Anyone else still need a SUR generator?

Gibbon wrote:
@ ST

You obviously missed the bit where i said i have a working version of that sur that Bejay corrected. With that i can fly through the landing bays and it is most certainly dockable.

I’ve included it here so you can compare.

All i was doing by showing the previous sur was to demonstrate that the exporter can make a decent body hugging sur, it just needs fixing so it can work properly, by that i mean the exporter as one possible solution to our woes.

Gibbon:

Your new galactica sur has no HpMount (the shield bubble) so it can be docked on. And the bent dock sidewalls are now straight and convex.

Very good.

LS: Yes I understand about not overwriting any of the data in the sur file. By using insert the file size is extended so I can see that might also cause problems since offsets to the following sections would be wrong and I would not know where to find and change them.

Adoxa: So if there are sections following the hpid location, we cannot insert additional hardpoints even if surf sections are not present? But if the hpid section is at the end, then we can extend it by adding our hardpoint crc’s?

I’ve still not quite got in my head what I can and cannot do (we engineers need precise instructions or else our logic circuits malfunction)!, so I will have to do it and report back.

Now - we need to be sure that all the lessons learned here are incorporated into the next sur tool!

My measure of the success of that tool will be to generate a sur for a vanilla ship, and it should be identical to the original sur including hardpoint sur parts, and all bounding boxes including those for the (weapon+wing) surs. Nothing less will be acceptable! Because only then will we know we have a tool that produces fully compatible surs.

And on top of this, remember that it must have:-
1. an option for shield bubbles for small fighters (HpMount plus an identical bounding box),
2. an option for a tight bounding box like the ones used for vanilla freighters and warships (plus the internal bounding boxes), and
3. an option for no bounding boxes at all, only bare sur parts, so that we can generate surs for the huge ships and bases etc. without needing Sur Splicer.

I know that this is a tall order - but I have complete faith in the abilities of you guys who are slaving over the next sur tool.

Of course you won’t please everyone but this will go a long way.

Come to me for encouragement any time, this tool will complete our arsenal!

Thanks guys.

Mirkha wrote:
…
in fact with the boolean tool, the sur works for the laser and not for the hull, if i reminber well

Hi Mirkha, good to know you are still around!

What do you mean by “laser”? Which parts works?

I am keen to be able to use the “Bool Tool” as I call it, because it makes modelling so much easier.

Yes, correct.

I don’t think it is MilkShape, it’s the Sur collision calculation algorithm - it does not know about concave shapes or shapes with holes because it uses extremities of the outer vertices surrounding the shape it is checking for collisions - these are being called “Bounding Boxes”. And it makes sense that the calculation is looking for penetration within the bounding box vertices.

But no tool will be able to split for example a sphere with a docking bay or hangar in it into 4 or more parts automatically.

We can do that, but then we also need to have cmp groups with the same name, so we may as well make the sphere in 4 pieces and give each one a name, and then sur exporter can easily make the convex sur parts for each piece.

As we all know, the limit of 18 parts is a problem for the tools we have, but this next sur tool will overcome that problem.