Ship Disappearing At Dock

brianmccumber

Hello. Maybe someone can point me in the right file path to fix this annoyance. I’m flying the Tarsus in the Privateer mod and when the camera zooms in while you are buying gear the ship disappears when the camera gets close. If you circle the view using the arrows the ship reappears. this only happens when the camera is really close to the ship. I’m pretty sure this only happens with the Tarsus, so maybe the glitch is in it’s ini file somewhere? Is there a length of draw or something that I can change to keep it from disappearing? There are so many different files that make up a ship, I figured someone who has a better grasp of the file structure of a ship could give me a pointer. Any help will be appreciated.

See attached images to see the glitch in action

Skotty

It might be a problem of the radius written in the ship’s CMP / 3db file. Every object in Freelancer has a radius which helps the game to decide whether to draw it or now (save resources). If the radius is too small (which can be a problem of ships exported with older CMP exporters) they disappear.

A solution would be just to load the model into FLModelTool and then save it without any changes. FLModelTool fixes the radius as soon as it loads the model if I remember right.

CK256

Another possibility is the LOD setting in DATA/SHIPS/shiparch.ini here’s an example of a vanilla ship (highlighted)

[Ship]
ids_name = 237034
ids_info = 66570
ids_info1 = 66571
ids_info2 = 460999
ids_info3 = 66572
ship_class = 0
nickname = li_fighter
LODranges = 0, 40, 60, 140, 300, 1000
msg_id_prefix = gcs_refer_shiparch_Liblf
mission_property = can_use_berths
type = FIGHTER

Check if your ship has a similar setting or sometimes it can be listed like this new mod ship (I think the game extrapolates the settings between 0 and 5500)

[Ship]
ids_name = 460398
ids_info = 461353
ids_info1 = 461354
ids_info2 = 460999
ids_info3 = 461355
ship_class = 3
nickname = Mauler
LODranges = 0, 5500

brianmccumber

Well thanks fellas. I had just downloaded the hitbox help package yesterday and it had the FL model tool in it. As old as the privateer mod is it’s probably like you said, older cmp exporter problem. I just opened it and saved it and it fixed the glitch. So I appreciate the help. I’m sure I’ll be back with more problems soon. At least I get to play Privateer while debugging it, heheh. I’ve already fixed a number of bugs in it. Achilles and Hector in Troy system are now dockable with ship/gear/commodities sales and missions/news in the bars. I’ve also been adding asteroid billboards and bands to relevant asteroid fields. Having asteroid fields that just appear out of nowhere bothered me when I’m playing this mod. But anyway, thanks fer the help.