Speciality Modding

rsabatino wrote:
heres a question where to you put the files ?

You working on another mod or, just checking it out in Vanilla?

There is Windows for raspberry pi 2/3…
But whats will work except notepad and calc? 😄

I’ve been getting random crashes in these systems, may or may not be related to this which is why i’m on an encounter witch hunt atm. I suppose the argument is if the encounter is declared then it should work, i’m just fuzzy on area encounters working in a tradelane, not logical

Typically with Freelancer the things either had a use that was removed or were going to be used, but never made it in. Either way, sounds like it’s safe to ignore/remove outright.

I should know better. I’ve been using territory for ages in my mod, never realised i could add sector names to the navmap. That will teach me to skim the readme. Tested and works. Thanks adoxa, you rule 🙂

Good to know, I shall include it in my project.

I’m assuming the reader has a 1024 characters read buffer for the whole line, which frankly is more than enough for normal usage. You shouldn’t be storing that much text data directly in the INIs.

Vertex reorder got the terrain into MS3D correctly, but another problem cropped up and I’m just going to put this off until can grad new 3ds Max version and any export but Milkshape.

What did work in this project was the retexture.

That other problem was that even with terrain sorted the vertexes on the hardware started flipping for the same reasons. GW vs Wavefront. But the cmp for base didn’t care about importing new textures. So Jeff’s Used Starships will have to find somewhere else to set up shop. Wonder what the rent is on Planet Primus?

Wondered about that myself until I found CMP implementation in the game is fluid and not static. A big part of tricks some thorn scripts play is reading data from CMP’s and changing that data in some way. Perhaps this is the reason. It shocked us at the beginning that CMP could and does hold textures. My beating my head against a terrain mesh change for Planet Toledo had me loading textures into the cmp when I ran into a mesh that didn’t load into Milkshape correctly.

Then scripts move mountains. Literally. and When Toledo’s CMP is scripted to become Planet Sprague in the story line, boom everything is changed. This might be the reason the .vms has redundancies. And the fornat has to cater to more that ships. If scripts have to pull out data it doesn’t bother with the entire .vms as it doesn’t effect the entire .vms, it takes data from and makes changes to the data farther down the tree.
For all intents and purposes CMP for ships is static and being so has mat files that have to be called from the ini files. Which also makes me wonder if the MATs too couldn’t be added to ship CMP’s, but that’s for other savants to wrestle with. I’ve got enough on my plate right now.

Okay I’m getting warm. Old copy of 3dsMax from the day
Recognizes skeletal data from UTF->XML dump if given old character studio header & footer and packed as old 3ds character file. So I have skeletons, but mesh data and vertex weights I’m beating my head against. Plenty of tristrip tools, none recogize their format. Has Anyone cracked DFM’s.? Would appreciate some help here. Somebody in Discovery came close to or did mesh overhaul from file dates, but might have been a texture overhaul as they are solidly different. The whole .dfm structure smells like early Character Studio, but they packed the body meshes differently and as I found the skeletons come out. I think they encoded into .3dm or CMP
Edit: (Disco Was re-texturing. Darn good job too.)

Edit (again): Another modding community got into this and and handed me a trove of 3ds and gmax inport - export plug ins and scripts they bundled.
22 mb worth so here’s the link:

https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn1/other/gmax12-3dsmax4-importexport-plugin-script-collection

Team at a company called 3D Convert is looking into mesh converter for .dfm’s.

Company tossed back to creators of the Delphi format. Natch it’s tied into 3DS Max. They THINK there WAS a DFM to CHR converter (when dinosaurs trod the earth). The say they are scouting their archives. Yah…. Right. It was in mainly a way of binary compression for AutoCAD, but they thought it would compress any 3DS files so data in UTF to XML is binary compression. Great. Akin to encryption. The skeleton data was just vertex splines. Who needs compression? The CHR to DFM just stripped the header-footer. If the don’t get back to me it’s into the dll’s and engine to find the “encryption key”.

Oh sages of the mystical arts, this humble supplicant appeals to you….

Oh hell, I need help to find that landing forcefield fx for a full blown redo of Planet Toledo, but I’d like this effect and can’t seem to run it down myself.

Here’s shots of half completed Toledo base and another of one of my own ships with a place holder texture I’m using for positioning. Your help would be appreciated.

Edit: Excuse intruding on the peace of the dead oh great ones. An e-mail oracle explained the secrets of alchemy and how this simple artisan could never penetrate the archana hidden deep in their libraries. I shall slink back into humble obscurity and never more disturb your eternal slumber…

Thanks guys. In any game you were apt to find one “Boba Fet’s Slave ship” was a notorious example of the phenomenon of the aim point being outside ship and you’re having to strafing or “spray and pray” shooting.

Run the .cmp file through FlModel tool. Resize too a low amount like .99 then save. This should zero position. If this doesn’t work try resetting zero with FladdRadius (both progs are in downloads). If both don’t work go back to modeler and zero the model (x0, y0, z0) on you model’s center point and re-export.

Thanks a lot buddy ! I owe you one

MeisterLampe wrote:
I’ve attached the .3db file, just put it in the NEWNAVMAP/SPACEOBJECTS folder and replace the texture with whatever you like.

Thanks! So if I don’t want this side-effect, I actually have to go through with the spherical zones.

On that note though, some types of zones show property_flags, and some don’t (like rings). Anyone ever figured how to include these types of zones to also show property_flags?

Hmmm on my old laptop, the game + mod work fine. The archetypes show up as they should.

So, there is an issue on my PC that is not simply in one of Freelancer’s files, because I’ve re-installed it…

NEVER MIND

I’ve copied the laptop’s copy of the mod to my PC and now I can see the archetypes. So there were some files corrupted in my mod somehow. But not the .cmp , .sur and/or texture files, because I replaced them with older versions, and as far as I could tell also not the SolarArch… So, it’ll remain a mystery, that I ideally should trace back to its source, to learn from it. But now that stuff seems to be working again, I have quite some work with restoring all the stuff I took out.

I believe it is, yes. I was just saying what I use ^_^

There are plenty of tutorials around on how to use Hexplorer specifically which makes things easier when it comes to editing FL.

None of the DBG commands work. USER_MANEUVER_FORMATION is for the current formation button. None of the other keybinds you’re looking at do anything.

The hidden commands that do work (like rolling) have been uncovered long ago, you’re not gonna find anything new.

I also seriously don’t see a way of making a ship orbit another ship using the built-in AI. What you’re asking for would need to completely replace the formation logic, and that’s not something you change with INIs.