[Star Dragon]

I created them in model view before I altered the table to match...

[TrashMan]

Hmm...I'll send you the tbl I was using....(including the phasers I used)

[Star Dragon]

Here's the scorp defending itself.. BTW if you can make it out I am in teh Klingon heavy fighter just behind the HUMP photon tuebs!! That's me!

http://photo.starblvd.net/Star_Dragon/5-4-1-1078878254?m=0&pg=4&ro=3&co=0

HOWever teh ship refuses to move even when I add teh seond engine to the table.... Question.. This may sound dumb but I added teh subsystems to teh FRONT of teh bussards as there is no way to make teh shape of teh subsystem tehWHILE warp Nacell.. I will trt making it the rear as a test now, but does taht make a difference?

  I have had bricks with NO subsytems and fighter tables fight and fly NO PROBLEM. are cap ships a differnt animal? It still refuses to move beyond slowing from initial accelration as game starts, but at least it will fight now..

Some improvement.

Oh and Trashman, EXCELLENT WORK! as you can see fromt eh pics teh weapons looks like they are coming fromt eh right spots with no visible clue that the turret is there, and does NOT take away fromt eh beauty of teh texture , AWESOME JOB! as this was a first attemp the centering of some of teh strips could be a little better, but that's really nitpicking as this model is extreamly workable he he...

[StratComm]

'teh' is probably the most annoying modification of a word on the entire internet, and I really feel like not answering because of its repeated use.  However, if the engines are not working as they should then you've got a problem.  The engines are physical subsystems, aren't they?  Do they have '$special=subsystem' in the submodel properties?

[Woolie Wool]

I hate "teh" too.

[Star Dragon]

I try hard to proof read MOST of my posts cause I am aware of my problem typing the word THE (it seems I am dyslexic with that word when ever I type and I often have 10-30 corrections to make each time) so please bear with me...

  Can anyone explain the difference cause The scorpion will move as a fighter with NO susbsystems added, but wont as a capship?

  [EDIT]  Just to try something I changed all the romulan warbirds to scorpions to see a massive phaser battle for retail trek, but I forgot to beam fre all for them. The fed scorpion slaughtered them, but best of all THEY ALL MOVED normally!

  I know remember this problem occured for the sdf-1 a lonmg time ago.. the soultion I THINK is to make a NEW mission from scratch or delete the model from the mission having the problem and ploa a NEW one in with new orders...

  Whatever glitch that happens is a pain cause it keeps getting saved each time you change or try something so it can get really frustration ONCE it starts to occur.

  I have no idea what causes this but, it's just one of those quirks that FS2 has..

[StratComm]

Star Dragon, I've forgotten one thing.  If you aren't ordering a capship to attack something, or telling it to go to a waypoint, it will not move.  I had forgotten about that but if changing the class fixes it then that's got to be the problem.

[Star Dragon]

The class that was the unresponsive ship was the same. I merely changes the attackers to the same class (formerly Romulan Warbirds) to see if they would keep moving or stop, they ALL moved..  Just a wierd quirk...

[EDIT}

Oh Trashman,  I was thinking... Instead of having HUGE stirps that are gonna be invisible anyway, HOW about making ALL the phaser turrets the same size as the photon turrets? Just place the boxes in teh center of each strip and it would end up looking the same in combat right? Plus it may make it a little easier to center them on the strip, plus being the same one size, generic turret, may make the whole process easier yes? I mean a modelr could just copy the turret and paste them where ever we need them to go right?

   Don't worry about re-doing the Scorpion though, AFAI am concerned it's FINISHED !!!

  I am happy with my torpedo primaries so we can just allocate the appropriate turrets as virtual secondaries in stead of me changing the weapons... It makes no difference in game. I have NOT successfully translated OMNISCAPER's glowing secondaries so Proper Micro Torpedoes for the fighters are on hold (I will rename the existing tables as such and re-sized the cap ship versions for fighter use (for testing and screeshot purposes)...

l8tr

[TrashMan]

To answer that...the turrets are made to follow the strips. If they are only small dots at the center of the strip, then the weapon won't take damage unless a direct hit is made - in other words - it would be too damn hard to hit/destroy a strip

[Star Dragon]

About as dificult as FS2 capship to capship combat already is

  You forget... the size of your torpedo turretns are as big as my heavy klingon fighter... just invisible BUT they show up on scanners as Gun turrets so they CAN be targeted and destroyed by fighters...

   This is why fighter wings are so deadly in Star Trek, Dozens of micro torpedos hitting the same shield arc and then blowing through to kill the weapons behind that area so their cruisers and battleships can hammer that area till the hull is blown out and takes that target out of the fight...

  Still Fighter Wings in Star Trek take much HIGHER casualty rates than FS wings... According to the fan fictions at least... The battles are freaking BRUTAL!

[TrashMan]

Erm..perhaps I didn't explain myself good enough.

You see a phaser strip on the model. You see the strip fireing. You shoot at various parts of the strip and it will take damage ONLY if you hit the very center. Since some strips are long, that would be a bit stupid...

If you fear that the strips are destroyed too easily, just increase their hp..

[Star Dragon]

Gathering my courage (and the fact that I had 4 days off due to illness), I plunged into Karajorma's turret tutorial (which was well written and easy to follow). I managed to make working turrets for the new Tholian Destoryer and set a few of them against our Scorpion. One problem I noticed however...

   How does one make the attached cubes have a material assigned to it in TS? The only functions I could find are paint face (which is a solid color and NOT a material, and accessign the TS material library (known as .lib files), how do I get the turret cubes to take a pcx material? I need to name them something so I can chage them in model view to invisible so they disappear in game.

   Other than that, they work great and I am encouraged

   Oh and as far as destroying the "small" turrents, they are a LOT easier to destroy than you think cause unlike normal beam turrets these are CUBES, you hit any part of it and it takes damage (I experimented attacking the tholian destoryers in my fighter from different angles...

  So that disproves the need for total strip coverage when the actual firing point is in the middle anyway.

   In short progress IS being made, just baby steps for now however.. Now I need to learn how to make a large model into subobjects and then take on multi-part turrets ( ), at that point I should be pretty self sufficent until I get to music tables and making AVI's under 340MB's (a 5 min trailer I made for the robotech mod actually ended up being OVER 300 mega byes after winrar)  L8tr!

[karajorma]

Thanks for the comment about the tutorial. Glad to see you're finally getting some modelling experience SD

You're on the right track with Paint Face. What you have to do is assign a texture rather than a solid colour to the tool. I can't remember how you do that exactly with TS3.1 but rightmouse clicks on the Texture Sphere sounds like a good place to start.
IIRC you can get it to open a list with plain colour, texture map, procedural etc on it.
What you want to do is get it to open a dialog box so that you can choose the texture you want (I think you need to have a copy in BMP format for TS)

[Star Dragon]

[edited prior post]

   Ok, after HOURS of work I got the Tholian Destroyer fully armed BUT all 9 turrets are listed only as submodels NOT as guns. all are listed in order using pof editor as turrets:
   
   0x in submodel turret01
   ...ect for all 9 of them
   0x in submodel turret09


did I do something wrong? Can this be fixed somehow in pof editor?

[Bobboau]

if you have submodels you have all you need for turrets,
look into my sig

[Star Dragon]

but that just confused the hell out of me, remember I am NOT a modler and it didn't anwser any of my questions. At least in a way I can understand... I have no idea why this happened. before I only made 4 turrets and it worked fine even though the untextured cubes appeared red on the model (very ugly) but at least they fired and were listed in the pof as guns automatically...

  This time I add the normals and nothing happens, no firing lines and no listing as guns (this is a CAP SHIP) not a fighter.. I followed K's tutorial exactly just like last time, only difference was I added 5 more turrets and textured them..

[edit]  guess what I opened the model again and this is what it looks like in true view:

scene
   loc light
   loc light1
   loc light2
No Name1
    geo
    geo,1
    geo,2
    geo,3
    geo,4
    geo,5
    geo,6
    geo,7
    geo,8
    NoName

I noticed when I saved it after making lights, naming then correctly and then gluing them in trueview that when I used PCS to make the pof when it finished it listed the materials and objests in that small info bar BUT it said 0 lights.. I remember last time I did this it said a few at least!!! why is it not converting properly and then deleting the lights I worked so hard to place on the model???

[Bobboau]

glue lights to turrets glue turrets to hull, convert, if PCS hasn't done so, set up the turret data (tgun) and give them the apropriatte submodel (obj2) properties, how to do both of these are detailed in the tut in my sig. just click on the pcs guide and click on wich ever tab you want (I recreated the PCS tab interface with javascript) and on the right there will be an explaination on what that windo is and what to do with it.

if your pof, in PCS, has the corect number of subobjects, you don't need to fiddle with truespace anymore

[Star Dragon]

the problem is NOT with the .pof

I redid K's cube tut and made the cube again...
 
1x in submodel turret01

it recognised the turret and assigned a normal and all set for game no problem.. ALSO most importantly it showed that it converted the light  ( 0 materials, 1 light, 2 subobjects) in the status bar after conversion to pof from cob...

   When I do the normal tholian ship all 9 lights I added are NOT listed (2 materials, 0 lights, 10 subobjects)

  Why does this happen when I folowed the steps exactly and used trueview to position and glue the lights to the geo's and glues the turrets to the hull?

  When I open the model after failed conversion all I see is a list of geos with numbers assigned...

geo geo1
geo2
geo3

Why is TS messing up on saving my lights that I DID glue?

I tried to fix it in pcs but no luck , I added firing points for all 9 turrests but only two showed up. the other 7 never gave me a crosshair to move the point into position, like they were invisible or non-existant. reloaded the model tried and saved multiple times after ading correct normals, still failed...

[Star Dragon]

When you convert a pof to a cob to work on it it strips the light associations from the turret as far as FS is concerned when you reconvert it. It will no loner show turrets as guns.

1x submodel in turret01

will now become

0x submodel in turret01

   Meaning you have to redo all the lights from scratch! I noticed it groups all such turret lights in the middle of the model at 0,0,0

  Not only that in 3d exploration the lights ARE visible as connected to the turrets BUT they are renamed like this

H_turret01, H_turret02 ect...

   you can reconvert it to pof and it DOES recognise the lights in the status bar (X materials, 10 lights, X subobjects) but model is useless as turrets not shown as guns.  Adding normals does NOT work. Delete your model you are screwed...

   Looks like I'll have to save the model after EVERY turret addition to make sure they work and keep a current working model. Evenif I succeed this will take HOURS. There goes my Sunday...

[TrashMan]

Send the model over...I'll take a look at it...