Freelancer Battle for Orion Mod

    Ok guys bringing it back to the orig post lol. Iv decided to give it ago at a star trek total conversion mod. now i know others have done this like WTS but im talking pure trek. spending a few months doing background research and I have a few treky freinds who can tell me what ship levels should be what. But when I say total conversion I dont say it lightly. I recon in the next few months im gona be on here alot. I want to change every aspect of the game if at all possible to star trek e.g. all characters to wear trek uniforms and change face detials to add diff races. I know I have my work cut out for me but I already have all the information I need on the web and the 3d ships are easy to come by. So here goes nothing lol...................... Thanx all for the comments and the help with modding and ip stuff ill update in the next few months with a few vids of what ships will be in v1.0 hehe

    cheers. yeah im not a massive fan. I have watched a few of them such as voyager but to be honest everything I need is on the internet. I cant believe how mad people are about it. Some of the websites are in sooo much detail. first thing I will do is post a video of what ships i intend to use in the mod. I also intend to keep the graphics as close to the video as possible. Going into one of the other post, does anyone know what happends if you import a model that has to many poly's? I have a space doc that has 140k poly's and I red on another post that 75k was the limit? is there a reason for this and can it be broken with a little coding? I want the detail to be as good as it can be without screwing up the current system requirements and I love the ships Iv downloaded. Iv converted their texture to tga and they still look awsome. Star trek online is the visuals Im looking for with the fredom of freelancer.


    To keep system spec at best Im modding on a laptop. This giving me a better view of how it will run on low spec desktop pc's and todays student spec laptops. with freelancer being such an old game now i havent really come across a system that cant handel it and Im hoping to keep it this way once Iv finished modding.


    This brings us back to the conv about modding for fun or public. This mod is for fun but Im hoping that I do such a gud job of it that others will like my work and take interest in helping me out later with small things that I havent learnt how to change such as. re-designing the 3d bar or city to look like a star trek city bar with my own ships in the back ground of the city e.g. transport shuttles and stuff. it would also be cool if when you land on the planet it always showed a shuttle landing as it would be a little un realistic to see the enterprise land on the planet just to pic up commodities lol. anyways im a long way from that point and iv yet to finish researching the first four races. so if anyone knows anything about trek and has any ideas just pop them down here. Ill always comment bk, thanx for the support guys!

    140.000 is a lot for a model for Freelancer. And if you're laptop isn't powerfull it won't manage to handle it. If you want to change the cityscape/bar model, you'll need something to replace the existing one with the UTF Editor.

    yeah i had a feeling you might say that. the doc does look amazing though. spoze thats what the testing phase is for. might see how it handels and if its killing my laptop put a different one in thats alittle smaller when it comes to polys. cheers for the city/bar info. ill look into creating a 3d city and new bar to re-place it with. im guesing freelancer use's tga texture for that too?

    Freelancer used textures in texture archives called .dds files. You need the plugin for that for The Gimp or Photoshop.


    Texture Libraries are linked with the UTF Editor.

    It can use tga, spuder, but it's much more sensible to use dds where possible.


    Mipmapping as well as the smaller file size. ;)


    Nvidia does the dds plugin for photoshop, I presume they also do it for other image editors.

    Erm...


    TGA, uncompressed tga's only.
    DDS, yeah auto mip mapping, but... DDS is a lossy format, Freelancer can use dtx1 or dtx3 for sure, dunno about dtx5, havn't tried it yet, dtx1 gives best compression and worst loss of image quality.


    As for final file sizes, depends on how many mip levels you actually need, a fully mipped dds might wok out larger than a single mip0 tga image, and give noticably worse image quality.

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

    yeah as much as Id love to go all out on graphics, not only am I not artistic enough but I want my mod to be able to be played on any computer you can buy these days, even notbooks. So my main objective for now is to get my first version up and running then maybe look into giving the graphics a new look. As im doing this mod for fun im also using free graphics so i cant expect the models and textures im using to look cgi realistic.


    My biggest issue atm is polys. a few of my models have got alot of polys such as my borg cube. it has 190k polys so im not sure how freelancer will react to it.


    Thanx for the help guys ill make a note of using dds files

    I think with todays hardware it shouldnt be so bad on performance to use high-poly models. I dont know what polycount the vanilla models have, but I got freelancer to run on a laptop with 2GHz Celeron and 800 series Chipset integrated graphics. Even on a PII350 + GeForce4 440MX and 128MB or memory it still ran fine at 1600x1200.


    Also, if you haven't already, check out memory alpha. Good for ST infos of ALL sorts

    yeah freelancer runs easy on all of my systems. i bought the game about 10 years ago and my hardware was way above the requirements then, so now its way more advanced in the notebook. my laptop and desktop have way more upto date hardware but my main objective is to maintain stability for everyone and I know that some people use really old pc's unless they are hardcore gamers inwhich case their hardware will be better than mine and will run any mod I have made on my systems.


    Ill check ST info out cheers for the heads up.


    What I may do once the whole mod is finished is update the graphics and see what I can push it too.

    is there any chance some one could make a freelancer export plugin for cinema 4D. my ships cant be imported into milkshap as they are to big for the program.

    I wouldn't hold your breath, right now all the excitement seems to be about the new exporter for autoshmuck bigbux max, and how cool it is, along with the assumption that anyone who doesn't work in milkshape must be using a budget student copy of max. I saw a thread someplace where somebody mentioned they used c4d, and got told "Dpnt limit yourself byclinging to one app" meaning "why didnt you buy max..."


    I use c4d, an older version its true, 7.2, but an older XL version, replacing it would cost me best part of 3 grand (thats real british pounds, not those dollar things). chances of me swapping to max are zero (always hated the user interface, its why I ditched my copy of max 4 years ago for c4d).


    So, unless you can find some nice person with a copy of the cmp/sur file specs, who also happens to be real handy at c4d c.o.f.f.e.e. programming, and knows how to make a coffee plugin backwards compatible with 7.2 xl...


    Trim polys...

    AestheticDemon


    Terror Trooper #666


    Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day...
    Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...

    Quote from spuder

    My biggest issue atm is polys. a few of my models have got alot of polys such as my borg cube. it has 190k polys so im not sure how freelancer will react to it.


    Thanx for the help guys ill make a note of using dds files

    Can't help commenting on this. How can a borg cube be 190k polys? Answer is obvious but so is the solution. A basic cube model should be under 1000 polys. Next step is to do an outstanding texture for all six sides, problem solved. Not everything has to be modelled to achieve an excellent result.

    yeah although I want freelancer to run ok. by now it shouldnt have an issue running new upto date models with todays hardware. This cube looks amazing and cuting bits here and there would be unfair to its creator. This person really has put in a lot of time making the model and I really want this in my mod.


    is there a exporter for max? I do have a copy of that but tend to find the interface easier in c4d. but I can use max to export my models if needed?

    oh also on my mind and alittle of last topic but is it possible to change the clocking effect to sumit more treky? the current sparks passing the ship thingy doesnt really go well with a unclocking war bird lol? or if anyone has already done this Id love a copy