[nexiusevaro]

Hello everyone,

I have been lurking around for some time and have found that almost every question i had has an answer somewhere in the forums.   

Brief background info:  I was looking for a space sim to mod and mess around with and after an internet and gamestore search ended up stumbling across the SCP.  Fairly good day that was!  I had played fs extensively back in the day (went by the handle Hack -not so much to annoy and confuse people, but more due to the fact that i learned the game in multiplayer and considered myself pretty much a hack at it for quite some time.)   So, in a nutshell, to see all that has been done with fs1 and fs2 through the SCP was just one of the coolest things ever for me.  My gratitude and appreciation to all of you who worked and continue to work on it.  %^#$&*$ fantastic find for me!

Other background stuff.. My first experience modding was on bf1942, particularly in the GC mod.  I ended up joining the GCX team and helped out with single player coding work and built a few vehicles (inc: the ATPT, Storm, ARC 170, etc.)  I worked in 3ds max and photoshop, doing all the bits pretty much myself (modifying code, building meshes, weapon work, texturing, skinning; mainly to learn...  Had a lot of help learning my way through too... don't get me wrong.  Theres a website still up that details some of the adventure, but its pretty sophmoric compared to what goes on around here =) 

My question is this (aims at VA.)  I have moved to blender for obvious reasons and am working my way through the learning curve.  I dl'd the script to export with and it seems to work fine in my initial forays.  My question is this:  are you able to texture in blender and then export to cob and do heirarchy in pcs or is there another (better) way of doing the process.  Blender looks like it will work similarly to 3ds max for mapping and texturing, but i haven't gotten that far with it and was wondering about a good flow plan for texturing etc before I start that part of the process....

Thanks for all the help you all have already given me and not known it!   

nex

ahhhh the modify button.... another question posted below when i was edit button blind....

nex

[nexiusevaro]

oh and one other thing i was wondering about....

is there i reliable way to get the cobs into blender that are already in game?  I managed to do it once... wanted to have a ship in so i could look at materials, scale, lods, etc and I honestly cant figure out how i did it... think i used gmax or some program in the tools folder, I ended up importing to blender in an .x format i think.... 

just wondered how you guys get stuff out of fs2 and into blender preserving as much as possible (so us noobs could mess around with the stock ships and have the basics already there when we alter and reload) ?

thanks

nex

[Oddgrim]

Yes there is a way to keep textures intact but Blenders .cob export doesn't  keep the uv-mapping in my experience so I use this method:

Blender export to direct x then I use a program called Deep Exploration 5 to convert it to .cob format.
I do hierarchy editing in TS (copy turrets and LODs) Save as .cob and use PCS2 to save file as .pof
Does that answer your question?

[Water]

The export script handles uv fine.

You must select all objects and hit CTRL-A ( applies rotation and scaling) The mesh dosen't need a real Blender material - as long as it has a texture in the uv map window it will be fine.

There is an import script - I can upload it later today.  The current version of PCS2 has a semi broken "save as cob" feature. PCS1 handles exporting to cob older models but can't handle the newer high poly stuff.

For "concept" textures Blender has Texture Paint. It is really good with organic stuff (characters) not so good with straight lines (panel stuff) Works best with a graphics tablet - Once complete the texture can be finished in a paint program.

Also Blender can generate ambient occulusion maps very easily now.

Edit: The import script is not great but it does bring in the mesh and uv (eg it loses the materials)



[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Vasudan Admiral]

You worked on the GC/GCX mod? Wow. I loved those mods.

s there i reliable way to get the cobs into blender that are already in game?

Getting existing models into Blender is a bit tricky unfortunately. In fact I find it a lot harder than exporting them, mainly because Blender lacks good reliable import scripts when it comes to textures. Your best bet that I've found thus far is to use deep exploration to save the cob as an OBJ and import that into blender. You'll then have to manually figure out which textures go where. It kinda sucks.

Water, I'd like to see how well the COB import script works in that regard - I'd be very grateful if you could upload it.

are you able to texture in blender and then export to cob and do heirarchy in pcs or is there another (better) way of doing the process.

If you're using Waters modified export script as it sounds like you are, then you've pretty much got it right there. One thing to watch for is that the script makes each subsequent object selection a child of the previous. This doesn't matter (since you'll be shifting it all around in PCS2) until you get to the very end of that list, where the script puts the last two objects into one. If you have any twin barreled turrets on your model, a good way to handle this glitch is to make each turret arm (only on that one turret!) a separate object and select them last. This way, the export will merge them back into the single object they should be.

Blender looks like it will work similarly to 3ds max for mapping and texturing, but i haven't gotten that far with it and was wondering about a good flow plan for texturing etc before I start that part of the process....

Not quite sure what you mean here, but my texturing workflow is basically this:
Model > UV unwrap checking for problems in the model the whole way > export UV map as TGA and reapply this to the model > bake a nice ambient occlusion map to a separate image file of the same resolution as the UV map to use as an overlay in the main texture > separate sections of UV map into different layer groups > paint on the textures for each one starting with basic colour and plate lines and going from there > apply AO map as lighting overlay layer on the texture > tweak until insane.

[Water]

VA - script attached to prev message now.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Thanks.

[nexiusevaro]

VA - thanks for the info!  Had a good deal of fun with gc/gcx... ended up breaking and fixing things far more than i played overall tho.  Kinda where i see my fs skills going.... I'll post the site link that details my gcx stuff if ya want, just need to peek it over first.  Its mainly just a page i could show people that basically explained things so i could go on and on ad nauseum about what i was doing and the glazed look i got would be accompanied by some idea what i was blathering about. ...

water - thx for the upload!

I appreciate the help and if there are tuts on any of this please feel free to refer me and not go over stuff thats been hashed to death.  Tried to do my homework, but there's a massive amount of stuff to learn changing platforms (esp for a relative nooblet.)

Last question - any suggestions for a relatively safe work area?  Do you guys generally fred up a simple mission and apply ship changes there or create a minimod and apply them in that environment?  Just looking to try to add some simple ships and see how things go together mainly (and don't want to implode my version of fs open in the process.)

thanks for your quick responses and advice

nex

[chief1983]

First off,



Now that that's out of the way, I just thought I'd see if you were interested in helping with another Star Wars mod, in any capacity.  Fate of the Galaxy is always looking for help, and we could always use someone who's got experience with the Star Wars universe.  Regardless, welcome to HLP, glad you found the place!

[Water]

Last question - any suggestions for a relatively safe work area?  Do you guys generally fred up a simple mission and apply ship changes there or create a minimod and apply them in that environment?  Just looking to try to add some simple ships and see how things go together mainly (and don't want to implode my version of fs open in the process.)

Having a seperate mod dir is recommended. Over time you end up testing/breaking stuff. It's better to have several test mod dirs in different states of chaos than messing with the FS/MVP dirs. I tend to use the launcher to keep swapping between them.

[Vasudan Admiral]

If you want a simplistic overview of the FS data structure: (there's probably stuff in here you already know, but I've put it in just in case. )
It all centres around the tables. The most important ones are the ships.tbl and weapons.tbl.

In terms of how new ships are handled - the ship will have an entry in the ships.tbl which will follows a rough layout (you can find all the information on the layout in the wiki here. It looks very scary, but really it's piss easy.

Typically, people just copy & paste an existing table entry of a similar ship and then change the bits they need to. After you've copied one, all you need to change to actually get a new model game ready is:
$Name: UniqueShipNameHere
$POF file: FilenameHere.pof
(The tables are just text files BTW. They need no special tools to edit.)

Aside from the table entry, a new ship will consist of a model file (.POF type, and stored in data/models) and whatever textures it needs (.DDS type, stored in data/maps).

The POF file contains a lot of the ships raw data, such as the mesh, textures, UVs, subobjects, shields, LODs and debris, as well as a lot of other stuff such as subsystems, dockpoints, attack paths, firepoints, turrets etc. To create POF files you use the Pof Constructor Suite 2 (PCS2) to convert a properly set up .COB or .SCN file. Since PCS2 allows you to edit the subobject hierarchy now, you don't have to worry about setting it up in the cob or scn. The main tutorials on the actual conversion I'd recommend are Bobboau's PCS1 reference guide (the same stuff still applies to PCS2, it just has a better interface) here: http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/blackwater/fstut/fstut_index01.htm and Karajorma's turretting tutorial (mainly focusses on hierarchy, and does so in the horribly buggy truespace 3.2, but it might help anyway) here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/FAQ/shipmods.html

Once you've done all that and have your new ship modelled, mapped, poffed and tabled up ready to go, you get it in-game by placing it in a mission (assuming you don't just want to release it at that stage). The missions are created in FRED 2 - which comes with an excellent tutorial in the help file.

And that's about it. There is of course a LOT more detail to every aspect I've covered here, but that's the basic gist of FS modding.

Finally, a couple of notes:
1) The collision mesh used in game is just the visible model - there's no need to make a separate optimised mesh for such purposes.

2) VP packages are just container files - in them they contain the same data folder structure as in the main FS install path.

3) Use TBMs (modular tables) if you want to add individual ships. TBMS get appended to the main table, whereas TBL files overwrite each other. You can read up on TBMs here, but the main things about them is that their filename is "WhateverYouWant-shp.tbm". The -shp tells the game which table it should be appended to.
As for their contents, it's just:
#Ship Classes
< ship data as it would appear in the ships.tbl>
#End

[nexiusevaro]

Wow

VA !   Thanks for the breakdown, that's damn helpful!  I have been unpacking things and looking around a bit for textures etc. will be nice to have a guide at hand when i do it again.  Appreciate the advice on how to set up a workspace as well.

Chief, Thx welcome!  I am still pretty green with this new environment to be of any use to you guys, but i will let ya know if i think of anything i think i can help with.  I will look over your guys' mod a bit more in the meantime.  I did let Dnamro have my sw models for the new bf2142 star wars mod, doubt there's much there that will be of use to em given the quality of work they are doing now and i doubt they would be of much use to use guys anyway ... I can't remember the name of the new bf2142 sw mod but ill look it up and post it below.  They have a fairly fantastic preview vid. 

OK here's their site:   http://www.moddb.com/mods/6512/first-strike

Here is the link to my old modding update site...  it had a crap load of spelling errors and reads like it was written by a 10 year old, but it has a few moments of amusement for those who've stayed up way to late and find stupid stuff amusing.... it's prolly best read in such a state actually...

http://www.angelfire.com/ak5/nexiusevaro/

not at all 56k friendly and rife with popups but... it's free....

regards,

nex