[Getter Robo G]

Trek in Fs2?

  Never happen...





I will never match Omniscaper's efforts, but I try.



I've got a 4-5 year jump on you but have come from the opposite way.
Models first! No assets = no mod. Plus I don't know how.
I focused on weapons and ships and a general outline of what sorts of arcs the campaign involves.

Other than that since I had no assistance, nothing has been done aside from me still securing permissions and making conversions...

Plus PCS2 doesn't work on my system for making COBs into POFs I have to use MV or PCS1, that realy slows me down so I probably have a few hundred half converted assests scattered across 6 drives.

Plus since Jan, RL pretty much sucks right now...

[starlord]

those ships still leave me awed...

[Napseeker]

Pretty nice!  Is there a thread dedicated to your trek game anywhere?  Would be interested in playing this at some point if you also have plans on turning yours into a standalone.

@starlord: I do have screenshots for ST:Invasion (from many years ago) I think at one point I was going to recreate some of the fighters from that game although eventually gave up since I couldn't get enough angles of the ships for a decent modelling reference.  Also I ended up only wanting to focus only on ships that were either in DS9 or in ST:Armada rather than go too overboard on a ton of ships.  As mentioned, this wouldn't be much of a space sim so much as a more arcade-ish type battle.  Anyone who ever played my original mod, Invasion of Cardassia, would know sort of what I am aiming for here.

@whitelight: yes, that's the site!  It's too bad the link to Omniscraper's conversions are dead though. Anyone know how many models he ended up converting or if his files are still archived anywhere?  I really hate it when someone goes to a lot of trouble to convert assets and then over the years all that work is lost and seemingly gone forever.  If I can find them, I'll upload them to one of the more larger FS2 hosting sites to make sure they stick around for other future trek modders.

UPDATE: so far I've now gotten the non-debug version of FRED to run standalone, and I can make a mission that uses a few ships.  I had to extract out the Defiant, Vorcha and Galaxy from the trek.vp and make a smaller, more manageable vp of my own to work with, but I was quite pleased that I'm at least able to do some FREDing!

When I run the other versions of FSO or Fred however, I keep getting these error messages:
Unable to load starfield bitmap: 'dneb01'!
(Where is this dneb01?  I found no trace of it in BTRL at all anywhere)

[karajorma]

dneb01 is the first nebula referenced by the FS2 stars.tbl. You should probably start replacing those with more Trekish versions anyway.

[Napseeker]

Ah thanks - found it and fixed it!

Do beam weapons in FS2 rely on a POF model?  I noticed that when I fire my phasers, the game crashes. In the weapons file, the reference is a bit confusing as it says:

$Model File: none ; laser1-1.pof

It looks like it uses "none" and that laser1-1.pof is commented out, but I'm not 100% sure as I've put in the other required assets other than this pof, yet I get a crash.  I can recreate this model I'm sure but I'd like to be sure it is the cause.  Every use of a beam weapon seems to specify the model file in this way, which seems odd unless there's a reason why the pof is included.

EDIT: also if it is in the FS2 assets, can anyone tell me if it's a cylinder or a flat plane?

[Aardwolf]

Beams don't use model files, just the textures. Semicolons ( ; )  mark off comments.

[Napseeker]

Thanks - I must be missing something else related to the beams then... 

[Dragon]

Beam weapons can use models ,but they are not shown.
Try to change none to some random model and check if this works.
You will not see this model ,but it can make things easier.

[Flaming_Sword]

When in doubt, copy/paste stuff that works

[Napseeker]

Oh I've copied and pasted, believe me.... my eyes are bleeding from how much I've randomly tried stuff to get past each bug.

Update: I do now have my mini-Trek mission running standalone (with a Peregrine squad fighting it out with a Vorcha). The techroom, options, etc. all work fine and no, I do not look forward to the months ahead as I will have to replace all the screenies with a Trek-style theme.   I had been hoping that maybe there was some "fat" that I could trim from the BTRL demo so I could reduce the amount of recreation required but as it turns out, aside from the obvious BSG-specific additions, the BTRL gang already did a really good job at making a very lean and mean standalone game.  I pretty much ended up copying over 85% of what was in BTRL in order to get it stable enough to play (and then of course merged in a few of the ships and weapons from the Unimatrix TC mod).

The phaser (beam) crash only seems to happen when my phaser actually hits another ship.  If I fire it off into empty space, no probs but if the beam collides with an enemy or friendly, it's crash to desktop time.  This is while running the Release version.  In the debug version, I can't even get into the mission since I am stopped out by an assert that says:
Assert: bm_bitmaps[bitmapnum].handle == handle

Without a debugger, I can only guess that maybe the handle = 0 or -1 but presumably it's an indicator of some other underlying problem that may be related to the crash too.  I put in all the background bitmaps into the VP (blue, red, planet) and my fs2 mission uses a few of them for the background, so not sure here.

So close... so close....

[The E]

This is just a bit of random guessing, but maybe you should take a look at the Babylon Project's Minbari fighter weapons. Those are pretty phaser-y, and they don't crash the game.

[Napseeker]

Cool, okay I'll do that....

EDIT: Hmmmm, still no luck.  Is the source code for 3.6.9 available for download in rar or zip from anywhere?  I realize it's under source control but I wouldn't have the foggiest idea of how to grab the code that is based on the 3.6.9_stable_build.rar I downloaded already.  At least if I had the source I could understand what the beam implementation was looking for as it loads and what I might be missing.

[karajorma]

I don't know where you could get a matching codebase as a download. The BtRL one might be close but I don't know if I even still have that uploaded.

That said using SVN to get hold of it is easy. Follow this guide but instead of checking out HEAD select revision 3825 instead.

Although I don't know why you haven't moved up to 3.6.10 instead. It's much better.

[Napseeker]

Okay, let me look into SVN...

I was thinking about switching to 3.6.10 but being a worrywart, I thought it might be safer to stick with the same version that came with BTRL (or I guess not exactly the same, I didn't notice until the other night that the exes I got from the main page's download weren't the same exes as what came with BTRL).

After still getting nowhere this morning, I think I'm going to first start from scratch and just see if I can get a phaser working in BTRL instead.  There's just something I've done wrong somewhere and the beams keep crashing the game.     I did manage to get the Vipers to use the training beam DET-21 so I do know BTRL itself can handle beams fine.

UPDATE: Okay, phasers seem to be working on AI, no crashing.... have Mirandas and Vorchas blowing each other up, so seems good.

[chief1983]

FS2 Open 3.6.9 Source tarball

From the Current OS X and Linux versions post on Cross Platform Dev

[Getter Robo G]

So basicly ATM your modding a mod?(BTRL)

I started from regular 3.1 and now use 3.9

Well you got teh phase thign solved, good.

I was going to post my hybrid-Omni phaser for caps and my conversion of TBP Nial beam for fighter phasers (I asked for permission). But seems your all set now...

Let me know when you get to animated torps, I was working on 12 or so... Had 5 finished I think including fighter variants.

Yes, my Trek weapons test is still on youtube...

[Napseeker]

FS2 Open 3.6.9 Source tarball

From the Current OS X and Linux versions post on Cross Platform Dev

I saw that download before, but I couldn't figure out what tool would be needed to unpack the archive. I'm familiar with .tar files but is there a Windows app that can handle .bz2?

Otherwise, progress has been good: I've created a number of small combat missions and everything appears to be loading with no major debug warnings.  It's running standalone perfectly on my PC, no doubt due to the stability of BTRL itself.  I'm starting to convert my own Trek models over to POF to replace the Unimatrix ones, and putting in my own effects.  I still have some remaining questions that hopefully someone can answer:

- I've read over the FRED cookbook in Karajorma's FAQ and was really impressed by the examples. Other than the regular walkthrough, are there other FRED cookbooks online?  I already have a ton of questions about how to do various things with FRED and using SEXP, but I don't want to re-ask questions that have probably been asked/answered already.  And yes, I am going through all the postings in the FRED forum to learn by what's already been asked from years back.

- speaking of which, so far I haven't come across an answer to this:  I'd like to have a large ongoing battle between two fleets as the player is busy flying about accomplishing his task. The problem is, as I understand there's a limit to how many ships in total one can have in a mission (around 100?).  I'd like to set it up so that when a ship dies (on either side), it goes through the process of exploding, but is then resurrected and randomly placed somewhere in space so that it can then return back to fighting. That way, the appearance is of an ongoing background battle with seemingly limitless ships until the gamer has finished his task...

- is there any way to set up a restriction for all ships, including the player, that they cannot completely roll their ship or do a loop whereby they ultimately end up "upside-down" from their initial orientation?  Most battles on Trek (tv and film) typically keep both parties "right-side up" so that you don't have the Enterprise facing against say a Klingon ship that appears upside-down from their perspective.  There is a command in FRED under the ship editing's Misc section which says "Doesn't bank when turning" but even with it checked on, I've noticed that in-game it doesn't entirely prevent banking and yes, I do still end up upside-down.  It's a pain to have to constantly roll my ship after an engagement to return to the up-side orientation again.  It's very un-Trek like, regardless of the realities of 3d space combat, so I'm hoping to find a way to limit rolling.

[chief1983]

It's BZip2 or Bourne Zip 2.  7-zip (which you should be using ) can handle it and GNU Zip (.tar.gz, .tgz).  .tar.bz2 is just the other one, they each have their strengths.  But yeah, use 7-zip.

[Getter Robo G]

That's BS (or rather misinformation).

back in DTP3.1 build I was making a Robotech mission (Blind Game) where you get ambushed in an asteroid field and three main characters get kidnapped for 3-4 months. You're part of the escort wing and witness it.

Took me over 10 Hour to get the placement of the asteroids just right to hide the enemy cap ship (like in the episode) but kinda obvious, "Why are there so many rocks clumped together almost like a huge mass?"

Anyway i was doing other stuff and when I finally tested it again there was an error.

All the asteroids I laced turned into FIGHTERS! I had 300+ more enemy fighters attacking 12 friendles!




I did not crash! I couldn't do ****, but I did take a few screnies. That's what got me testing BOE type missions 100 vs 100 ect (200 total)...





And this was back on a PII 400 / 32mb ati card/ 256mb board memory I think.

The problem is the CPU is controlling all those AI's, plus all the turrets and subsytems on cap ships, PLUS all the firing efects (only so many can be rendered at once).

Any of those stress the engine out for random crashes...

[chief1983]

Looks like you ran full speed into the object limits to me.