Skotty. wrote:
You could do it the same way as the wrecks in FL were made. Use/create a Fuse that makes it drop all its loot and give it healthpoints. If you want to make it hidden you can make it a NON_TARGETABLE solar with destructible = true. People won’t recognize it until they actually destroyed the asteroid.

Vital wrote:
You can make it some kind of NON_TARGETABLE depot with asteroid archetype and invisible cargopods, try to make appropriate fuses so that the more players hit the asteroid - the more cargo will gradually come out…
And look through Adoxa’s plugins

Both of these are sort of what I was thinking about. Will report back once I start fiddling with some actual asteroid fields, since I need to tackle the asteroid field and exclusion fields before I can put the rest into practice 😛

Yeah, I am green 😛

Cheers

-Sparta

In addition to UTF editor, which is awesome for importing/exporting dds and tga files, you may eventually find yourself wanting to change things that don’t have a mat file, but instead have the textures loaded in the .cmp file itself. For this, I suggest “Freelancer XML Project” which will allow you to basically decompress the files you want to tinker with, spitting out xml files (can also extract images and audio clips from files by checking the options in the program).

Example: I wanted to create new thumbnail icons for ship vendor for my new ships… I got the images taken of the ships, put them in 64x64, but could not find the .mat files associated. After decompressing the .3db file, I opened the .xml output and found the image the .3db used. Selecting “extract images” from the XML Project program, I was able to extract and replace the image. After a little editing of the .xml file, I was ready to recompile/compress the contents back into a .3db file with a new name (all values in .xml changed as well as image name changed). After compiling the .3db back together, I now have my icon thumbnails for my added ships…

FreelancerXMLProject has been very useful for much more than just texturing as well… but just covering where you’re starting…

Also, if you do adjust your textures to allow transparency, system light color does not alter the appearance of your ship as greatly as if it were solid w/ no transparency.