Milkshape texture help

look in your shiparch.ini

try changing the lod range to something like 0, 4000 for your ship. Larger it is… you may want to go more depending on the camera settings.

Need a bit more information about that ships: you wrote “milkshape texture help”. Does it mean, you made new ships with unique textures or retextured existed ones?
What type of textures do you use? dds or tga?
If you use tga i’d advise to change them to dds, because freelancer flip up the tga textures in the game for some reason it may cause errors. Be sure the size of the textures are symetric like 256x256, 128x128.
After this, set the LOD ranges and camera positions as Forsaken wrote, because unique ships dont really work with vanilla settings. (they disappear when you use thruster, or cruise speed, etc…)
LOD ranges i use for non-vanilla ships:
LODranges = 0, 999999, 999999, 999999, 999999
Not sure it fits to your ships, you have to try many times to get the better result.

Hope it helps

also rember if the sur aint bang on you get the same results

That would have to be one heck of a large ship to get that. I’ve never seen ships… even with very very poor custom surs that had that issue.

@Forsaken some folk view them as a object in space maby thats what he doing to view them lol and you know what its like even a smidge of they blink

Yes, there is a free converter between tga and dds, just type this keywords into google and i ensure you will get many hits where you can download it.
Basically i use irfan view to modify textures( in minor of course) if you want to use it also, download its plugin from the irfanview website and you can open dds formats with it.
The dds converter works easy just click on the tga file you want to convert and thats all.
The good thing if you have unacceptable size of the tga the dds converter will warn you.

In regards of the sur file things, i have no experience on that, but im sure experienced sur/modeller guys here will answer to you.

Disappearing might be due to mis-setting the LOD ranges on your model. Most only make 1 LOD so it would be:
LODranges = 0, 9999

As for recoil, it should be possible to assign
“use_animation = Sc_fire” in its weapon_equip.ini entry
This means you’ll either need to find another recoil type animation script in a vanilla model, copy / import it into yours, and change the names to match those of your meshes. Then you’ll need to do the same for a Cmpnd / Cons / Pris node. There should be posts on this here if your model has more parts than the one you’re trying to use as a reference. Within that, I’d probably set the Origins to 0.000000 for X,Y,Z and mess around with the Angle (Radians) section until it looks how you want it to –I believe this is the range of movement.

More tweaking can be done within the Script as well, but if you do, be sure to read up carefully on how to add frames, and header modification requirements (there are 3 sections, each with differing data types, which must be edited by changing the “Interpret Data as”).

EDIT: UTFeditor 3 & 4, and perhaps a Hex editor, will be needed for animation work. UTF comes in handy for many, many things; from texture changes and material animations to hard points and importing Wireframes.
of course, as always: make backups