Tutorials

Good stuff, keep them coming.

If you’re just starting out I’d recommend you read Giskards section on system building see the link below

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/913966-freelancer/faqs/25096

scroll down (about 40%) to find

“System Building from scratch by giskard”

This will cover the basics of what you’re wanting to do in relation to bases, tradelanes, planets etc

if you have a hex editor, that’ll do, too for renaming parts. a good setup is with 16 characters each row.

After the mission where you snatch the proteos tomb (sp…) and blow up Tekagi… I’ve always wanted to make Trent’s eyes glow similar to the shade of color on the ships I’ve cloned, retextured and added (not replacing originals) to game… I’m not very good with .thn’s or .ale’s which is how Tekagi’s eye, head and hands generate the effects during the Cutscene.

Since I’m no good at editting the arrays of long numbers, I was hoping I might be able to accomplish something similar with the pi_pirate5_head.dfm that trent’s character uses. I noticed there is already a glow map for the eyes, but no bright colors in it… just looks like a black 32x32 image (mip0). After changing it to a color similar to my ships, I recompiled the dfm with Freelancer XML Project… same way I extracted the necessary images by bulk.

After that failed to glow, I confirmed in UTF that the images did update in the texture library. Also confirmed the int array for Material Library\eyetealblue\Et_flags looks like:
64
0

Also string value for Material Library\eyetealblue\Et_name was already pointing to the tga reference in Texture Libraries that holds all the mip maps. Also confirmed, since there isn’t an Ec_??? in the file, that Material Library\eyetealblue\Type is: DcDtEt.

Still failed in both cutscenes and just normal character walking between bar/equipment room/ship dealer, etc… So I tried to apply a 60% opacity to Trent’s eyes, hoping the glow might shine through, but still nothing…

Can this method be done to the .dfm? or do I need to do it through the .thn’s using .ale references? Is it possible to place a hardpoint or “mount” a light in the head’s skull that would illuminate the desired color I’m looking for and shine through the, now, semi-transparent eyeballs? Also willing to try any other ideas to accomplish this feat other than manually editting .ale’s and .thn’s in notepad…

Definitely a security risk. As a matter of routine principle I don’t take part in such remote sessions. There should be ample Youtube videos to consult, though.

I don’t know about SP. I know it works in MP.
I also don’t know why missions are not showing up with your added faction without seeing the mod.

Does the faction have an enemy populating the system? I don’t remember off hand if they have to be populating a base, but at least they need to be showing up in chance encounters.

Both factions need to be populating the system. The faction offering the missions needs to populate a base in the system (obvious). The vignettes need to be within 40k of the base offering the missions, and at least one of those vignettes should be overlapping the base.

Finally, the two factions need to be hostile with each other. This is set in empathy.ini and intitialworld.ini.

http://vimeo.com/17240860

http://vimeo.com/16804544

I’ll need to write a proper documentation some day. The thing with wireframes is that they should be done on the actual model based on the lods (this is how FL does it) rather than by using a seperate mesh for it.

So in the lod groups, just name the lod you want to be the basis for the wireframe “vwd_lodX” where X is your lod number. This will cause the exporter to use that specific lod for the current components wireframe data.

If you dont specify anything, I think it’ll always use lod0.

Anyways, there may be models where even the highest lod has too many vertices. There is a hack for getting higher vertice-count wireframes to work. I’ll need to search for it and I’ll post it on the limit breaking sometime.
However, actually the highest lod should never be really higher than 12k (you have 6 lods at your disposal!) so…

So, I’ve been trying to track down all the bugs of FW:ToW and I have the notorious MP3 decode error. I used the program you recommend, with the settings you did, M0tah, and I have more errors now as well as a new one wavlib: failed to decompress sound. Any idea what is going on M0tah? I can send you the spew if you want?

Nice tut 🙂 tho i usually tend to just stick to using the smooth modifier and/or going to the faces and making sure all the polygons near it only have 4 sides… else they dont reder correctly in max.

no worries =] welcome to SP 😄

Ok i’ve made planets and added appropriate code but something isn’t right the planets do not occlude when going behind sun or each other but appear to pass infront anyone know what i’m doing wrong

Yeh I can confirm this too, it takes any random mission that is declared for that zone. So if the mission defines 8 ships, 8 will be spawned putting you 7 over the 1 remaining.

Its not an issue normally but I was trying to get a fixed number of ships for a particular engagement.

The other way is to have encounters spawning only 1 ship, that will be repeated up to the density and/or battle size, but they would all be independent ships, all over the place, not in 1 “wing” and not in a formation.

@JONG:

Seem like you can’t use this method to make station SURs to work.

Stations won’t work with a SUR that uses the ShieldBubble option, they need to be done with the Shrinkwrap option, but as I’ve pointed out the “wrap” is badly formed and almost always crashes FL, the closest I’ve come to a DA style station CMP & SUR is two-thirds detection on a single component CMP.
As it stands the SUR-splicer is the only way to do station SURs.

@tai:

Great tool 😮
using it since yesterday, also found an good host, where you can set really who can get your sources xD, it’s http://xp-dev.com/

Another one!
www.fireforge.net - based on GFroge like Forge of Starport 🙂