Help needed with custom ship

Xarian_Prime wrote:
to check the .3db worry… just use this line…

item_icon = equipment\models\commodities\nn_icons\EQUIPICON_nomadpower.3db

that solves the prob if its your icon… this icon is good for when you have no good icon as well.

and i’ll second the 4 or more entry’s in the ship markets prob… seen that one… easy fix just use 1… your custom ship & never more than 3

also… you used a lot of tools for the task… when in theory it’s easyer (for some things) to do by hand… tools can make BAD mistakes that when starting out will stress you alot (as you don’t know… you don’t recognize them…) we normally use tools to place & template our data… then handcode (lol… copy/paste… edit…) our final file… Hcmp dont fall into that category though… brilliant proggy, BUT… it will show you a working ship… and FL still crashes as it handles the CMP with less vigilance than the game… it will also show textures the wrong way on many ships… but they flip fine ingame and look correct (mainly a .dds thing)

If i were u… I’d swap out the icon 1st… if still crashing, scrutinize your goods & arch (or have another do it for you)… if all else fails… send someone like me (who lives inside his shiparch.ini & ms3d) your ship for simple debugging… the 3rd is costly though… as you may have to share your ship as payment for services rendered… mwhahaa… erm sry…

The new icon fixed it with no crashes……now for the bad news.

the ship still doesn’t appear on the ship floor but i know it exists, how do i know this? well this is what happens when i take the ship out for a spin…

For positioning information the gun is supposed to be on the left wing if looking at it head on.

Davis wrote:
No, i didnt missed but hps are orig your ship is not.
Your entirely ship is missing so it cant be that only your textures are wrong because i cant see the glass either.
So as your hps appear on the ship in order, only problem is: the model itself.
Its very simple, you wrote you made new cockpit for this ship. Have you modified the camera_offset? If yes, to where?

EDIT: where is your prev post?

I removed it as you changed yours and it didn’t need to be there.

Davis wrote:
Yeah, because you answered my question i wanted to ask while i was writing my post. k
So my last question is the scale.
What was the last setting in cmp export and in fl model tool?

It would have been the default settings, my hardpoints are all in the right place but the ship is flying it the 90 degrees clockwise instead.

the placing of my hardpoints looks like the right scale but is obviously wrong.

Davis wrote:]

thats not good… ok:
first you have to turn your entirely model anticlockwise 90 degrees in milkshape, ctrl+a, rotate y -90, and then still assigned your model, move/ absolute x,y,z= 0 (very important in cmp the ship must be appears in the front!!!)

in regard you wrote i suspect you havent used flmodel_tool, what is necessary, to put that ship in game properly.
if you dont know this great prog then download the version 1.0a beta 6 simply open your cmp in that and scale up to 25 at first then save, open its sur, if it is orig then rescale it to ship/automatic, if its custom then first ship and after scenery, save it and thats all.

done the whole resize, definitely not that, just made my hard points further away from my ship and the collision corresponds with that,

am i right in saying it must be the .mat thats not working correctly?

Davis wrote:
could be then. so you renamed the vanila textures if im right, and put them on your ship… have you modified anything? color, hue etc… if they are in tga format yet, then convert them to dds as Xarian mentioned.
i have no more idea, do the texture names matching with the material names in milkshape?

What i didnt read, do the textures appear in cmp?

I renamed the vanilla texture yes.

put them on my ship yes.

modified anything i.e color…. no

.tga format? yes*

texture name match with materials in milkshape yes.

do the texture appear in hcmp? never thought to check it and just makes the ship a dark colour…there could be my problem…

think i’m gonna start a fresh from the importing into milkshape stage, thanks for the help davis and prime, just need to learn a bit more on .mat creation as everything else “seemed” to work…

Davis wrote:
wait with that.
first check the textures in cmp, click “w”
if you got dark color without textures then you have problem with the mat, there is no reason to redo your ship again.
first dds convert, swap the textures in milkshape to the dds formats with same name, mat exporter again, check your cmp, if you got textured model thats a good start.

ok ok, will do, quick question (probably a nooby one) how do i convert to dds, google isnt helping at all

Xarian_Prime wrote:
“Paint.net” & there’s a dds progy somewhere here i think in the downloads if that fails to work with dds (it should convert easily just save as)

Davis wrote:

how much i love this day… vga memo off, im off, shop almost off…

heres an other:
http://www.filefront.com/3577988/DDS-Converter-2-1.0/

converted the dds and exported my .mat……it worked! finally some progress.

only thing wrong with it now is the ships upside down and orientated the wrong way…i know how to fix that though, thanks to davis, oh and the sur is crazy it makes me collide with planet after venturing a little distance from the docking ring…probably to do with it not being custom .sur.

Thanks prime and davis, helping others is re-warding in its own way.

Xarian_Prime wrote:
hehe… no worries

& yer… its quite amusing flying upside down & engines first, i’m pretty sure we’ve all done that during the first few attempts 8-)

so easy to forget to flip the ship just before export… few more things…

always center your 0
ship should face “you” in front view & down in topview

for .sur’s grab the “FLModelTool10ab6” to re-size any existing .sur (& ye ship as well if needed) or try “FL_Sur_Builder_0002” both good proggys and easy to use.

oh and… Paint.net is good to get a grasp on texture manipulation & exportation… but the mighty Gimp is vastly superior if your looking further at this task… but for simple conversion & export Paint is pretty awesome… just dont try anything fancy with .dds (alpha channels mainly) in Paint as it wont save the data right… that’s what gimps for

been using model tool to resize…took a few attempts but i got it right in the end, ive been using paint for my textures saving as .tga and then converting using dds converter, that got annoying with the whole “cannot convert not a multiplier of two”, but i finally got a ship that works now even if it has got a shield thats on fire.

Davis wrote:
I forgot to tell, when you export from ms3d to cmp the settings are:

orientation: back to front
model type: ship
scale down: 92 (default)
level of detail: level 0

heres a tutorial made by frozen, how to make custom hitboxes, you can see the proper ship orientations on the pics:
http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=30770

post#2

thanks for the link, looks like good stuff, ill start that soon.

i used the upside down orientation instead of back to front and the rest of default, i only put one group in as that part confused me but i don’t seem to have any side effects as of yet, so all is good.