Evil...i play your warlords mod dedicated...frankly, this excites me....Finally, I can shove a corellian corvette down ANOTHER galaxys mouth .....Long live evillejedi!!!!

the ships need hardpoints as those will not transfer over, they also need some work to scale them correctly and get them into a format that is exportable, as soon as I resolve my texture issues I may release some of the base ships for testing (tie, gunship, strike cruiser, ISD)

Well, I managed to place a dummy in 3ds max, and it also showd as "Hardpoint" in the game. The Problem was that whenever I tried to palce an object on that hardpoint the whol model disappeared.
And If I seved the "new construction" the object I palced wasn't there anyways. So soemthing wnet pretty worng.
It's enough to know that you can use those "Dummy Obejcts" as Hardpoints, you need to know how to do it the right way.

So what could help is a detailed "How to place Hardpoints" for 3ds max-users.

I had the same problem with the ship disapearing, then I changed the option for how many frames it exports in the pandaX settings and it started working

I had the same problem with the ship disapearing, then I changed the option for how many frames it exports in the pandaX settings and it started working/quote]

Thanks for you answer. But the only "Option" I find about frames in the pandaplugin is at "X File Settings"
1. No Frames
2. Top frame Only
3. Sub frame hierarchy

Nothing about changing a "number" of frames. So could you explain it more detailed, please? Thank you

O.k. I can give the answer myself: It's "Top Frame Only"

I think he meant export Top Frame Only

Evil you getting close to releasing any of these ships for testing soon? Really looking foward to trying out some of this stuff

as soon as I can get the textures to export properly I think I will release the following ships

tie fighter
corellian gunship
Nebulon- B frigate
loronar strike cruiser
Victory I Destoyer
Imperator I Destroyer

they won't be in components, but they should have hardpoints for weaponry

I'm waiting for patch 1.1 before making any major changes, just fooling around right now

I found DeepExplorer to work much better than Panda Exporter in creating the .x models and exporting the textures...theres a 30day trial for it but retail is like $300 bucks

Atm tho since I pretty much given up on getting any sort of 3d model to work correctly in the game, I am working on creating a modding tool so you can easily edit the xml files without having to manually type entries and stuff.

you can add dummies in 3DS Max and they work. I just dont know how to change ingame ship size and the orientation of the dummies.

http://www.new-avalon.de/GCmods/ShadowExample.JPG

http://www.new-avalon.de/GCmods/OmegaExample.JPG

p.s. the omega's hull section is rotating

orientation is done in max, just rotate them to what you want (a little trick, but watch the type in transform box)

ship size is based on the model size, but the 'base' size is determined by the hull class, the huge hulls are like 3000 m long the large are 1.5 or so, the model scale can float in that range it looks like but not by much (I had to scale down to get it to fit o nthe screen, but I only can change the hull size drastically with the size attribute in the XML, it autoscales) a cheap trick would be to make a dummy object mircoscopically small to force it to scale smaller then the autoscaled hull size


rotating... you gotta tell me how you got that oen to work (x file anim?)

well the dummies are just cubes in Max for me. I dont see into what direction they face (or at least I dont know where I see it). ^^

gonna try playing arround with the size some more (omega was 7 parsec long on a tiny hull). ^^

for the rotation I used 3DS Max and let Panda export it as animation (at 3DS Max Objects activate "include animations", at Animations hit "Add" and add an animation within the used frames (0 to whatever), Key Options stays "Matrix", Timeline uses "3DS Max Ticks", at X File Settings enable "include animation options"). that worked for me.

to create an animation in 3DS Max you can simply declare a time intervall (0 to 100 or so). then you can do stop&go motion capturing basically. For each frame in the time intervall you move/scale/rotate your objects in 3DS Max the way you want it to define the animation over the whole time intervall (like they did for the wallace and gromit movies ).

or go to the "Motion" tab and then choose "Parameters" then Transform Position/Rotation/Scale with TCB, then at PRS Parameter choose Rotation, then add key information for all keys you have defined (keys are special frames that define at which point in your time intervall the object should be exactly the way you want it. for instance I used at frame 0 that the hull section was horizontal. while doing all that of course have the parts of the modell selected that you want to rotate or be animated.

so it looked like this under key info for my simple rotation:
key: 1, time: 0, X: -1, Y: 0, Z: 0, Angle: 0, EaseTo: 0, EaseFrom: 0, Tension/Bias/Continuity: 25
and
key: 2, time: 240 (used 240 frames in total for the animation), X: 0 Y: -1,Z: 0, Angle: 180 (half way for 1 full rotation, but as it is beeing repeated it looks like a 360 degrees rotation anyway), EaseTo: 0, EaseFrom: 0, Tension/Bias/Continuity: 25

you can probably use the curve editor too, but Iam not a 3DS Max pro anyway so I cant explain it more in detail.


I have one more problem however. The X-Files are extremely large (Omega is over 20 Megabyte, my Sharlin Cruiser is 18 Megs big). I cant really reduce the number of polygons without destroying the model and I already removed everything unnecessary. is there any way to make the X Files smaller (does GC2 accept binary comprimated X-Files instead of text?)

I'm very familiar with max, it's just the export process that is getting me, you really need to cut the poly counts on your models otherwise the game will run very slow when someone has fleets of them, I suggest making a low poly model <3000 and then using the normal mapping to make a normal mapped texture that way you can retain all the detail of the small meshes http://www.monitorstudios.com/bcloward/tutorials_normal_maps1.html is one way to do it



every object has rotation, you can rotate dummy objects even if it isn't immediately obvious, just use the rotaqte tool

link not working for me

Link

btw GC2 accepts comprimated binary X-Files. that reduced the size from 18,7 MB from my Sharlin Cruiser down to 5 MB. Which is still pretty big but way better than 18 MB for download purpose. didnt see a difference to a text X-File ingame.

link works now thanks.

Iam still looking for lower poly models to use so I dont have to make them myself (not enough time on my hands), but it seems most sites that had babylon 5 models for modding purpose are closed down now.

found a site that has lots of Babylon 5 models for Blender ( http://www.b5-blender.com ) , but 3DS Max doesnt accept 3ds Files exported via Blender for me at least.