Added Ship Mod crashing FL when selecting from Dealer
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Hi All,
I’m a newbie modder and have tried to access all the tutorial and help available on creating new ships in Freelancer.
As a toe dipping exercise I have tried to create a new ship model and load it into Freelancer. I thought I was going pretty well….The ship did appear for sale in Manhattan (by choice) when I originally selected it I did see the 3d model in the “Select Ship” window and the info was as per the ship I copied from the ini file…don’t know how to add IDS info yet…
However when I selected the ship it crashed FreeLancer. I went back and re-checked the ini file and found that one of the HP’s seemed to be incorrect (HPHeadLight instead of HPHeadLight01) so I corrected this and re-applied the mod. Now I can’t even click on the ship in the ship dealer without it crashing.
The two visible problems I have are:
- Ship model doesn’t appear in the Ship Dealer room, just an empty bay with those circular mounting FX and nothing on top.
- Ship Icon in dealership doesn’t display. I thought I had created an icon.3db file for this as per instructions though
I have included the URL to my flmod package. The ship is very basic and just wanted to use it to cut my teeth on modelling. I have run through the modded Freelancer directory with FLScan and it doesn’t pick up any errors to do with my mod.
Can someone help please??? Or just point to some bit of info that I haven’t managed to find on my own yet.
Link to FLMOD of ship: http://files.filefront.com/13375472
Regards,
Rich
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Possible things 2 do
–- add a “HpPilot”
— check “ids_name” of [ship] and [good]
–- convert dds textures to tga -
@F!R
Why convert the textures from DDS to TGA? As long as they are square there should be no issues with their use, (i know you can use odd sized ones as well but they normally don’t work). The obvious advantage to DDS textures is the file size, considerably smaller than using TGA
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… just bad experience. ;D
And if you see “just an empty bay with those circular mounting FX and nothing on top.”
i d bet on the textures.
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I’d also suggest you post your error log using FLSpit. Maybe it will be more telling than just the symptoms.
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I’ve just downloaded your ship, I’ll take a look and see what’s wrong with it for you.
@ F!R, believe it or not but FL prefers DDS to the TGA format, which is one of the reasons DA switched to DDS half way through development.
If your having problems with DDS then I can only suggest that your card drivers might be the problem.EDIT
Your icon is the problem, the pathway is correct, so I suspect either a corrupt mesh or the wrong texture type.
I never “butcher” a vanilla icon, I always make a new icon using the icon template that comes with the .3db exporter plugin.
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What can i say.
I had models crashing Freelancer
and i switched textures - even only a few of such a model -
to TGA and it worked ok.
Never seen something similar the other way.So i can’t belive, that FL likes DDS better than TGA.
Might be my graphic card or drivers,
might textures not square, might be 2 simple- but that concept works 4 me and it works fast.
And most of the WTS models also use DDS (mostly) textures.
Reason: size. The rest: my incompetence + laziness. -
Hi F!R,
I have tried using TGA instead of DDS in the .mat file with little difference.
I tried using an existing ICON 3DB file and this allows me to see an actual icon (for a different ship) and purchase the ship from the ship dealer.
Using both DDS and TGA I can’t see any of my textures rendured within the confines of a planet / base (ie. landing, taking off, equipment dealer) however I can see all equipment I have mounted. Kind of like a permanent Hull only cloak.
In space the textures rendure just fine and everything works great!! One small point is that when using TGA the textures didn’t map to the correct surface areas, but using DDS they mapped to the right locations….but only in “space”.
I re-did the icon.3db file using the “Osprey” tutorial but FL still doesn’t like it.
I’m pretty sure I’m using the right CRC values for substitution but who knows.
FLSpit didn’t show me much besides some MP3 errors when playing the new game intro. I did get the following warning though which might be relevant:
WARNING: alloc_equip: Archetype[0x8000bec6] not supported/equippable!
IT feels like I’m so close and yet still so very very far!! If someone could take a look at the .3db file in the FLMOD I listed previously to double check my node renames and CRC valur calculations that would be great. Thanks everyone for the replies and assistance.
Bejaymac: .3db Exporter??? For MS3D? Where/How? I have only managed to find the CMP and MAT exporters. I don’t think that would cause the in-base rendering of the textures to fail though.
Rich
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The following line in your script is why you have invisible textures-
LODranges = 0, 75, 150, 1000
This tells FL to switch to the different LOD meshes in the CMP, you however don’t have LOD meshes, so there’s nothing for FL to draw on screen, what you should have is “LODranges = 0, 2000”, which is the maximum distance a ship of this size can be physically seen on screen.
Osprey’s tutorial was how I used to make icons, but since the arrival of the .3db exporter I haven’t used it, it now takes 10x as long to make the texture as it does to make the finished icon, and as long as you remember to change the group & material names in the template, you will have an infinite supply of icons.
FlSpit never does show errors for this kind of problem, any mesh errors (cmp, sur & 3db) are a CTD without a log entry.
WARNING: alloc_equip: Archetype[0x8000bec6] not supported/equippable!
That’s a regular vanilla FL error, a capship base or wreck has something mounted in it’s loadout that shouldn’t be mounted (make it cargo ;)).
EDIT
Apart from the texture being upside down for a TGA there was nothing wrong with it, so it looks like the 3db was corrupted, the icon in the above link uses your texture converted to DDS and was created in seconds using the 3db exporter ;).
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To get the CRC problem fixed rename groups and
materials of your ship to unique names like “myshipy001a” …
and export it again. -
Thanks everyone. Bejaymac, the LODRanges did the trick. And the 3db exporter is working much better for generating icons.
Seems to be fairly stable, although the ship seems very small……smaller than HardCMP would have lead me to believe.
Was having some strange artifacts with the transparent / opaque glass in the ship. The glass seemed to make some of the faces behind them transparent / opaque too. Probably just a result of my deficient modelling skills
I’ll prob try my hand at modelling / adding something else a little bit more serious into FL soon.
Rich
