Posts by AestheticDemon

Quote from MadPommie

Thx Aesth,

i found a ref like the one Bob said and yeah it's gone, but yours worked just coolio... until I opened it at it was fail

MadPommie

Hmm, corrupt archive... ok, no worries, I have another version of the archive, and I notice the working ver is a slightly different filesize...

EDIT:
Just peeked at the readme for that zip, there's a mention of "Rowlette's Revenge', and you not finding a selling base or wreck for it...

You get it from the tractored loot in SP Campaign mode, just after you fly through the jumpgate on your way to meet Juni at Cali Minor, where a FP7 survivor in a rhino comes to talk to you and 3 liberty navy jocks blow him out of the sky... Don't forget to whack the 3 navy boys too...

:twisted:

adding glowing warp nacells is easy enough, I was thinking about the impulse engines (the lumpy bits just inboard of the nacells, on the 'wings'), as they have a sort of grill effect at the back end, I'll see what I can do with a simple trail effect or something...

Download Database - The Lancers Reactor

Lancerthing v1.07

:twisted:

LOL Been a little busy last couple of days, catching up on stuff I didn't get done earlier in the week during the riots, and the aftermath, should get the mesh sorted tonight/tomorrow (fingers crossed)...

Speaking of 'in game'... anybody got any suggestions for engine effects? Havn't seen any startrek stuff in must be 10 years, have NO idea what impulse engines on a shuttle should look like, FX wise...

k, just so I know what your trying to do... Humour me...

How are you trying to pull up the info on a 'known' base, when actually in the game?

Open nav map (F6), zoom in on desired base, left click on base name, left click on the question mark?

or

Open cargo screen (F7), select cargo, click 'traderoutes' and get a list of known bases that buy or sell that cargo and how much for?

or

Something else entirely?

To be honest, I havn't tried it yet, I suppose I should have a play with it, set up a test dckable or something same as I did for the 'pad' type...

In theory, since you're using flmm 1.5 this *should* work...

The numntimes="-1" *should* tell flmm 1.5 to repeat the change for EVERY [base] section in the file, without you having to do each one separately.

Let us know if it works ;D

Heads work the same way...

Find the head you want to clone, copy and paste the dfm file with a new name, so

Copy head_99.dfm paste as head_99_goth.dfm, export the mip0 texture, apply your pale goth makeup, make your mip1-mip8 resizes, import them into the head_99_goth.dfm, then rename the correct bits so they wont conflict with the original version...

You need to change the materials names in...

\ MultiLevel Mesh? Face_groups Group? Material_Name

...for all mesh lods (mesh0 mesh1 etc), and all groups (group0 group1 etc), and in the Materials Library section, and in the texture library, the names for the 3db's can be left as is, since you're just cloning an existing head/body...

Doesn't matter if head_99 3db in head_99.dfm is replaced by head_99 3db in head_99_goth.dfm, since its the same mesh, but the texture names and material names MUST be different, if you want to use both...

Check out the downloads, for a 'mod' called 'Plastic Surgery Kit' or similar, has a whole bunch of cloned female heads, that can be used alongside the originals with no problems.

As for gaps in trents textures, well maybe the dds to tga/edit tga/tga to dds routine has made just enough errors in replication to leave gaps, just using tga's might well fix that.

*sigh* for a simple scripted mod, 1.5 works pretty good, and the new features include stuff that makes your code shorter and simpler, the main problem with 1.5 is it sometimes causes problems with very large ini copy mods originally written for 1.3 back in the stone age...

For a small change like this 1.5 will work just fine, it's not the flmm version thats causing problems here.

Quote from spuder

just a quike Q: trents texture is dds format but only has 1 texture insted of 8. most of the others are TGA and have 8 peaces each. Does this mean if I turn the TGA textures into dds I will only need 1 file for each section for all the others or is trent different in some way?

Nope, same as any texture, 1 dds file or several tga's, how many depends on how large the textures are, basically its factorial 2,

mip0 = original texture
mip1 half size
mip2 quarter size

and so on until you hit 1 pixel by 1 pixel

tga's will give better quality, since dds is a lossy format, but f you use dtx 5 compression which Swat mentioned he'd tried and FL takes with no problem, you lose less data than with dtx1 or 3, it shouldnt make much difference visually.

Options tag?

It's used to ask you questions when you activate a mod, open sp yes/no, how much starting cash, what system to start a new player in, etc...

any "data file=" code block in the mod with the options="x,y" bit after the ini file name will only trigger if your choice for activation question x was answer y

If you are not using that feature, you shouldn't need the [options] block in the header at all.

Did you break the section and source lines into 3, if I recall correctly, the flmm docs say only 1 tag per line so...

...might not work, try...

...instead.

You say it didn't append, so you opened the ini file after activating the mod, and the new values were not in the file? Check for typos in the brackets, if one is missing it all goes pearshaped but still might activate.

Also, did you start a new game after activating, or load an existing pre edit savegame?

The dfm files contain mesh names and texture names, the names must be unique, so just saving the file as a different name will probably cause conflicts, you need to clone the file, with different mesh and texture names...

You have to do this manually in a utf editor...

Here is a clone test I did, of a recoloured Liberty uniform, for a new faction, compare this with the li_female_guard_body.dfm to see what I changed...
UTFEditor v3 lets you open multiple files so you can see them side by side...

To be honest, I havn't looked at docking rings, lol, too much other stuff to do, I found 'pad' in one of the dll's, tried it, and it works, I *think* it might have originally been intended for dockable solars like the factory unit (pueblo for example) that has a 'landing pad' modeled on the back, it's even hardpointed up, they just didnt script it up as a dockable in the ini files...

land? Havn't seen that one in the dll, you sure about that one?
Hmm, just checked, docking rings use the 'ring' type

So, thats

berth, med moor, large moor, small moor (not used in vanilla), pad (not used in vanilla), jump, ring, airlock (sort of used in vanilla)

Quote from spuder

yeah will do thanx. you sound prity clued up about 3D modeling, is that what you do or is it just an interest of urs?

What I do is IT Tech support/Operations (last quarter of a century or so, before that I was in the Royal Navy), 3D CGI is just a hobby, one I've dabbled in for the last 17 yrs or so, along with a little game modding / custom content creation here and there...

LOL

Quote from spuder

kk think im getting it. no i dont actually use poser it just what the models are created in which im using but ill look into what ya said.

Click the 'website' button under my forum avatar on this post, that will take you to my deviant art gallery, look for the 'poser freebies' subsection on the left, ignore the swords n spears etc, try the light sabre or the bullwhip, those are simple meshes, rigged as posable characters for poser, they have cr2 files to define how the obj file is loaded and set up a 'skeleton' for posing it, simple skeletons not too hard to get the gist, if you're that interested... lol

Yeah there is some kind of 'hardpointing' in there too, for prop attachments, probably in the 'skeleton' section, thats why all the character accessory props come in male/female flavours, to match the variations in position on the two different skeletal rigs.

EDIT: Just opened a dfm since its been a while since I looked in one, theres a short hard pointsd list in a hardpoints section, for basic prop attachments, a parts list, multi nested but similar to a cmp, the face groups bit off the root is totaly unlike cmp/3db formats, looks like there are embedded mesh data in there in a mad binary format including bone names and bone weights, for kinematics, along with uv data again in some mad binary format, this seems to replace the standard vmesh data of a cmp/3db.

So, the material lib, texture lib, parts, and cmpnd sections are pretty normal, the hardpoints section is NOT normal, the skeleton section is almost empty, and the multilevel section is just insane, like somebody translated part of a vmesh format, might be worth checking the 'multilevel/mesh0/group0/' and geometry sections against the source code for a cmp/3db exporter plugin, seems the group0 group1 etc sections define the material groups just like the ones we use in cmp exports from milkshape, with a material name (not crc checksums or hex codes, plain text), and a list of triangle index numbers to which that material is applied, while the geometry section is an alternate format of vmesh, maybe if an export plugin c coder looked at this, it might actually be possible to write a milkshape exporter for it, so you could export a 'dummy cmp' and then export the dfm mesh format from the dummy and import it into a cloned dfm with utf editor...

All those bottom level nodes are full of data, boneweight and bone are just 3 col arrays, for vertex weight mapping and vertex to skeleton bone assignment, that is which 'virtual body part' left thigh, right foot etc a particular vertex is attached to and how much it should deform from its position when the body part is posed.

Point bone count, another array, but who knows what it does, doesnt seem to match the number of verts at all... Points_bone_first, who knows, mad binary stuff..

[EDIT2]: Lightbulb time... array of xyz coordinates for the start points of the 'bones' in the skeleton, that is, center or rotation for each bone, left thigh pivot point, left shin pivot point, left foot pivot point etc., similar to the format used in poser (a rigging system even older than Freelancer) [/edit2]

Points is just a standard vertex list, with xyz coords, so points_bone_count *might* be vertex winding order to define the tris... *might* not, point_indices & uv0_indices looks more like triangle definition lists in fact.

The vertex_normals bit worries me, not sure if milkshape uses vert-normals, or if it only supports surface normals, vert normals allows you to make curved polygons instead of flat ones, a high end (3ds max) kind of mesh smoothing.

And thats just one mesh entry, there are 6, lods? Anyone ever seen characters use lods?

Icky format...

Now your getting the idea, in one of your pm's you mentioned poser models, do you use poser/ds ? if so, open up a poser .cr2 file in a text editor, and you'll see how the meshes are chopped up into groups, with a set of code for each part that defines how it links to the other parts, and how it should bend when you change the pose of the figure.

You also find a similar system in jedi knight 3 (academy) or the quake series (in most 3d games involving humanoid figures in fact), sometimes the mesh it's slf is chopped into bits to attach to a skeleton, sometimes its a single mesh, depends on how old the game is amd what system they use.

editing the ini's to use a new dfm is a piece of cake, cloning an existing dfm to add a new reskinned one, is tedious but doable, making a new dfm from scratch is the hard (never been done before) part, the dfm mesh format isn't just a cmp with a different file extension, nobody is really sure what all the bits in there actually do, as yet, except digital anvil who aint saying...

Thats the bit that would make the first person to do it a "FL Modding Hall of Famer". Gonna involve taking an existing dfm literally to pieces and comparing mesh formats etc with cmp's/3db's, trying to figure how to group the mesh, how the mesh bending system (so the knees flex etc) works, talking a LOt of very experimental work.

Game is 8 years old and this still hasn't been cracked, unlike most other FL formats, so don't expect this to take a few days...

I havn't looked too closely at chars, so this is just off the top of my head, you understand...

There is a separate folder for the animations, which come in two flavours, male and female, each set is based around a standard skeleton rig for the gender in question...

The bodies etc, have multiple parts, presumable for defining bending zones for the joints, maybe some form of vertex weight mapping like sims2, maybe just simple mesh bend zones, say a spherical falloff, like some versions of poser or truespace, maybe some wierd combo, maybe something else...

A typical body only uses 3 texture maps/materials, but these are assigned to multiple groups, it's kinda tedious altering tex names when cloning body meshes, and I havn't done it in a while, but in addition to the multiple mesh groups, there is what seems to be a complex 'skeleton info' section as well, this will presumably match up with the default skeleton used to create the anims, so any male anim should be applicable to any standard male body. Basically, dfm files are NOT just renamed cmp's. The actual mesh format may be the same vmesh thng used in cmp's and 3db's, I havn't bothered to check as yet, maybe somebody else knows, but cmp's and dfm's are not the same, dfm's seem to use features from both cmp's (extra nodes to define stuff like joints) and 3db's (built in texture libraries) with mad stuff all of their own...

What Poly is talking about when he mentions using cmp's or 3db's is making STATIC 'alien guy' statues, and putting them in your bars instead of animated vanilla characters .