So easy...
-
Here's most of the weapon bitmaps from descent. SPAR's appear glitched; but they will only make warnings.
[attachment deleted by admin]
-
woah look at all that pixelation. talk of the good old days. :D
youre probibly gonna want to double the size on those, increase to the next power of two, apply some gaussian blur around 2.5 should break up that pixelation abit. unsharp also seems to improve the look of effects. because descent weapons were not completely transparent, you, oddly enough, need to put in alpha channels to get the same effect. i normally just copy the image, paste it into the alpha channel and up the contrast untill the brightest pixels are pure 255,255,255 white. it the images are still too transparent keep uping the contrast on the alpha channel..
puting a circular path around the outer edge of the effect and stroking it with the smudge tool should make it round again, 4 or 5 pixels of radial blur should clean up any blockey interior. most of the effects could be revamped fairly easy thanks to the fact that the frames arent that different in alot of them. phontoshops automation system can save time as well. i could do one frame, recording my actions, and run them on the other frames. i might just do it myself. the way i texture seldom lets me play with the filters or the automation. il maybe bring em up th 256^2 and save them as properly mipped and alphad dxt5, if i have the time.
lest of course you want to keep the pixelation for nostalgia purposes :D
as you can see, major improvement with very little work
[attachment deleted by admin]
-
I don't think I can make the effects you described with paint :). Remember that those are basically just ripped from Descent2. One of my goals for the mod is to "clean up" descent and make it feel more real. I put up the effects so anyone with the time, software, and knowedge could fix them up.
I was wondering if anyone would like to take a look at these two ships. One of them is a .pof, the other is a .max, and they are from Aldo's model dump. Basically, I think they'd work GREAT as PTMC warships. The .pof crashes when it goes ingame, I don't know why, and the .max has too many polys to be converted, so it needs to be grouped. Nuke was also kind enough to provide a link earlier to a site that had lots of good stuff in regards to weapons and robots. I'm also attaching the hi-poly descent 2 pyro and its textures, anyone who wants to get it ingame is welcome to do so.
I want people to help balance and develop my mod, so I'm releasing the tables I've been using. I'd reccomend just plugging in the weapons.tbl and testing it from there. I especially like the fusion, but the lasers themselves are cool too. To run it without much hassle, you need the pack of .eff's I uploaded earlier, or else be prepared to do some LONG table edits. So go ahead and tell me what you think. Yes, I intended to have all weapons eat up your energy fairly quickly. This is a balance change that I feel is important, because in stock fs2 there was no reason to keep energy in guns and you spent your time with guns on minimal power with enhanced engine and shield power, which I feel is kind of awkward. Now you have a reason to boost gun power :).
My weapon ToDo list has come to this:
-Vauss
-Mass Driver
-EMD
-MIcrowave
-Models for secondaries
[attachment deleted by admin]