Milkshape: some practical How-To questions

the Sur file

I made a .sur the same way I made a .cmp. But it seems like it’s way too big.

I tried refining it with FLModelTool, but then the game hung.

Should I set the .sur exporter smaller than the .cmp exporter?

O btw, I thought those weird arrows in Milkshape were just a way to visualize hardpoints or so. But now there’s one visible in-game Hmmm… maybe that’s why the .sur is too big (if this arrow, which flows above the ship, is rendered into collision data as well)

EDIT: yes, ridding the arrow has improved the .sur.

Now I wonder how the ship will look as an NPC ship… I’ve only seen it as a player ship sofar, but I wonder whether it will dispappear when its center goes off-screen (in whihc case I would need to load it in FLModelTool - and I hope this won’t screw it up!). But maybe the .sur exporter has been developed in the last years. Anyway, this is for later.

Davis wrote:

[…]

Well, this description became very hard to understand, and might be confusing, but it’s not easy to describe it requires lots of hours of practicing (and suffering).

I apreciate it very much!! But I will only go thru it tomorrow - gotta go sleep within an hour (have to work dayshifts tomorrow and sunday).

Right now I will just finish the thing I’m in the middle of.

Arrow-like objects in imported models

What is the function (within Freelancer I mean) of these arrow-like objects that are present in vanilla models? It seems like I can just delete them without consequence - and if I don’t they might become visible in-space, so it’s kinda mandatory to delete them. But I don’t wanna run the risk that I later find out they have a vital function, hence my question.

Timmy51m wrote:
They’re the hardpoints! Like I said, use the groups tab, you’ll see everything listed in there. You can choose whether or not to import the hardpoints when you import the cmp. You’ll likely need to edit the hardpoint positions after you export an edited cmp, milkshape usually screws up their rotation and knocks them out of position by a few decimal places.

Thx for the info!! I’ll redo the HPs in HardCMP then.

Hardpoints and the SUR file

I’ve noticed that those hardpoints floating outside of the actual model, get solidified too when the SUR is exported. Is there an easy (as in “one or two clicks”) way to prevent this? Or should I just manually delete each and every of these hardpoints?

Doing the latter now, until I learn a better method.

Timmy51m wrote:
What are you saying? You export the cmp and the hardpoints get exported as mesh instead of hardpoints?

If ‘mesh’ (a much-used word which meaning I never could nail down) means in-game material, yes.

And, it was also exported as surface-collision material in the .sur file. After I removed the outlying hardpoint arrows, and did the export again, the sur size was fine (as in: my ship’s visual boundaries matched its surface bumps)

I’m in some big operation now, doing 4 ships at once (three fighters and a freighter, based on the Hawk-Falcon-Eagle trilogy). If all goes well (and I hope I’ll finish it before my gf comes home) then deleting all the HPs before exporting the .sur is indeed the solution. Redoing the HPs now, then the .ini data, then see how they fly (or crash)…

Timmy51m wrote:

You know when you use the cmp importer there’s a tab you can check which allows you to choose whether you import hardpoint info or not right?

yeah you told me so but I was already working on a model.

Weird mixed result, as to my present (above-described) project:

• overall fine: ships work fine
• the lightest fighter rendered a crash on launch
• not all the weapon hps I made, showed up. Shall go thru them tomorrow.