Author Topic: Destroyer Revamp WIP  (Read 7664 times)

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Offline gevatter Lars

  • Another wingnut
  • 213
    • http://gevatter_lars.tripod.com/
StarLancer is its own universe...just as a sidenote.
Still StarLancer was a nice game and had some kinda interesting looking ships. A StarLancer mod would be nice.
"Yes! That is my plan, and I see nothing wrong with it. I figure that if I stick to a stupid strategy long enough it might start to work."
 - comment to "Robotech: The Masters"

 

Offline --Steve-O--

  • 28
  • I might be the last man on earth to use TS3.2
this thing is screwed...... :mad:

it converts with both PCS1 and 2, no hassle. but the moment i try to plop it down in Fred....immediate crash. when i try to view it in the tech room (changed POF in the table) immediate crash. i even tried loading just the hull and made a table saying that it is nothing more than a nav buoy, it crashed once, then actually loaded the model but at 1/8 the size, missing parts and textures both mine and even ones in the MVP files. if any body is up to taking a look at this mess i would be ecstatic cuz with now this model is nothing more than taunting eye candy, and i have no clue what is going on with it.
"And so they dwelled in filth, on worlds made of dirt and feces, and there they lay until they stumbled into the skies." --the Mad Prophet

 

Offline Water

  • 210
ok - I'll take a look

 

Offline --Steve-O--

  • 28
  • I might be the last man on earth to use TS3.2
much appreciation  :D

here's a link to the RAR containg what i firmly believe and might just be the gate to hell itself.

http://www.mediafire.com/?3kheljmmzdm

i'll keep slugging it out with this beast over here as well.
"And so they dwelled in filth, on worlds made of dirt and feces, and there they lay until they stumbled into the skies." --the Mad Prophet

 

Offline Water

  • 210
Noticing quite a few modeling errors - boolian type stuff. Which version of truespace are you using?

 

Offline --Steve-O--

  • 28
  • I might be the last man on earth to use TS3.2
TS 3.2
"And so they dwelled in filth, on worlds made of dirt and feces, and there they lay until they stumbled into the skies." --the Mad Prophet

 

Offline Water

  • 210
You may need to change either how you model or the modeling package. Only use boolean functions if you are willing to edit/tidy up at the poly/vertex level. Sometimes letting the game engine work out some of the intersections may cause less problems than Truespace's attempt.

Also if you never see a poly in game - then you can delete it. For example the 14 polies under the turret base(x10) etc...

Got your pof in game after re-saving with PCS2, and yes most of the bits had disappeared.

Got the hull in game and then got the skirt in game. Both of these were re uv- mapped (auto with single texture - Blender)

Made a temp table and attacked the ship - most of the turrets were invisible so it was hard to tell which ones were firing.

PCS2 has error checking stuff to catch problems. But all automated fixers are there to catch the occasional error. TS3 does not do booleans very well - and you have done quite a few. For an object that gets copied multiple times like a turret, it pays to get the first one right.



At the end of the day it's FSO that chooses if a pof is usable, not PCS.
( 1k for a gun barrel is high poly  :nod: )

So it is fixable with a bit of effort - but I don't think Truespace 3.2 is the App to use. I would recommend Blender (but maybe not to a Truespace user) - possibly try Wings3D. Use it to fix the mesh and then re-import to Truespace.

Nice ship  ;)


 

Offline --Steve-O--

  • 28
  • I might be the last man on earth to use TS3.2
yeah, i am actually looking into moving up to a newer TS. 5 or 6 haven't decided yet. i had wings, the interface was unbearable. i actually downloaded blender yesterday and tinkered with it a bit. Now, if i import it into blender and hammer out the bugs, will it preserve all my UV information? or will it get tossed? also what were the catastrophic errors that caused it to crash? or was it cumulative effort of numerous errors? and another good question...what parts where the most dodgy? i've still got the model in a textured pre-union format so i'f all else fails i can toss the current pieces and start out semi fresh without loosing to much. as for that turret, i just checked it and i found why it was drawing "funky faces".  so that i'm sure i can fix it easy with some line draws.

thanks for looking into it
"And so they dwelled in filth, on worlds made of dirt and feces, and there they lay until they stumbled into the skies." --the Mad Prophet

 

Offline Water

  • 210
yeah, i am actually looking into moving up to a newer TS. 5 or 6 haven't decided yet. i had wings, the interface was unbearable. i actually downloaded blender yesterday and tinkered with it a bit. Now, if i import it into blender and hammer out the bugs, will it preserve all my UV information? or will it get tossed? also what were the catastrophic errors that caused it to crash? or was it cumulative effort of numerous errors? and another good question...what parts where the most dodgy? i've still got the model in a textured pre-union format so i'f all else fails i can toss the current pieces and start out semi fresh without loosing to much. as for that turret, i just checked it and i found why it was drawing "funky faces".  so that i'm sure i can fix it easy with some line draws.

thanks for looking into it
Well Blenders cob import isn't the best. Although it brings in the uv info, it thows out the material list. Obj is better for importing. It's more hotkey orentated, so unless you learn them the interface is not useful, but fast when you do.

I think it may be cumulative errors, anywhere you used Boolean ops. With the colours Blender uses I can find/see the problems easily enough.

When I re uv mapped the hull and skirt with a single material - all the parts showed up in Freepace. So maybe FSO has a problem with faces with no material? Before you start fixing the mesh - Assign everything to one texture map and test it out.


 

Offline --Steve-O--

  • 28
  • I might be the last man on earth to use TS3.2
up date.
i tried assigning a single map, still wouldn't load in fred. so i took it apart and started feeding it bit by bit into the engine to see what part makes it crash, or atleast what bits show rendering issues in fred. all the parts loaded fine into fred, i then started adding the parts back together and feeding it though, a few pieces added at a timei got nearly the whole hull into fred with no issues (after i corrected and replaced some parts), but when i introduced the main hull it crashed. i reverese ordered it and attatched every thing to the hull and it crashed when i added one the last few bits, one of the main engines. so some of it goes in, but not all. next stop is to rework that main hull...even looking at the geom on that makes me shudder.
"And so they dwelled in filth, on worlds made of dirt and feces, and there they lay until they stumbled into the skies." --the Mad Prophet

 

Offline --Steve-O--

  • 28
  • I might be the last man on earth to use TS3.2
i have a theory, to many polygons on one total object of the mesh. i just tested it, when it loads, the poly count is around 8500. so  i left the main hull out, but copied and glued a bunch of parts to the overall mesh and pushed the hull count above 10,000. crash.
so i know more or less its not the main hull, cuz it wasn't even present and all parts used were certified as stable enough. so could this be it then?
"And so they dwelled in filth, on worlds made of dirt and feces, and there they lay until they stumbled into the skies." --the Mad Prophet

 

Offline Vasudan Admiral

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    • Twisted Infinities
Nope. The game handles many more polys than that just fine. I've managed to get a 230 000 poly test model working before. Your problem will almost certainly be an unstable mesh, and by the sounds of it, more than one piece.

When you say you were 'gluing a bunch of parts to the overall mesh', can you get a screenie of the hierarchy used?
Get the 2014 Media VPs and report any bugs you find in them to the FSU Mantis so that we may squish them. || Blender to POF model conversion guide
Twisted Infinities

 

Offline Water

  • 210
i have a theory, to many polygons on one total object of the mesh. i just tested it, when it loads, the poly count is around 8500. so  i left the main hull out, but copied and glued a bunch of parts to the overall mesh and pushed the hull count above 10,000. crash.
so i know more or less its not the main hull, cuz it wasn't even present and all parts used were certified as stable enough. so could this be it then?
If you were using PCS1 then yes, it only handles about 9k or so. (per sub-object) PCS2 doesn't have a problem.

 

Offline --Steve-O--

  • 28
  • I might be the last man on earth to use TS3.2
Victory!
i still have to clean up the mesh a bit more... but here it is!
here's the kicker... all i had to do really to fix it has break up the sub objects into groups with poly counts less than 10,000. so the engines went into one group, the skirts into another and the main hull being just that, the main hull. this was all done with PCS1. i still dont know why PCS2 butchered it though. i do know i erradicated some horendous geometry and fixed the turrets, so maybe that had a huge hand in it. i would like to thank all of you especially water for helping me out with this bugger.
so yeah, screen shot to celebrate!
"And so they dwelled in filth, on worlds made of dirt and feces, and there they lay until they stumbled into the skies." --the Mad Prophet

 

Offline Vasudan Admiral

  • Member
  • 211
    • Twisted Infinities
If PCS2 butchered it, then it almost certainly had a reason I'm afraid. Can you try opening the model in a debug fred build and checking for any errors that appear there? Also I'd suggest extensive ramming and shooting collision tests all over the hull, especially at potentially problematic places like intersections and stuff.

The latest builds of PCS1 did have pretty solid BSP compilation, but if the model really was stable it should have converted in PCS2 - which makes me a bit suspicious of it having worked in PCS1.
Get the 2014 Media VPs and report any bugs you find in them to the FSU Mantis so that we may squish them. || Blender to POF model conversion guide
Twisted Infinities

 

Offline Kazan

  • PCS2 Wizard
  • 212
  • Soul lives in the Mountains
    • http://alliance.sourceforge.net
when PCS2 takes a butcher knife to your model it means it's screaming at you about bad geometry
PCS2 2.0.3 | POF CS2 wiki page | Important PCS2 Threads | PCS2 Mantis

"The Mountains are calling, and I must go" - John Muir

 

Offline Water

  • 210
i still have to clean up the mesh a bit more... but here it is!
Umm... I think Steve has got the point already  :p
(TS3.2+Boolean=fix intersections)

 

Offline Vasudan Admiral

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    • Twisted Infinities
Well the issue is more that he's implying the solution involves using PCS1 over PCS2, because ideally you want to fix the model to the point where PCS2 can convert it correctly rather than settling for a result that may only half work or something. :)
Get the 2014 Media VPs and report any bugs you find in them to the FSU Mantis so that we may squish them. || Blender to POF model conversion guide
Twisted Infinities

  

Offline Water

  • 210
Doesn't using Truespace3.2 with anything newer than PCS1 create a time paradox or something   :lol: