[Grizzly]

I am very intrested in the HTL'ing of the Serapis, the Vesudan Advanced Interceptor which happens to be my favorite fighter (Because it resembles the Mitshubishu A6M5 Zero, the fragile but extremely agile and deadly Japanese WOII fighter).

So... Could someone fill me in on the progress?

[Vasudan Admiral]

Err, well Taristin HTLed it ages ago - it's been in the MVPs ever since.

[Ransom]

It's borderline unusable due to clipping errors, though.

[Cobra]

I never noticed any problems with shooting down Serapis fighter except for the one in Procyon Insurgency.

[Ransom]

I tried fighting a wing of them earlier and could barely manage to bring one's shields down. Nine out of ten shots just passed straight through it.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Well I'll look into it then. We don't (well.....err, usually ) make a whole new model because an existing one has clipping errors.

[colecampbell666]

The Aten?

And my Serapis is fine.

[CP5670]

The Serapis model is particularly bad with this, enough to have a significant impact on the balance and difficulty of some missions. It has caused me to waste a lot of time in the past trying to figure out why some of my missions behaved differently at times than they usually do.

I never noticed any problems with shooting down Serapis fighter except for the one in Procyon Insurgency.

That one is identical to the normal media VP model, just with different textures. I removed it from the campaign when I found out what was going on.

[Vasudan Admiral]

This is kinda concerning then - I extensively tested all possible HTLed ships for collision errors months ago and fixed the ones that issues appeared on. The Serapis was among those I tested, but I found absolutely no evidence of any problems with ramming and shooting from all angles.

If I've managed to miss an issue as large as the ones reported here on the Serapis, it makes me wonder what else might have slipped through.

From FSU internal, this is the list I've been keeping of collision errors. Has anyone experienced errors with the crossed out ships on the 'possibly broken' section other than the Serapis? We need to smite these errors for the next release.

===============
List of broken ships:

Aten (Rebuild completed)
Apollo (Not looked into this yet, but it's reported in the main forum thread that it's ghosting)
Hecate (Fixed  in "FixedPofs1.0)
Faustus (Fixed  in "FixedPofs1.0)
Sobek (Fixed  in "FixedPofs1.0)
Dis (Fixed  in "FixedPofs1.0)
SAC3 (Fixed  in "FixedPofs1.0)
Zephyrus Not worth the huge effort involved in fixing for now.


List of possibly broken ships: (ie, stuff that was converted with the pof exporter. Most I think are fine, but I'll check them out.)

Ursa
Pegassus (Slight ghosting on the tip of the nose but otherwise ok)
Amazon
Satis
Anuket
Mara
Ares
Erinyes
Perseus
Mjolnir
Serapis
Medusa
===============

[Galemp]

Hmm. Given the problems I've been encountering recently (that have nothing to do with specific models) I think the issues may be code-based. As more and more high-poly ships are being used, I think it's the engine itself that's not calculating things properly.

We should run some tests... my hypothesis is that with only a few ships in a mission everything will work fine, but with five or six wings of high-poly fighters, half a dozen high-poly freighters, and three or four high-poly capships (such that the polycount of all ships in a single mission exceeds 100k) there could be problems.

[haloboy100]

Well now. Looks like the Freespace engine is finally feeling itself under the SCP's heel

[CP5670]

From FSU internal, this is the list I've been keeping of collision errors. Has anyone experienced errors with the crossed out ships on the 'possibly broken' section other than the Serapis? We need to smite these errors for the next release.

I have noticed some holes on the Satis (in the fifth mission of PI, for example), although they aren't quite as severe as on some of the other ships.

This is all on the 3.6.9 VPs by the way. I haven't tested the 3.6.10 set much, if any models have been changed in that.

[colecampbell666]

Thank God. The Aten is fixed!

[Cobra]

Uhh. No. The Aten is still a ghost ship, as is the Sobek. (partially.)

[Snail]

Apparently il y a un new version in the works.

[colecampbell666]

Uhh. No. The Aten is still a ghost ship, as is the Sobek. (partially.)

Never had problems with the Sobek. Anyway...

D'accord.

[haloboy100]

Damn French Canadiens

[Vasudan Admiral]

Thank God. The Aten is fixed!

Well.....not so much it seems. The new model has no collision mesh errors, but it seems to have somehow developed the ability to cripple the rendering of weapon effects, weapon impact effects and particle spews, but all only when it is on the right hand side of the players screen! Rotate it to be on the left and all works as it should. I have never seen anything like it. :\

[colecampbell666]

Mantis?

[Vasudan Admiral]

It's definitely a problem with that particular POF, rather than the engine - using the old Aten model gets rid of all the effect rendering issues (but reintroduces the totally fly-through model problems obviously).

Really this kind of effect rendering problem shouldn't be physically possible to get from a POF, yet that's what's happening plain as day.