[ryuune75]

I have this weird problem, hope someone can help me;
I made a few capital ships, with multi part turrets, and they work fine, they aim, shoot and all. Problem is, everytime I (alpha1) try to ram the turrets, at the very moment i collide with them the game crashes to desktop!
I have this problem with most of the ships i made, but not all of them, and i cant find out the reason...

[Bobboau]

retail or FSO?

[karajorma]

Both I'd imagine. I had exactly this problem a little while back (In fact turrets produced following the instructions in the earliest version of the Turreting tutorial would all cause crashes in this manner).

I simply changed the way I built them corrected the tutorial and the problem went away. Try following the turretting tutorial Ryuune.

[ryuune75]

Originally posted by karajorma
Both I'd imagine. I had exactly this problem a little while back (In fact turrets produced following the instructions in the earliest version of the Turreting tutorial would all cause crashes in this manner).

I simply changed the way I built them corrected the tutorial and the problem went away. Try following the turretting tutorial Ryuune.

But... I in fact learned to make turrets thanks to your tutorial!!!

Do you mean you have changed it lately? When?

edit: i re-read the tutorial, and i'm sure i've done the turrets like you explained here, can you explain me what was the exact step that you changed to correct the problem? Was someting about .cob editing or .pof editing?
Or, now that i think about it, do the names of the subobjects and light matters? Cause I don't give them the names like you did in the tutorial, i only name the groups "turretxx" and "turretxx-arm".

[karajorma]

It was a long while back. Over a year ago IIRC. Here's the thread where I discovered the problem.

It was something in the way I made the cob. I've been told I don't need to to name all the objects like I suggest in the tutorial but when I did start naming them as part of rebuilding the turrets the problem went away.  To this day I have no idea what was causing the crashes or why the (minor) changes I made to the tutorial fixed them.

The weird thing is that exactly as you state the turrets work perfectly except for the crashes.

There is however one difference between the picture in the tutorial and the way I actually do it (and the way I describe doing it in the tutorial) I don't attach a light to the base. The picture has one but my models don't.

[ryuune75]

Thanks, so calling the turret and barrel meshes "geo" and the light "turret02-fp-XX" should solve the problem?
Also i'll try removing the light from the turret base.

[karajorma]

It worked for me. I pretty much follow my own tutorial when building turrets and since I made the changes I've never seen the problem again.

[ryuune75]

Damn, i tryed doing that but it didn't worked, I still crash going against the barrels of the turrets...

I'll show the hierarchy of one of the ships i'm doing, can you tell me if you see something wrong?

[karajorma]

Hmmmm. Do you have more than one barrel on those turrets?

If so make each barrel a seperate subobject.

[ryuune75]

Originally posted by karajorma
Hmmmm. Do you have more than one barrel on those turrets?

If so make each barrel a seperate subobject.

Yes I have a single mesh for 2 barrels, should i make them 2 separate object them? Ok, I'll try this too, thanks!

[karajorma]

Yeah. I did that for all my turrets. It may have been one of the changes I made.

I really should update the Turreting Tutorial. It was a real example of the partially sighted leading the blind when I first wrote it

[Vasudan Admiral]

wether the individual barrels are separate objects or not should have no effect whatsoever if you're using the latest PCS. (or any other version of it i'm aware of)

the lights that you want to become firing points on that turret should be named turret01-FP01 rather than turret01-FP-01

naming the geometry for each turret is also unnessecary - to get PCS to autogenerate multi part turrets from the SCN file you just need to have the base group called "turret01-base", and the arms group called "turret01-arms" glued to it as a sibling.

other than that i can't really spot anything that could lead to a crash other than a faulty conversion (meaning bad collision detection), which is why i strongly recomend using Kazan's latest version of PCS if you're not already. https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=26889&package_id=53033

to learn how to use it thoroughly, take a look at Bobboau's PCS tutorial from his sig: http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/fstut/fstut_index01.htm - which has everything you need to know about PCS.

[karajorma]

Originally posted by Vasudan Admiral
wether the individual barrels are separate objects or not should have no effect whatsoever if you're using the latest PCS. (or any other version of it i'm aware of)

It might if you're just using two seperate non-intersecting barrels that you've simply booleaned together. I can see FS2 having all kinds of problems with that.

Now I come to think of it I might have made that mistake back then. It would certainly explain why I had problems.

Originally posted by Vasudan Admiral
the lights that you want to become firing points on that turret should be named turret01-FP01 rather than turret01-FP-01

As far as I can tell that doesn't matter. I've converted quite a few models using turret01-FP-01 or turret01-FP_01 and they all seem to have had their firing points in the right places.  IP Andrews guide also suggests naming that way. Bobboau on the other hand uses the turret01-FP01 format.

I guess Kazan is the person to ask about this one.  

[ryuune75]

Awww, tested with one barreled turrets and the problem persist... also i've used the latest version of PCS to convert them, and about multiple turrets i've fount the same problem with a ship with one-barrel, one-turret....

Damn, this is getting weird.. why can't i solve this, sigh....  

[Star Dragon]

As far as ramming goes in my final mission I have Khyron ram the SDF-1 and they both are destroyed and it doesn't crash (just to let you know ramming is a viable option for cap vs cap). It's really cool to see the zent ship shove itself halfway through the hull and then I sexp them both to go BOOM simultaneously like in the episode.

  As far as the turret tutorial I managed to make single part turrets but they don't always work ? Or when I go back and try to add more they stop working?

  I hope you get your problem solved, you're pretty close to finishing MACROSS?

[Vasudan Admiral]

As far as I can tell that doesn't matter.

heh, just ran a quick test, and you're right - both ways work.

the only thing left i can think of that could be an issue is screwed up barrel geometry. there's not a lot left that could be wrong.
does it work with a really simple model? ie, the one in Kara's turreting tutorial? if even something like that screws up then it's probably the TS version you're using or some similar thing. if that works, then it will be something wrong in the current models barrel geometry.

[karajorma]

I'm rewriting the tutorial as we speak to make it a little clearer actually

When I first wrote the tutorial I basically just figured out how to make turrets. It was just that myself and a few others had such a hell of a time getting things to work that I wanted to make sure no one else had the same problems.  

Ryuune can you send me one of your turrets. I want to see if I can figure out what is causing the crash. Send it to [email protected]

Originally posted by Vasudan Admiral
the only thing left i can think of that could be an issue is screwed up barrel geometry. there's not a lot left that could be wrong.
does it work with a really simple model? ie, the one in Kara's turreting tutorial? if even something like that screws up then it's probably the TS version you're using or some similar thing. if that works, then it will be something wrong in the current models barrel geometry.

I find even that hard to believe. When I discovered the problem I found that I could even get the GTC Great Big Cube to crash. I can't see how I could possibly have done that since it was basically two cubes with a couple of lights on. The only operation I ever did on anything was to make the barrel a little smaller and a bit longer. Neither of those should ever cause bad geometry. The problem is something in the way the turret is put together but since I never managed to fix the problem except by building the turret from scratch again I don't know what I did wrong the old way.

So if Ryuune has the same problem I did he'll probably be able to repeat the problem with a very simple model.

[ryuune75]

Originally posted by Star Dragon
As far as ramming goes in my final mission I have Khyron ram the SDF-1 and they both are destroyed and it doesn't crash (just to let you know ramming is a viable option for cap vs cap). It's really cool to see the zent ship shove itself halfway through the hull and then I sexp them both to go BOOM simultaneously like in the episode.

  As far as the turret tutorial I managed to make single part turrets but they don't always work ? Or when I go back and try to add more they stop working?

  I hope you get your problem solved, you're pretty close to finishing MACROSS?

Oh but the problem is not a ship crashing on another ship, it's the PLAYER ship crashing against a turret. That made the game crash.

Btw, this problem is not on the Macross mod, in fact all of the 6 turrets of the Macross ship itself are working and don't suffer from this problem. I have this problem in EVERY Homeworld2 ships i converted.

p.s. my Macross mod is on hold, until i find someone who is willing to fred missions... for the rest is 99% finished.

[ryuune75]

Originally posted by Vasudan Admiral
heh, just ran a quick test, and you're right - both ways work.

the only thing left i can think of that could be an issue is screwed up barrel geometry. there's not a lot left that could be wrong.

That could be. I didn't model any of those ship/turrets, i just take the mesh and put them into Freespace2 (the one i'm finding problems on are the ones from Homeworld2)

[karajorma]

Okay. I'm at a loss here. I just rebuilt the GTC Great Big Cube and I'm getting the crashes on hitting the turrets again. I've tried building it the way suggested on the this thread, the way I suggest in the turreting tutorial and several other way and I'm still getting crashes.

No idea what I've done differently today that I haven't done previously.

The crashes seem to occur if you smack into the part where the turrets and turret barrels intersect. I actually found it quite hard to crash the game (on one occasion I was bashing into the turret for over a minute before the game crashed). So I guess it's not a problem that is going to come up often.

Anyway since I've now infected myself with this problem too I don't think I'm in any position to give advice on how to solve it.  Oddly enough none of my earlier models seem to suffer from this problem.