A Troubling SUR
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A ship SUR is giving me trouble, which is unusual because I’m generally pretty good at making them. It’s been giving me problems for a while now, in fact, and I thought adoxa’s 1.3 exporter would fix it… but it doesn’t. I’ll upload the relevant files so you can take a look at them.
What it’s doing is freezing the game. Not crashing it, like most SUR errors (and errors in general) are want to do, but locking it up so that I have to ctl-alt-del out. I’ve never seen that behavior before with a SUR, and it’s definitely the SUR; removing the SUR causes the ship to run just fine, albeit without a hitbox. I’ve constructed the SUR similarly to how I construct others, and the others don’t seem to show this problem, so I’m at a loss at explaining it and/or fixing it.
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Please, always use now the OBJ to SUR converter made by Schmackbolzen.
http://the-starport.net/freelancer/forum/viewtopic.php?start=0&topic_id=3849&viewmode=flatℴ=ASC&status=&mode=0
It’s use seems firstly to be complex but it features everything in a logical way you need for surs.Here is a pic how to use Schmackis converter right in the case of your ship (because the wings are not centered in the CMP you need to set center values of their sur meshes to 0, 0, 0 and not automatic):
Here is a new sur I made with Schmackis converter:
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Nice! That worked perfectly; I wonder what the problem with the exporter is with that model.
Unfortunately, I have another, unrelated SUR problem, so I thought I’d post it here too as to not clutter the board. I also don’t think that Schmackbolzen’s converter will help here, alas.
What I’m doing is making a sort of cross-beam. That isn’t exactly very descriptive, so essentially, I’m taking space_tanklx4.3db and taking off the tanks on the bottom. The model itself works fine, but the SUR is… problematic.
It took some doing just to get the damn thing to detect hits (freaking 3db files…), and now that it does, it’s detecting hits in places I don’t want it do. What I want the SUR to look like is three bars, almost perfectly matching the 3db; what I’m getting is a pyramid, which detects hits in areas which are quite far away from the model itself. The original space_tanklx4.sur doesn’t suffer from this; you can fly through, for example, the corners of the “+” shaped bottom, whereas with mine you can’t.
So I’ve spent the last three hours or so trying to eliminate that part of the SUR and get a form-fitting SUR, all to no avail. I’ll upload the relevant files again so you guys can take a look.
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With Schmackis program you can make surs working for 3dbs very well.
I just made 3 single boxes, fitting the beams you have in the model, and exportet the whole model as a .obj file.
And if you think you can use the old sur exporter for single part models: forget about it. Schmackis program makes more stable single part models than the old exporter. You can create whatever sur you want with it and never get a problem if you make all pieces convex (and if not, his converter makes them convex, but not recommended by me).
Here it is:
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It does ^^ Just ask Skotty
You need to add them manually, though. -
I’m not sure if Freelancer uses the shield bubbles included directly in the ships sur file or if it uses the shield bubble you’ve to add via the shield_link parameter to the ship. This would need some test I think.
But however, sometimes the shieldbubbles of the ships (vanilla ships) dont get “disabled” if your shield is offline and you can collide to every object just with the bubble and not your ships own hull.And besides that: if you add meshes for the hardpoints, they are verytime enabled for players, NPC have another role in the whole sur-history (for them everything works great :P).
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Hmmmm. Another problem arises.
Okay, look, I’m not secretly trying to get you to compile all of of my SURs for me, I’m really trying to understand the converter. I tried emulating the above screenshot as closely as possible (although I checked the “Always use convex hull…” option, though I’ve also tried it without that option checked with the same results), and my SUR is nevertheless bogus. It won’t load in HardCMP, FLModelTool, and it crashes MilkShape; I shudder to think what it’ll do ingame!
Again, I’ve included the relevant files, including a screenshot of my setup, just in case something is wrong with that. Could one of you tell me why my SUR isn’t getting generated correctly?
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Forget about the naming of the sur meshes like it is needed in the old exporter!
Always give the sur meshe EXACTLY the name of their counterparts. So the Hardpoints just must have names like HpShield01. To give them the sur part they are attached to, use the last column in the converter (Belongs to).
Normal meshes must have the name of their counterparts like they are in the FIX file, so everytime WITH _lod1 at the end!
Only root meshes can be named whatever you want.
Be sure always to make one group that consists out of multiple meshes with the same name.
NEVER merge meshes that belong to the same group in one mesh! Keep everything seperate.And: The sur converter WON’T create automatic meshes for your hardpoints. You have to do it by yourself.
Oh and, the wings were no convex models. You can keep all the standard checkboxes in the converter, but always use the Convex Tool in Milkshape.
Here the settings for this model:
Edit:
I think I should do the tutorial Schmackbolzen wanted me to create. I see the people aren’t using his program because they don’t know how it works. I have to change this! -
I don’t add shield bubbles, but like I’ve already written there are 2 shieldbubbles in Freelancer. One directly included in the ships sur and one connected to a 3db. The 3db-based shield bubble is set to your ship with the shield_link line in the shiparch.ini.
I just don’t know what shield bubble is for what detection. Never tested it.You could manually add them in your ships sur by creating a sphere and name it HpMount (because the standard shield bubbles are connected to HpMount). But it could be, that this bubble will always work for the collision, so no hit will really hit your ships hull and the weapons (except explosions of course).
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Skotty. wrote:
I think I should do the tutorial Schmackbolzen wanted me to create. I see the people aren’t using his program because they don’t know how it works. I have to change this!Bang on! It confuses the hell out of me.
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Well, I’ve had a lot of luck with the converter, and I’ve used it several times to make very good SUR files.
The last two, however, are a bit different, and I’m a little concerned that I’ve done something wrong. See, the other SURs I’ve made with the converter (four, to be precise) have all been under 30 kb once I’ve exported them properly (which is to say, after I’ve used the convex tool in MilkShape; it really cuts down on file size!). The last two, however, are both around 40 kb, which is considerably larger than what they should be, I feel. Also, while I’m fairly certain they’re detecting hits fine, I’m not absolutely certain. Using the convex tool in MilkShape hasn’t helped, so I’m hoping someone will be willing to take a look to see if I’m doing something wrong, or if the SUR files are just larger than normal due to the complexity of the model.
Thanks!
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39kb and 37kb are my results. Nothing to worry about. The Rheinland Battleship I made in the Tutorial had 87kb, and its convex model doesn’t have as much polygons as you may expect for a ship in that size.
Oh and I think it’s not good to make a shield bubble like vanilla did it on the ships. For players, HpMount will never get deactivated so you will ever collide with the bubble and not the shiphull itself. But of course, you can do it however you want.
