** Tutorial ** - Making a new ship from scratch

Mon Aug 25, 2003 2:56 pm by Warlord Bob

Shure

Its really cool actualy. Did you make a material in Milkshape? If not, first, select your ship hull (everything except the 2D triangles) you click on the materials tab and click "new" or sonthing like that. There are two buttons there that say "none". Click on the top one, and find your .tga file. Than click apply. Now rt click the 3D window in and select "textured". Ugly huh? Soooo select your ship hull if it isn't still selected (everything except the 2D triangles) and open your texture coordinate editor (cntrl T). There should be your tga picture with a wireframe of your ship stretched over it. Now is the fun part. Select and move vertices around until the color you want only on your engine nozles say, is on the faces that represent those and NOTHING else overlaps that color. Contort your ship however you like, it won't mess up your model. You may have to adjust your graphic a little but you can do almost anything with just one cleverly designed square. gl

We who are about to die salute you!

Mon Aug 25, 2003 8:02 pm by Imagine

Bob: About the texture names, I'm not really sure. I made the tex antioch and the image antioch.tga. The node in the mat with just 'antioch' could either be the name of the image without the extension or the name of the texture file. All I know, though, is it works if you set your tex and img names to be same.
The flmmbak is apparently the backup file for flmm. Do not mess with that. Go to the properties of the shiparch.ini read-only and toggle the read-only attribute off.

Swordmaster: Warlordbob is right; you will need to learn how to apply textures in Milkshape, because that is where you let the tga stick onto the ship. It's called skinning, and is a skill like modeling. There are a couple of good tutorials on milkshape's website. Make sure you finish skinning before you export the cmp file.

Edited by - Imagine on 25-08-2003 21:06:33

Tue Aug 26, 2003 12:34 pm by z103

could somebody please make a ship for me? with pretty much the same specs as Zousug? sent to this email please: [email protected] ? i would be very greatfull

Tue Aug 26, 2003 5:32 pm by Warlord Bob

Ok. I must be missing sonthing. The shiparch config. file I mentioned does not require bini de-compresion and doesn't have .ini at the end. Is it the right file? Shure looks like it. BUT even with every precaution I can think of, I can't get the game to stop crashing!!! Did this work for you? If so, please post the two lines of code in question from the modified patriot file... the data/ships/"yourgroup"/etc... and NOTHING else is changed? Right? Just those two lines? And deleting the "simple" and "colision" groups. Here are the two lines from mine...
DA_archetype = ships\liberty\li_bobship\li_bobship.cmp
material_library = ships\liberty\li_bobships.mat
The cmp is in the liberty folder ina a new folder called LI_BOBSHIP and the mat is in the liberty folder

We who are about to die salute you!

Tue Aug 26, 2003 10:49 pm by Imagine

I put my mat in the same folder (and same name) as the cmp file. Try that. I've also been running into weird crashes lately, but even on flmm mods, so my problem is prob different.

Wed Aug 27, 2003 10:52 am by SwordMasterD

Thanks for the assist guys.
My ship is now complete and thanks to Imagine's great tutorial my ship is now in the shop at manhattan and looks good. I have a few issues to work out though. First, my model is a little too small, so I'll have to scale it up a bit. No Prob. But I started up the story mode to check it out and when King is flying my ship in space his ship is invisible... Any ideas? I'm hoping it's just because it's too small but not sure...

In the world of space it becomes more difficult to follow the way of the sword.

Wed Aug 27, 2003 10:43 pm by hellraisermike

erg this is annoying...I've tried everything to get my ship ingame but it turns out invisble no matter what I do...

And also...for some reason there seems to be realistic physics on my invisible ship...can anyone help?

Thu Aug 28, 2003 12:49 am by Imagine

Ty, swordmaster

hellraisermike: check your LOD ranges first, if that doesn't work, check to see you have textures applied on all ship parts. If everything looks ok then, but still doesn't show up, you can send me the ms3d file and I will see what I can do...

Thu Aug 28, 2003 2:08 am by hellraisermike

Lodranges seem right

LODranges = 0, 99999

I copied a modded ships entries so i dont know what would be wrong with them...I'll send off the model later...

Thu Aug 28, 2003 4:48 am by Imagine

There is an interesting thing to note when you follow this tutorial; by replacing a ship, npcs may try to use that ship. Many npcs have their own loadouts, which may use hp's you don't have on your ship. I think it would be less of a headache to just edit the dll files to add the ship as a brand new ship. There's a tutorial for that in the database. I will do some testing with that and will prob incorporate that into this tutorial.

Thu Aug 28, 2003 5:11 am by Warlord Bob

Ok, I have an error somewhere then, because I have tried all sorts of file configurations there. I have the raven for an example so I should figure it out sooner or later. Thank you for all your help, and I'll let you kno when I figger it out!

We who are about to die salute you!

Thu Aug 28, 2003 5:05 pm by hellraisermike

I sent that ship off to you Imagine...I was wondering if you had a chance to look it over yet?

Thu Aug 28, 2003 11:51 pm by Imagine

Yes, I got it, and no, I won't steal it

It looks fine other than the fact that it is too small to export as-is. Also, the tractor source must have an underscore: HpTractor_Source
btw: did you texture it in milkshape?

Fri Aug 29, 2003 1:15 am by SwordMasterD

HAHAHA - Ok, the Hellhound is in the game. I neglected to add a minor part to my ship... The Engine. HAHAHA I still have a LOD Range issue but I'll keep working at it...

In the world of space it becomes more difficult to follow the way of the sword.

Fri Aug 29, 2003 1:40 am by hellraisermike

Yea I know the tractor_source is supposed to have an underscore...but milkshape wasnt liking saving the ms3d with it in...so i had to leave it without the underscore...

And no...It was not textured in milkshape...It was textured in 3dsmax4 and exported to milkshape...

Edit: I just scaled it way up...now I can at least see the individual engine exhausts...but still the actual ship is invisible.

Edited by - hellraisermike on 29-08-2003 02:56:13

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