[Goober5000]

For a mission I'm working on, I want an Elysium to tow a Faustus.  Trouble is, since the transport faces perpendicular from the cruiser's direction of travel, the transport will tow the Faustus up instead of straight ahead.  I need to know how to rotate the docking point so that the Elysium is facing the same direction as the Faustus when it docks.

I tried fiddling around a bit with the POF editor that comes with FreeSpace Mission Manager, and I ended up with a lot of strange positions for the transport, but none of them were the orientation I wanted.  Can someone help me out?

[karajorma]

You might find it easier to do using modelview

[StratComm]

yeah you have2 options: make a new dockpoint or change the old one.  I'd recommend the latter, since the Elysium's orientation at other times doesn't matter.  Select the dockpoint in PCS (or MM I guess) and go to where you edit the second point.  Now simply decrease the y position by 1 and increase the z position by 1.

[karajorma]

I don`t think you can actually edit dockpoints in Modelview but I was suggesting using it to see where the new points are

[Goober5000]

I downloaded ModelView, and although it looks like a superb tool for doing a bunch of stuff (thanks for the link!) it won't let me modify the dock points.

Next I tried going into MM and changing the coordinates like StratComm said.  I tried modifying both the Position and Normal coordinates (what does Normal mean?) but it didn't face the way I wanted.

I put up a page with screenshots in FRED showing what I need:
http://www.geocities.com/ipw47/docking.html

The Elysium isn't docked here in the second case, just moved into position and rotated.  However, in the mission it needs to be actually docked.

I'm stumped.  Might I have to mess around with the dock point on the Elysium instead?

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Goober5000
I downloaded ModelView, and although it looks like a superb tool for doing a bunch of stuff (thanks for the link!) it won't let me modify the dock points.

Next I tried going into MM and changing the coordinates like StratComm said.  I tried modifying both the Position and Normal coordinates (what does Normal mean?) but it didn't face the way I wanted.

I put up a page with screenshots in FRED showing what I need:
http://www.geocities.com/ipw47/docking.html

The Elysium isn't docked here in the second case, just moved into position and rotated.  However, in the mission it needs to be actually docked.

I'm stumped.  Might I have to mess around with the dock point on the Elysium instead?

That's probably the problem. I assumed you were changing the dockpoints on the elysium. Moving them on the faustus won`t help you one little bit. (this is of course assuming that you didn`t mean to say Faustus)

I reccomended model view cause while you can`t EDIT Dockpoints in it you can SEE them That means you can load in the models and see if your changes were correct.

[Goober5000]

Sorry - I should have been more specific in my first post.  I was changing the dockpoints on the Faustus.

By the way, I figured it out.  I went into Mission Manager and set the second point of the docking point to be slightly less on the Z-axis than the first point, leaving everything else unchanged from the original.  Voila, it worked.  (I have no idea why - it was a hunch that made me try it.)

[karajorma]

YOu got it to work by changing the points on the faustus? I`m surprised that worked You mind taking a pick of it in modelview so we can see what you did to the docking points? Or better yet post a link to the model so I can do it myself

BTW I take it that the faustus and elysium are docked at the start of the mission. If not you might have trouble docking them (cause you only edited the docking points and not the path for the docking point).

[Goober5000]

Happy to oblige.  Have a look here.

Yeah, they're docked at the start.  I haven't tried actually loading it in FreeSpace yet, but I assume it won't be a problem, because I didn't change the coordinates much.  I'll go looksee.

EDIT: I checked.  Docks and undocks just fine, on both sides.

By the way, is it possible to load multiple models in ModelView docked together? It didn't look like I could. The way I experimented was to keep re-saving a new POF file from MM, and restart FRED for each change.

[EdrickV]

ModelView32 can't load multiple models at the same time. (It can, however, open a VP file and present you a list of the ships in it so you can browse through them. That wouldn't help for this, but it's interesting. )