[Wanderer]

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

[Tempest]

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]

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

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

[Tempest]

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.

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[Nuke]

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 ) 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.

[Tempest]

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...

[Tempest]

Here's most of the weapon bitmaps from descent. SPAR's appear glitched; but they will only make warnings.

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[Nuke]

woah look at all that pixelation. talk of the good old days.

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 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

as you can see, major improvement with very little work

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[Tempest]

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



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