I hate surs forever
-
I’ve always known that sur creators were the most sought after and respected flavor of FL modder, and now I know why. Good lord I have never encountered anything more inconsistent and frustrating in my modding experience.
Currently, the sur works. Mostly. If I try to collide with other objects while flying the ship, it works perfectly. Every section (group?) of the sur collides correctly. When I am shot at, the sur works perfectly. All sections and groups are hit correctly when shot at with various missiles and projectile weapons.
However if another player starts to ram the ship. They can collide with every piece of geometry perfectly except for the center section. The piece that fits underneath the control tower and covers the “ribbing” on the underside of the ship. For whatever reason, ships, and only ships, can pass through this section of geometry.
On top of this, the center of the targeting brackets and crosshair is towards the back of the ship. I’m not sure if this is a sur related issue, but it is an annoyance.
I’m not even sure what the point of this is, its almost more of a rant than anything else. Oh, here’s an idea to make this topic relevant. What would people recommend as a good sur tutorial for ships like this one?
-
I sympathize i truly do. I’ve been looking for months for someone to help me out with surs and apart from one person who then disappeared with the models i sent them, not had any other takers.
Why i’m close to giving up tbh.
I can’t get the little f***ers working for love nor money, i know that much, end up at around the same state you are at…
-
Who stole from gibbon??? RAHHHHHHHH!!! feel my wrath…… :-x
Yip… surs are a pain… I tryed… a few times and fell flat on my a$$
otherwise i would defiantly have my hand up… I just use stock now & the model tool… and a S***load of imagination…I must agree… If surs are “so easy”… where are all you sur file experts??? (looks around…) nup not here…
-
I can imagine what you feel, for same reason, ive taken a break of modding for 2 months, because (and it may sounds pathetic) i dont dare to start this sur things… true instead of this torturing, i made ten new models (after i recognized i will need ten more surs, …well…)
I really hope you can fix it, all i can say is same as i wrote to Gibbon before:
http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=30770
“Tutorial: How to make custom hitboxes”
“.SUR’s - A visual how to guide”Best Regards
-
I can at least tell you how to fix your crosshair issue.
The crosshairs are oriented towards the geometric center of your “Root” sur object.
That being said, it is often best to put a small cube in the center of your ship with no texture and use that as your Root sur object. The remaining object can be what you build to fit the ship itself.
-
well it’s a little difficult to help you without know how you made the hitbox
which exporter do you use ?
have you made the hitboxes in MilkShape?
are you sure that all the shapes are concave ?
because convex works only for the hull detection.what i do is :
- make the different parts as many you need, anyway you use milkshape or any other 3D software
- export each one as a .sur with the settings you want (bubble or not)
- splice all with the sursplicer
here you find some tools :
http://www.filefront.com/15199521/hitbox-tools.rar/
–> msCMPExporterV21.dll
–> msSURExporterV1_1.dll
–> sur_splice.exe
–> ini.inishadow_academy.sur shadow_academy_cons_fix.dat 10100 : Radius of the ship (open the CMP with FLModelTool to get that value) 10000 10000 10000 : X Y Z (put three times the mass with a space in between) z_shadow_1.sur Root z_shadow_2.sur zomgbayz01 z_shadow_3.sur zomgbayz02 z_shadow_4.sur zomgbayz03 z_shadow_5.sur zomgbayz04 .....–> orbit_dock.cmp ( a very usefull example of cmp ;))
- you need also an hexadecimal editor like this one :
http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/freeware/xvi32/xvi32.htm#download
you allready know how to do all this
after that change the cmp is really easy
Sushi have made a great tutorial that you can find here :
http://zomgbayz2.googlecode.com/files/Infinite hitbox parts tutorial.wmvtrust me, if you follow this way you can save a lot of testing time and a lot of your hairs
that take only time, and still not said if you make few forms
integrate 20 parts in the cmp take maybe 10 minutes all done, no more … -
There is to this day no consistent way of making perfectly working surs, Why. Dont bother if ships can pass through some of your sur-parts, it likely wont really get better than that.
Even our models at Freeworlds suffer from a similar issue, where other ships can pass through any component of the ship other than the “root” object. There is some collision detection on those non-root parts, but its buggy and they can eventually pass through.It would be awesome to see some further development in the sur file creation process to finally be able to make surs that work just like the vanilla ones.
-
**Hehehehe, no no no no I don’t want to work on the cmp to sur converter again, drove me crazy
Who knows, I did release 3 new programs on my FL Coders forum, I may tackle it again soon…**
-
-
I made them using Dev’s wireframe maker. The program for it is here: http://the-starport.net/modules/wfdownloads/singlefile.php?cid=5&lid=1558
If you want a tutorial, let me know, and I can make a video for ya.
-
Awesome, thanks Sushi!
The screenshot also illustrates the weird targeting bracket and centering. The model itself is centered correctly. It almost looks like the crosshair is centered around the wrong sur part. As in its using the wrong piece for the root? I don’t know. I’m going to redo it all from scratch the long way eventually. I think that will fix it.
-
Honestly, I’ve never had problems making SURs, at least after Bejay taught me. Granted, I’ve never tested them in MP, so they could suffer from the same player-to-player contact that Why is running into.
The real bitch, I think, are wireframes. Yes you can use Dev’s tool, and the wireframes that are spit out are… acceptable, I suppose. Still, they look quite a bit better when doing them by hand, though the work required is the definition of tedious.
And have I really been gone for over six months? Seems like yesterday that I was still engaged…
MK
-
@Why
The screenshot also illustrates the weird targeting bracket and centering. The model itself is centered correctly. It almost looks like the crosshair is centered around the wrong sur part. As in its using the wrong piece for the root? I don’t know. I’m going to redo it all from scratch the long way eventually. I think that will fix it.
Just a tought: check this unique ship’s mass center in milkshape, and in that program you have made the model. In gmax for example there are 3 different centerlines, you can choose, when i convert the models into milkshape ive got a new one.
You may have to synchronize them.
Every time i import a new ship into ms3d i moved it into the centerline in such a way that, to get same result as in that program that i made the model.It seems you made a new sur bubble, have you ever tried using existed surs for the unique ships?
@MK
Honestly, I’ve never had problems making SURs, at least after Bejay taught me. Granted, I’ve never tested them in MP, so they could suffer from the same player-to-player contact that Why is running into.
What is the difference? If i collide with an other npc which has same unique ship i use, or in MP i collide an other player who has same unique ship?
-
NPCs don’t use the same collision detection as players.
-
Why485 wrote:
The screenshot also illustrates the weird targeting bracket and centering. The model itself is centered correctly. It almost looks like the crosshair is centered around the wrong sur part. As in its using the wrong piece for the root? I don’t know. I’m going to redo it all from scratch the long way eventually. I think that will fix it.
depends on which method you choose but if it’s with the sursplicer you need to put the right mass in the ini.ini file
the center is on the root, so you need to choose the right .sur …
and i’m not sure but you can try to affect a mass at each sur files that you export to see if it changes something
-
The target reticule placement it due to the sur piece you’ve chosen to be the root. If you pick another piece that is more in the centre to be the root .sur, it will fix it right up.
