What a time for me to have a nostalgia trip lol

Okay digging this out of the depths of my brain as it’s been about 9 years since I last looked at a SUR, hell it’s been nearly 9 years since I last looked at Freelancer.

4. Is shrinkwrap mesh (type 5) necessary? - if this is what I think it is then it depends on how you built the item your slapping a SUR on. They are designed to spread the damage to everything they cover, for example a wing on a ship that can be blown off, if it has a couple of hardpoints then anything on those hardpoints takes some damage when the wing is damaged directly.

It’s been 3 years and I don’t have any of my files handy, but iirc you can change the root_health_proxy so the collisiongroups no longer leech health from the hull, there is a problem with this though, each component’s health is added to the health bar in game, so you could find yourself dead with more than half your health bar still full as you can’t tell when your hull has reached critical.

You’ll be fine as long as you keep the total HP of your collisiongroups to less than 30% of the hulls HP, over that and your hull armor starts to get a little thin

JONG wrote:

Wow, that’s a new info for me.

So if I have a ship with 2 CollisionGroups, the ship with 10000 hitpoints and the 2 CollisionGroups with 3000 hitpoints, that the ship hull only 4000 hitpoints, right?

Yes

JONG wrote:

But those CollisionGroups has many weapon mounted on, if I give those CollisionGroups only 500 hitpoints, when those CollisionGroups get more then 500 hit, it will be destroyed or not?

Yes

CollisionGroups are designed so it looks like your ship has been in a fight, ie missing parts and sparks & flame coming from the damaged end, and yes that does mean any equipment on it gets destroyed as well, which is why you’ll find vanilla ships have most of thier equipment attached to the Root.

JONG wrote:

Wow, that’s a new info for me.

You’ll find that it’s more a case of just not being common knowledge, most custom ships don’t have destructable components built in, so there is no need for most to learn about CollisionGroups. It’s only when you try to replicate what Digital Anvil did to their ships that you start to understand these things.

You have to be carefull when modifying the hitpoints in the CollisionGroups, as they share the overall hitpoints for the ship.
A ship with 10k hitpoints and 4 CollisionGroups with 200 hitpoints each, means that the ships hull only has 9200 hitpoints.
So if you go nuts you could end up with a ship with a tissue paper hull that gets killed with 1 shot.

I haven’t seen anyone mention TAIKODOM, I only played it for a few hours but from what I’ve seen it’s very much like FL, only drawback is that it’s in Brasilian, so the constant jumping between the game & google translate just to understand the mission briefing spoiled it for me.

is it an original Microsoft CD or the budget release version?, are you using vanilla FL or running a mod?

Only the original Microsoft Freelancer.exe will ask you for the CD, as it’s only the original disc that has the CD security built into it that the .exe is looking for.

Which means your either using the budget version and are running a mod that uses the original .exe, or your CD is a copy/pirate of the M$ version.

That is one of the problems with the game, it’s way to easy to level up, just doing the Featured Episodes will have you at lvl 50 before you’ve finished them, and that’s without doing any of the other mission and events.
Don’t forget you also have the Klingon side to do, so your not finished yet

gratz on getting to Admiral LS, I’m still a bit behind you, but then I do have 3 characters on the go

I take it you got your free Federation & Klingon ships for the event that’s on atm

My 3 toons are -

Kajada@bejaymac <– Fed
Bejaymac@bejaymac <-- Fed
Aze’bur@bejaymac <-- Klingon

so if you see me give us a shout

FLMT has an issue where it holds onto the old settings of the CMP, so when you resize a SUR your getting the wrong settings.

If it’s still Anton’s original that’s available then you have to load the CMP, resize it, save it, close the app, restart it, load the resized CMP, then you can resize the SUR to the CMP.

You answered your own question when you started removing the SURs and the crashes stopped.

From my experiences I can say SURs are very touchy, they can lockup/CTD anywhere from launch of the game to the destruction of the ship.

Alucard wrote:
I made the same sur you did after a few goes with LS’s sur builder. It seem not to regesiter all hits. I appercate your contrubition to this.

No SUR does even vanilla SURs have a 1%-2% miss rate with guns.

Alucard wrote:

Now I have more errors, my Battleship/destroyers have no sound fx while using original cap weapons. No idea why, backtracked everything. Though I did change the rumble fx for the ships, maybe thats drowning them out. Hmmm I have to check. Thanks guys for your help.

As well as Gisteron’s suggestion check the number of HpFire you have on the weapons, even vanilla weapons with 2 or more HpFire were silent.

Scratches Head

Could someone point me to the part of my post where I belittled BullWinkle & LS’s work, cause I sure as hell can’t find it. It’s the exact opposite, I’m all for the SUR Builder and any other tool that makes it easier to get models into FL.
The problem is that even with a SUR Builder working as ST wants it, the CMP has to have been done right otherwise the SUR wont work, and in my experience that’s the part most fail on, either because they hate using Milkshape (too basic for them), or because they have little or no modelling experience (not knowing how to use the CMP exporter properly doesn’t help either), that is what my post was about.

Eh! the only SURs I’ve ever done with the splicer are the ones I did for Gibbon’s Galactica 2.0 mod, and a couple of starlancer ones I was working on before my last visit to the loony house, haven’t built a SUR since I got out, you never know I might just finish them one day. It’s the Exporter for me, 5 years of practise means that only “shrinkwrapped” SURs fail for me, and only because that part of the exporter is F***ed.

You lot do realise that even if you do get a SUR Builder that does what you want, that you will still have a #$%%-load of work to do in Milkshape to get the mesh in the CMP into the right state, otherwise you’ll never get the SUR Builder to make a SUR that works.

Here’s a swift knee in the nuts for you, when I’m making a “skintight” SUR 60-70% of the work I do is getting the mesh that goes into the CMP & the CMP itself done right.

So if you can’t figure out how to make a SUR using my methods with the exporter or Dev’s methods with the SUR Splicer, then you are still going to be in the dark with the SUR Builder.

Time to learn how to use Milkshape properly, rather than as an import/export tool.

Ältere Versionen von Milkshape funktionieren nicht so gut mit Vista & Windows 7, versuchen Sie es mit den neueren Versionen statt.

{Goggle translation )

The engine Colin used when he upgraded HardCmp requires your graphics card/chipset to have full OpenGL support built into it, and most Intel chipsets only have the basic support built into them.

The version of Freelancer Explorer that came out at the same time uses this engine for some of it’s newer features, so expect it to crash on you as well.

The Site is either down or under attack as all I’m getting are timeouts when I try to go there.

Not sure if LD will have the the source for 1.1 as that was Colin’s project, but you never know.

As for FLMM LD does have the source for it, as it’s now an ongoing EOA project, Matt dropped the whole lot in his lap a couple of years ago, Crazy released FLMM 1.5 last year as part of that project.

Bullwinkle wrote:

Bejaymac wrote:
so the idea of possibly spending weeks learning how to get a CMP & SUR to work right is a non starter for most.

Oooh. That explains my experience.

So, now that you have completed your two years of learning how to make good SURs, Bejay… is it possible to explain in a tutorial? Or is it like asking a hacker how to hack (impossible to teach)?

It was on the old Lancers Reactor, so it should be in the archive, it might even be on here as I can’t remember if I posted it here after the site went live (that gives some idea just how long I’ve been making SURs ;)). You are correct in that I can teach how it’s done, just not how to apply it to each mesh, that’s trial & error even for me. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve regrouped a mesh then exported it into a CMP, only to find when building the mesh for the SUR that the grouping wouldn’t work, and end up scrapping the CMP and redoing it with the new grouping.

@ adoxa, please don’t use the source code for V1.2 as even Colin will tell you it’s crap, it has a lot of bugs that just weren’t there in the v1.1, biggest one being it doesn’t make hitboxes properly.

I spent most of this afternoon trying to get it to make a usable multi part SUR without any luck. I used several of my own CMPs as well as a couple of vanilla ones, I made several SURs for each CMP trying to find a setting that would work, every single one of them was a fail of some sort, the Root was the only part to be done properly, of the parts that it actually made a hitbox for most didn’t cover all of the part, and depending on the setting it does miss out parts.

After reading the first couple of pages of this thread it’s become clear what LS’s intentions were when he made this, it was to save him having to make SURs for all of his single part CMPs, an automated tool to make a simple “wrap” SUR for his CMPs, and IMHO that is exactly what is should be used for as it does that beautifully.

Now what’s this about the SUR exporter being unreliable, the “shield bubble” never put a foot wrong for me when I was making ships, and the “shrinkwrap” did what it needed to do when I needed to use the splicer, it just took me 2 years to figure out how to get it to work
People have a pre conceived idea that the exporter is broken, which is based on thier & other peoples crappy no-brainer attempts, believe it or not but Colin came within a fraction of creating the perfect “shield bubble” SUR with v1.1, it can create a SUR just like one of DA’s, only the “wraps” covering parts with equipment hitboxes stop it from working like one of DA’s, it’s the “shrinkwrap” that has the problems.
Gibbon also hit the nail on the head with his “time & inclination” comment, for most the idea of spending the best part of a working day to do one simple ship is to much, and that’s when you know what your doing, so the idea of possibly spending weeks learning how to get a CMP & SUR to work right is a non starter for most.

Which is why ppl like ST are desperate for a one click automated app that can do it all for them, never likely to happen, but that doesn’t stop them wanting one.

ST even if they were created they wouldn’t register properly in FL, in my experience single vertice edges like your wing tips always act like a knife and cuts through every other sur, and would probably only be stopped from going clean through when the main body hit the other sur.

You need to split the “knife edge” on the sur model and move the top and bottom vertices apart, then fill in the holes with a couple of polys.

I haven’t used the sur builder and I probably won’t as I no longer mod, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t like “knife edges” either.