Trains and 3db's

That was me & ST gabbin about trains & armored transports m8…

Thanks for the clarification… this makes some sense now… still needs further investigation, but i got a point to work from…

Well here’s a story from the other side of the fence. For custom ships it doesn’t seem to matter. I have loads of them with cargo pods on and they are all cmp files and work fine.

While this theory might be the case with the original Train models, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference for custom models

Nope. I have the cargo pod hardpoints added in shiparch as the originals with loadouts handled internally as usual. No ship cargo loadouts added via loadouts ini.

As long as the commodity for the faction is added in commodities_per_faction.ini, then the little blighters should carry it

This is the line i added in shiparch,

hp_type = hp_cargo_pod, HpCargo01, HpCargo02, HpCargo03, HpCargo04, HpCargo05, HpCargo06

Bear in mind and this point needs to be clarified, this works fine for npc ships like this, not as a player ship. That’s a whole new can of worms if you want to do this for a player ship

How can I make this work for a player ship?..I have a problem…I’ve made the entries in goods.ini , select_equip.ini, I even added my cargopod entry in the st_good.ini… then I’ve added it as an add-on to the ship. The problem is that while the ship is docked, the cargo pod will not be visible…it is only visible in space.

The reason I’m asking is because I’ve made a ship that is very high poly…so I split it into 2 halves… and I’ve attached one half as a cargo pod to the main half so that I have a 40k triangle ship working. But It’s very annoying because in station or even story cutscenes or docking cutscenes the cargopod half is not visible.

About the Train 3db, for some reason all CMP versions of the Train (this includes Large and XL Train CMPs) have no collision. However, the 3db versions of all Trains (including Large and XL Train 3dbs) work fine, and collide properly.

Just a reminder - the .cmp files of the train crash FL.

I didn’t see why the 3db’s were used (still don’t) instead of the .cmp’s and swtched them, and later I got the crash every time they appeared.

And I forgot I had done it, so it took a couple of days to find the problem.

ok, what are you guys talking about… first of all cmp cargo pods have collision if the pod itself has a sur file.

as for fl crashing because of cmp… mine works, I just have the issue as stated in my previous post…can no one give me a pointer as to why it’s happening?

The Train CMPs all have bugged collision and do not collide with anything, whereas the 3db versions work fine. Go check it out yourself.

Also, the cargo pods have nothing to do with it.

Edit: Also, all items need an appropriate goods entry to show up on base. A CargoPod item type isn’t best suited for this type of thing - try an item type like ShieldGenerator instead.

Re-edit: Nevermind, CargoPods work fine. Just make sure you have a goods entry for them.

Wouldn’t the crashing be caused by the .cmp model trying to use the SUR from the 3db model. There is one key difference between these two SUR’s the cmp sur has to have a crc name for each part whilst a 3db does not, it still has the spot for a name to be added so it would be a matter of adding the correct crc to the name section, use adoxa’s sur to text app to see where it is. You would have to name it as root since that is where the model is. I’ve done this before with one of the vanilla missiles, i created a cmp version through using the utf editor and the using a hex editor to make the sur attach to the root.

Give it a go, i’m still digging around for my flash stick with my freelancer stuff so i can’t check but i think that will solve it.

Ozed

Sorry for double posting but i think this topic will dissapear without a !BUMP!

Anyway, when i was looking into the Train SUR’s there where a couple things i found odd, first is that their are extra SUR file’s perhaps for some different system for the trains where their is the locomotive bit and carriages can attach/detach to it, that’s a total guess based on the names of the extra sur’s: freight_car.sur and freight_train_cargo.sur. Another thing is that these two sur’s are totally unreadable, SURDump wouldn’t decode them and neither would the importer (although i didn’t expect it to as SURDump didn’t) this is again true with freight_train.sur. I just want to ask if freight_trainx4 worked since the sur for it was fully set up for a CMP (well at least to my eye’s).

Finally i managed to modify the 3db SURs for freight_trainx2 and 3 and have attached them for anyone willing to test them, i don’t have the time to do it right know.

Ozed

foxUnit01 wrote:
Also, the cargo pods have nothing to do with it.

Edit: Also, all items need an appropriate goods entry to show up on base. A CargoPod item type isn’t best suited for this type of thing - try an item type like ShieldGenerator instead.

Re-edit: Nevermind, CargoPods work fine. Just make sure you have a goods entry for them.

Can you give a sample text of code for the goods.ini and any other .ini’s to make them (the cargo pods) visible when docked at a base or planet?

Fus

So I built this ship, a remake of the Ebon Hawk from the KOTOR game, and I split it into 2 halves(21k triangles each) like so:

Then I re-skinned it cuz the color-scheme was too… “meah…”

And it goes as follows:

• The main ship section is the AFT or back section a.k.a. the half of the ship that has the engines
• The front half of the ship with the cockpit and all that was used as a component to be connected to the main half in the game so that the 2 halves make one ship counting 42k triangles.
• The idea worked fine but with a slight problem.
• When I am in space the ship renders beautifully and the super-high rez texture makes up for some fx that the game engine can’t render and it’s a joy to fly around in this thing as you can see here:

The problem starts when I am docked. For some reason the attached component, A.K.A. the front half of the ship is invisible even though the ship appears as a whole in the ship dealer’s little preview window. and here are the images to show you what the frak I’m talking about:

Ship Dealer Preview OK:

Planet-Scape View NOT-OK:

Now I’ve tried making the front half of the ship a cargo container, a shield generator and even a static weapon(seeing that turrets and guns are rendered in the planet scape scene), but the result was always the same; full ship in space, half a ship when docked.

If anyone has a clue about how to fix this please help! I know there is another method of making super high poly ships by splicing stuff together but I’d rather keep it simple for now.

You should try CMP slising the two parts together so they are parts of the same model. If you want you could send me the files and ill get it done quite easily (will have to be soon though, im going somewhere soon)

To tell you the truth, cmp splicing isn’t all that hard and it will easily fix your problem. Here is where you can get the video files to see how its done, but they are quite large from memory.

And yes i know you said you want to keep it simple, but really, it is the best solution i can think of.

Ozed

if I send them to you tomorrow would that be ok? I need to revise some smoothing groups on the mesh and remap some areas cuz the texture looks like it’s tiled and I wanna fix that. how do you want the files? the cmp mat and sur?, also another question if you splice it together will the hardcmpeditor still draw the model so I can edit the hardpoints or will I need to do that in milkshape? for me the model is harpointed fine but I wanna release the ship so that anyone can use it in their own mod so maybe they’ll want to modify it.

Just let me know, and I’ll send u a PM with a download link tomorrow evening. It’s 2 AM for me right now so in about 24 hours I’ll finish the retouching.

Hmm, probably won’t be able to do it in 24hrs, but if you do sent it too me i will get it done in a week. And yes, hardcmpeditor will not be able to veiw the model, but you can use one of the latter utf v3 editors to see where ther harpoints are, or just use the coordinates from before. Probably best if you send the milkshape and cmps + sur, although i can create a new sur through the cmp to sur builder. But there is still the option to learn cmp splicing from those videos if next week is too long a time

Ozed

next week is fine I don’t expect you to do anything in 24 hours, I meant I will send the files your way in 24 hours.I will learn that splicing thing eventually cuz it’s inevitable but for now I have too many things on my to do list.