[Enioch]

Hello, people!

I've run into a snag while trying to test-export our first Renegade Legion ship to FSO. The problem is this:

In the RL universe, ships use 'broadsides' of laser guns, synchronized to fire together, like old ships-of-the-line. The obvious solution to that problem is to create a turret model that spans the length of the ship with firing points  at regular intervals and 'salvo mode' enabled.

Thus far, all's good. The turret works perfectly. 

However. 

The length of the turret is a problem, in that the FSO (or PCS2, I dunno what to blame) creates cubic 'bounding boxes' for turrets based on the submodel radius -the distance from the center of the model to the furthest vertex. Which means that, since my turret is pretty long, it gets a bounding box about 400 meters on every side. Which, of course, extends to the other side of the model.

So, I get a situation where a fighter fires at the starboard laser guns of a capital ship and also damages the port guns, since their bounding box extends to the starboard side...

This, of course, is highly unrealistic, as you can probably figure out for yourselves. If I'm firing at you from the right, I should damage only your guns on the right, not blow holes into your left side...

My question is this:

Is there any way to manually adjust the dimensions of a bounding box, or force the engine to register hits on a turret only when the turret model itself is hit?

Thanks!

[pecenipicek]

fix up your model. that shouldnt happen unless you have very glaring mesh problems and/or stray vertices/polys in the mesh.

[Enioch]

How does the integrity of the mesh come into it? I can't guarantee that there aren't any problems, of course, and I'll definitely look into it, but I don't get it.

Is it possible that you misunderstood? My shots aren't 'flying through' the ship. There are no collision errors. But when my shots hit the hull of the warship that lies within the limits of the turret bounding box, damage gets carried to the turret.

[Sushi]

Isn't there a flag or something that forces FS to look for submodel collisions before doing damage, instead of just using the distance between the impact point and the submodel center?

[Enioch]

Is there? I looked in the wiki, and couldn't find it.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Do you have the pivot of the turret set to it's center? If so you should not be getting a bounding box that wide.

[blowfish]

No, I'm pretty sure PCS2 calculates the bounding box based on the actual dimensions of the subobject, otherwise everything we have would have perfectly square bboxes (take a look at a few models - they don't).  Make sure the object center is where you want it to be, and that there isn't any extraneous geometry floating around anywhere.

[Droid803]

I don't think its the bounding box, but rather the radius.
FSO applies damage to subsystems based on radius by defualt, IIRC.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

No radius is used for special point subsystems.  Subobject based subsystem use the actual mesh for detection if done right. 

[bobbtmann]

I've had problems with the bounding boxes before with the Carrack. Not the same problems, mind you. I wanted to have the turret model really big so that when it blew up it took a chunk out of the ship, but the interpreted turret would actually be really small. Visually it was convincing, but the target's bounding box betrayed the real size of the turret mesh.

As far as I could tell, there is no way to manually alter the size of a bounding box. In your case, however, the mesh might have some stray vertices lying about.

[Aardwolf]

I've had problems with the bounding boxes before with the Carrack. Not the same problems, mind you. I wanted to have the turret model really big so that when it blew up it took a chunk out of the ship, but the interpreted turret would actually be really small. Visually it was convincing, but the target's bounding box betrayed the real size of the turret mesh.

I reckon you could do some very clever POF-ing to make that work... at worst, you would end up using Lua-scripting to destroy the larger hull section whenever the turret went down.

[pecenipicek]

How does the integrity of the mesh come into it? I can't guarantee that there aren't any problems, of course, and I'll definitely look into it, but I don't get it.

Is it possible that you misunderstood? My shots aren't 'flying through' the ship. There are no collision errors. But when my shots hit the hull of the warship that lies within the limits of the turret bounding box, damage gets carried to the turret.
*snipped picture*

as i've said, check your mesh thoroughly. bounding boxes are determined on the maximum distance of points, edges and polygons from the objects center. either your object center is out of whack or you have extraneous poly's/points/edges somewhere.


provide the pof and an .obj of the offending file so that we can check.

[Enioch]

Be my guest! 

Clicky

The POF is still WIP, so many turrets do not have subobject info yet. What you wanna check are the 'chains' of hexagons in the sides of the ship.

I could provide a .tbl entry as well, if you think you need it.

[pecenipicek]

oh.. dear.. god...


dude, no offense, but forget the way you did turrets till now, and just observe retail pofs.



IIRC, max firepoints per turret is 3, otherwise engine doesnt give a flying one.




for sanity's sake, do you have the latest mediavp's? if you do, open the GTD Orion and observe how all of its turrets are composed and then apply said stuff to your model while pofing.



the geometry doesnt have anything that should **** up the bounding boxes, so my guess is that the turrets get damaged a lot is because the firing points expand the bounding box.


also, it crashed PCS2 for me when viewing one turret, but no biggie there.


add me on msn if you have it, i can guide you thru the process of turreting

[The E]

IIRC, max firepoints per turret is 3, otherwise engine doesnt give a flying one.

Wrong. Max number of firingpoints is 10.

[pecenipicek]

IIRC, max firepoints per turret is 3, otherwise engine doesnt give a flying one.

Wrong. Max number of firingpoints is 10.

thats something i didnt know.



amusing

*thinks about a 10 FP 2-part beam turret...*


*my brain asplode*

[Enioch]

Yep. Max number is 10. That much I checked before even working on the mesh.

@pecenipek: No offense taken. But I do know something about turreting. 

And I know which turret you mean (the one that crashed PCS2). It does that for me too. Its mesh has flipped normals. I fixed the issue in the original mesh and next export will be OK.

But that still doesn't solve my issue. If it's the firing points that expand the bounding box, then they shouldn't, because I did everything by the book.

Is the issue solvable, or will I have to live with it? Because I can live with it. I just don't want to.

[Vasudan Admiral]

Something is wrong with the bounding boxes of those turrets according to PCS2. In fact almost every bounding box including detail0. They all seem shifted to starboard. o_O

I'd say it's the result of a bad conversion - what format was it converted from or which program?

Edit: Correction - some bounding boxes for objects that are NOT on the ships centreline are shifted either too far (always along the X axis) towards or away from the centreline. Quite odd.

[Enioch]

Huh. You know, I never noticed.

Bad conversion is possible, but unlikely. Conversion was from Blender to PCS2 via .dae format.

I even followed the instructions!

[pecenipicek]

oh yes its very very possible. even when following instructions