Need Help Tool Q's

Sky-Blazer wrote:
Im trying to learn the Awsome tool’s made for modding
a slow proccess to be sure ive been actavating them as needed per tutorials and read me’s
but some are kicking me Blue.
I’m Hoping i can be pointed in the right direction for info pertaining to these tool’s.

If my questions are of the DUH nature i apologize in advance but i clearly have not absorbed the obvious.
1: msCMPExporterV3
as a test i added a turret hard point to the starflyer and tried to update existing
it clumped all the hard points together and ate half the ship i’m not clear on how the number of groups and the group quantities work are hard points a part of the group? Is a wing by itself a mesh or a grouped group of parts a mesh that i would count as a number of groups to export? giving the line below i don’t imagine that possible
Number Of Groups: Default = 1 (Maximum quantity is 18) you would run past 18 in a quick hurry.
what is quantities asking for? is that the individual groups?

Thanks in advance.Sky-Blazer.

First off, Welcome to The Starport Blazer. As to your question which I have quoted you, As I understand it, there are issues with the exporter 0.3, something I have had some experience w/that version. I personally use Exporter 0.2. Much more stable, IMO.

There are others who could explain your question better that I, but I will explain what I understand. Number of groups is the groups in ms3d. Now if you have a ship with say 4 parts (Hull, Wing1,Wing 2, Tail) and they were just one group per part, you could either tell the exporter to export the default, (nothing wrong with that) or you could say groups= 4, putting a 1 in each of those boxes.
Now if each part was broken up into multiple chunks cuz of multiple textures, (5 textures for the hull say) you would say in the exporter I have 4 groups, but instead of 1 group for the hull, you would put a 5 in there instead.

Again, this is what I understand. I could be completely way off, but here is something to work from.

Fus

The thing i’m not understanding is WHY are the Id Name and the Id Info number (458753)
the Same every thing i have seen or observed tells me that they can not be the same
and the infocard importer/exporter agrees with me.

They indeed can be the same, and many folks mod this way. I have seen problems crop up twice by doing this though, so I NEVER use the same number.
The reason they can both exist is that one is a name resource and one is pure xml.
Here are pics from Reshack:

WARNING: >’ not found at the end of ids 458753…fixing

This sounds like you are trying add text into the INFO section. This pic may help.

Simply plug in a number from vanilla that is suitable, copy and paste, then edit for your taste.

Well from my own work on DLLs, the reason the two can be the same is the DLL can store a string and a HTML (XML in FL’s case) string at the same number. DLLs can store more than just those 2 types though including executable code.

Sky-Blazer wrote:
sumanuti gave me some helpful information on CreatID through a link
unfortunatly for me i don’t apear to have a RUN function does anybody Know where it would Be on a W-7 64 or how i would work around the lack of the function.

If you are referring to the command prompt found in XP, (my Box’s OS) I bypassed it by making a .bat (batch) file. Simply open a notepad file (or w-7’s equiv), type in your code, and save as a filename.bat (Where file name is your choice, ie CreatID.bat) Put this file in the folder where your CreatID app is located. Then simply dbl click the .bat file, and viola! it’s done it’s thing.

Example .bat file text (I use it to convert ms3d to Descent 3 .orf files)

ORFTOOL -SM:BENCH.ms3d -DO:BENCH.orf 
pause

Edit: For my example I had to make sure that the ms3d file was in the folder that the ORFTOOL and my .bat file were.

Fus

Start button - type in text box cmd - hit Enter