Posts by Argh

  • Two Effect Lines

    If you´re trying to have the Cloak effect called when Cruise is enabled... well, I´m not sure that´s going to work. ALEs have sub-effects that can be called by the game engine depending on the state that the game engine´s in. IOW, I doubt very much that the Cloak ALE can be called as a normal part of activating Cruise. Sorry, it´s just how things work.

  • Fuse files

    lol... 1. I don´t use any chat software. No offense intended, but I don´t like chat. 2. I´m at work. Kind´ve inconvenient. Sorry.

  • Fuse files

    Well... erm... the easiest way to do a self-destruct is to have a Torpedo with a ridiculously large detonation_distance ... then it detects the player´s ship and blows up immediately on launch. Give it a nice large blast radius, have players equip two of them (or put them onto ships without a Good entry, so that they´re "just there" when a player buys a ship)... and there you go. Why two of them? Because one, no matter how much damage it does, will not knock down both the Shield and Hull. Which, if you think about it... won´t damage the ship that sets it off, which won´t be very ... self-destruct-like...

  • Show off your finished and in progress work

    Please send me an email, if the address listed here on TLR isn´t correct. I´ll send the CMPs and a couple of the new MATs, so that you can get an idea of what´s been involved. I am... pretty positive that I renamed some Parts in the earliest ones I did, before I realized that I didn´t need to alter *everything*... so I´ll have to re-check that and see if I need to do some from scratch. No real big deal, honestly- the CMP alterations are pretty straightforward... it´s the MATs that are a big pain. With one important exception. The Kusari Elite (that´d be the Dragon that´s not the Blood Dragon version) was altered fairly extensively, in an effort to fix name collisions between it and its more illustrious cousin. This has worked, to some extent- now the Elite doesn´t turn into a Blood Dragon Dragon (lol) seemingly at random, like it used to, except at ShipDealers, where it has proven remarkably resistant to being fixed, and will only stay a Dragon if the Blood Dragon version is offered alongside it. Very strange problem there, haven´t quite figured out why it´s still colliding yet, but it´s probably a bad INI reference somewhere.

  • Two Effect Lines

    Cruise effects are called by the game engine, which calls a sub-effect from the ALE. Cruise effects are generated by the Trail, not by the Flame.

  • New Stations

    I really like the idea of new Mining Bases. I don´t like the way that the current ones work, and they´re utterly impossible to get Big Things to land/take off from, without using ridiculously huge radii for their DockMounts. I also think that new Docking facilities with planets might be a good idea. But I´m kind´ve concerned about the whole "dropping onto the planet" sequence- that´s hard-coded, and goes along with Docking_Ring types. But that´s a cosmetic thing, really. I´ve been thinking that I can make some sort´ve forced-perspective "tube" that seems to drop down to the planet´s surface. I think the first thing I need to build, though, is a larger base with a proper "landing strip", to test whether I can, indeed, get larger SURs to register collisions correctly.

  • Show off your finished and in progress work

    Basically... an OcOtTwo will still only be rendering one polygon side at render time... the difference is, it won´t automatically cull the backfaces. The reason for using OcOtTwo is that you can then use partially-transparent and opaque areas on the same texture, and have it look right from all angles. So, for example... instead of modeling some bars over the roof of that fighter´s cockpit... you could paint them on, and because it´s Two, you´ll see it through the glass on the other side. Check out the MAT used for the gridwork on FL´s Stations, etc... they´re using OcOtTwo textures there, instead of increaing the polycount, they used a small, tiled texture with alpha channel.

  • Show off your finished and in progress work

    Harrier, that´s gorgeous, as usual <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> I feel a bit of a stinker saying anything that´s not gushing about what´s an almost perfect ship... but... the cockpit glass ... just doesn´t feel right. How´s about a smoked-glass look with an DcDtOcOtTwo texture and some bars across the top of the glass? Just a thought... the rest of the model´s just so nicely realistic that I really feel like the cockpit glass should be perfect, but I´m probably just a minority of one there <img src=smilies/icon_smile.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>

  • Show off your finished and in progress work

    Lastly... and this is directed at Cold_Void... I´ve been spending a <i><b>lot of time </i> </b> with FL´s Parts recently, as part of assigning Glowmaps. What I can tell you is this: FL´s designers were ... ah... well, they were trying to be <i>frugal </i> and re-use Parts and Materials over and over again. Hence, the same darn texture is re-used for Engine Grills over and over again... engine_grill01 is everywhere. Problem is... they duplicated that (and many other) textures in the MATs everywhere. Methinks they were just plain sloppy- there wasn´t any need to duplicate that data... FL doesn´t really care where a texture resides, so long as the MAT refers to its name correctly. They could´ve saved themselves (and us) a ton of trouble by just lumping all the textures into one big MAT file, honestly. But nooooo... they had different art teams working on different things at different times, and probably ended up with some poor, downtrodden soul making it all <i>work </i> as they got near the end of production. What has happened as a result of this ... is constant name collisions. You cannot, for example, just replace engine_grill01 in one MAT and have it work right. Just try it, if you want to. What´ll happen is the same thing that happens when modders build stuff with name collisions: if you load up the very specific object that refers to this &quot;new&quot; MAT... everything else in the entire game that also refers to that MAT name... will also use that texture! Kind´ve... inconvenient. Worse yet... if you, say, buy another ship, that refers to another MAT (which has a different file associated with engine_grill01)... then everything will change to THAT... including whatever ship you thought you´d changed! The only way to avoid this, I eventually determined, was to go into every darn model in FL that makes use of these textures... and use FL Model Cloner to re-define their MAT references, giving them unique names. This totally fixes the problem, but it´s obviously rather time-consuming and annoying- you can´t make any mistakes. Having done so for just about all of the &quot;collections&quot; of like-textured ships in FL... I can tell ya, with dead certainty, that naming conventions are one of the least-understood and yet most-important areas of building working models in FL. If you´re really after your goal of totally destructable, multiple-LOD ships (that somehow don´t have all of the very real problems I´ve described and documented)... you need to be aware that the only way for you to achieve your goal is by very, very carefully naming everything. Those Part names will come back to haunt you, if you give them generic names, like &quot;broken_wing&quot;. Please, just trust me on this- while I disagree with your goals for what I think are legitimate technical/gameplay reasons, I wish you success in realizing your dream of matching DA´s work, and you really need to pay very close attention to naming conventions or you´ll put a lot´ve work down the toilet <img src=smilies/icon_smile_tongue.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle>

  • {Software} CMP Exporter v0.3 Beta

    I´ve tried the sample weapon that came with the Exporter. Same problem- weapon works just fine in-game, doesn´t draw in Rooms... Dunno what´s causing this, but I´ve tried messing with the Extents and other stuff, to no avail. Too goshdarn bad, really- this Exporter is like a dream come true, except for this wee little problem. For now, I´ll stick to the hard way.

  • Request for Ship Modders

    Weeeeelll... Having looked things over at that site... well, that stuff´s all over the place, in terms of suitability for putting into a video game. Truth told, most of it´s not very professionally built. There´s a huge difference between building a high-poly wasteful and texture-inefficient model for some random raytrace in your spare time and something that´s ready for FL. Some of the Borg stuff might be salvageable. But the stuff that looks low-poly enough to be worth bothering with is also the least imaginative art- in large part, because it´s very obviously non-canon... even the color schemes are wrong. Whoever thought Borg stuff should be all green and glowing... is obviously confusing Borg with Necrons <img src=smilies/icon_smile_wink.gif width=15 height=15 border=0 align=middle> I could see someone doing a really nice Borg cube, but do you really want this huge collection of random things, most of which are totally non-canon? What´s the point? The Borg don´t think small, and making fighters for them seems kind´ve silly, if you ask me... At any rate, if I ever have spare time again, I´ll make a nice Borg cube if I´m bored enough. Lord knows, it´d be a real pain to really capture the essential creepy detail of the Cubes without going waaaay overboard on polycount, and it´d be an interesting challenge. But not right now... and if you really want Borg fighters... find better inspiration. These designs are very boring, at least to me. Just my opinion, of course- you guys obviously like them, and it´s not your fault I don´t like what you do. Hopefully somebody else will feel differently and help you out.