[Akalabeth Angel]

Seems like a lot of older models are considered "buggy" by today's standards. I dunno if this is due to poor modelling on the part of the author or something going screwy during the process of getting the model into the game. What do people do to check to see whether models they've made are stable and work as they should ingame? I've seen a bit on the upgrade project forum about shooting them from all angles for collision detection stuff. But I haven't heard much beyond that.

Do any of you pro-modellers out there have a checklist you go through? Or program tools you use? That sort of stuff.

[peterv]

If interested for a beginner's opinion, this is what i did for a non-player ship i created.
1. First off all, force your model  to move, accelarate, stop and wrapin/out.
2. Put it to a fight whith several combinations off fighters/bombers (do not interfere to the batle)
3. Same as above, only this time make the attackers destroy subsystems. It's good to originally place the attackers in angles where the subsystems are not visible.
4. If there is a fighterbay, check the docking/undocking procedure.
5. Same  as above for docking spots. It's critical to use several sised docker ships.
6. Put your model to dock/undock to other ships/stations even though the bugs in this case are usually their problem.
7. Force it to collide whith bigger/smaller thinks.
8. Put it to fight whith anything close to it's class.
9. Fly far from it, close to it and try to (sounds weird, i know) penetrate it.
10. Make combinations off all the above. This is extremely boring but try to do as much as you can.

[Nuke]

i bet i could write a lua script to test collision detection on a model. essentially using of loops to create essentially a grid of weapons fire at every possible direction, most likely all 6 orthographic planes, and then use a weapon collision hook to test if each shot had hit or not, then generate a bitmap output of the data. then simply overlap that bitmap with an orthographic render in photoshop then use a blend mode which would make holes apear obvious.

its not the best way to do this, especially if your model has cavities which are not filly visible in ortho renders, such as fighter bays.  also your limited by a grid pattern of a certain resolution. so there may be polies which would still produce bad collisions.

when it all comes down to it the best way to insure that models have good colision detection is to make damn sure you dont have any micropolies or overlapping verts, or that you dont have any accidental faces inside the ships volume. a low threshold 3dsmax weld on all the verts in a model is the best way to prevent the first two problems, the 3rd must be visually inspected. essentially move the view inside the model and look for something out of the ordinary.