thank you for the excellent tutorial. i'm just reading through it now, and i find it to be very well written, and hopefully i'l have something useful to show from it soon.

One other point i dont think you have mentioned is that in the shiparch.ini entry, there should only be two LODrange entries, 0 and the furthest away that it should be visible (0, 1000) means it can be seen up to 1K away

There is no objective truth other than schplurg,
Everything is relative to schplurg

I've got LOD ranges covered in version 1.4.

All you guys have helped me out so much with the questions and all the other tutorials and forums on here. I couldn't have ever writen this tutorial without TLR.

Your participation here is thanks enough.

ok, going through the tutorial and downloading the tools that you recommend, however, the links for the ms3d exporter plugin and the gmax .m3d exporter are broken, and i can't quite seem to find good links to those files. can you direct me to where i'm going?

thanks,
--Lowell

their not broken, but suspended as lancerplanet is experiencing downtime. You may want to see if they have the tools here, in the downloads section. I can't garauntee that they will but its worth a try. beyond that... its a waiting game until lancerplanet opens its new server.

i making a ship too but my problem it that my ship is invisible!

i can see the guns, turruts, torpedo, mounts, engines, thursters enz but not the ship it self.

also ym ship is flying with the top forward but that i problemi can fix myself (i hope) -> its difficult telling what up and down and left and right and top and bottom on a CUBE ship

Liberty Confederation Council member. join us on the excelcia server.

I made my own ship from scratch following the tutorial. Thank you very much.

I can see my ship, buy it and even equip it. I cannot fly it in MP on my own server. I copied all the files I changed over to the directories on the server, but when I leave the planet I get the "Possible cheating detected (Ship or Equipment no sold on base)" error.

I tried makeing a few other ships made by other modders buyable at that base and some of them generate the same error, but some do not. So It seems there is some other file entry involved in the cheat detection.

What am I missing? I have read the posts here until my eyes are bleeding but this does not seem to be addressed.

Like many others in here I used your tutorial to create my first ship for freelancer. I set out by downloading the files needed and succesfully made the plane model in gmax. I exported it and imported it to MilkShape 3D and began creating all the HP (in little triangle shapes). After doing all that and texturing it I desided to export it. This is where the problem began. Instead of poppoing up the window with the HP etc it displayed the message saying an error had occured and did I want to send a bug report. My first thought was that maybe something was wrong with the exporting files, so I opened up a ready made ship in .ms3d format that I downloaded and tried exporting that. Of course that ship exported without any problems!

I've tried creating a ship from the beginning, changing the HP positions, checking the spelling etc but nothing works. I keep getting the error message. If you could help I'd be really thankful, as I really want to start creating mods. If you need the ship model I can send it to you by mail.

harcan:
this sounds to me like a LOD ranges problem. in the shiparch.ini where your ships entry is... set the LODranges to "0, 2000"

kaladon:
This is a problem that I still have not figured out. I apologize for that. there are some people i would recomend asking however, if you cant find the answer here... Soundspawn is one of the most knowledgable guys I know. It is possible he knows the answer if no-one here does. soundspawns forum... you can try it. i suggest using the bar to ask your question.

necrolord
the only thing i can think of at the moment is that you might have a dll problem. try looking for the cmp importer dll and if you have it get rid of it. though you say a premade ship exported fine. im assuming that you are exporting in cmp format. this is weird... try getting rid of the importer dll if you have it. other than that i cant think of anything at the moment. ill keep pounding it out though.

Edited by - drizzt4.0 on 2/21/2004 8:06:31 PM

Thanks for the reply Drizzt. I found my problem at last tonite.
I had a typo in my Market_ship.ini.
You said:
1, 1, 0 = a buyable ship
0, 0, 1, = a ship not for sale at that station.

I put:
1, 1, 1 = buyable but not flyable in MP.

It worked just fine in single player, but would cause me to get booted for cheating on my multiplayer server.

I fixed the ini and everything is just fine now. I have a few more tweaks to make to the ship now that I can see and fly it. Once done I will submitt it here.

I want to thank you again for the great tutorial! You made making my first ship a lot of fun, and saved my untold hours of digging thru files and posts.

You have done a real service to the Freelancer Modding community here, we owe you a great big cheer and many thank you's!

First I have to say:
great tutorial

I tried to create a ship following the tutorial but it`s not sold at Manhatten (where I chose it to be sold) any Idea why? And YES I`m sure I used the right base ID, YES I`m sure I disabled (001) another ship and enabled (110) my ship package. I think it`s not an ini-problem but if u got any Ideas tell me
I should add that I....kinda screwed up the model. Added 7 Weapon HPs once but after saving and re-opening the Model in Milkshap it told me that there were only 3 HPs....weapon 5, 6 and 7. I`m not sure if that is a real problem since it was the first time I tried to create an own ship. Also I used an exported texture for the ship and I`m not quite sure if that worked. But following the tutorial that should only give me an invisible or white ship if it didn`t work.
Well but this isn`t the reason why I`m posting...I`m trying to create a new ship soon and look for anything I might have missunderstood.

The real reason I`m posting here is that I wanted to ask if anyone knows how to create weapons. I imported some weapon to Milkshape to see what Freelancer needs to use the weapon but didn`t really understand it hehe.

Little edit:
while writing this post I had the Idea that my ship might be too big...well I opened the defender to compare it with my ship and noticed that my ship is about 10 times as big as the defender....might be the reason for my prob...I`ll try to resize it somehow (not sure if this sentence was understandable)

Edited by - Helmer on 2/22/2004 6:38:34 AM

Dear Drizzt4.0,

first let me thank you for your really GREAT tutorial !!!! Your explanations are easy to understand, easy to repeat and great how you explained the use of the used programms.

Nevertheless I've got a problem : I like to make a Star Trek mod. Therefore I'm a bad modeller, I thought it was a smart idea to convert .sod models from Star Trek Armada 2 to Freelancer .cmp format.
I imported a .sod model in Milkshape, deleted all the groups but the Box1(-> hardpoints of the sod format), made then all the adjustments explained in your tutorial (-> build new hardpoints) and saved it as a .ms3d model. After finishing I exported it to .cmp format and made the material file with the UTF editor.
In my first try I made all the moddings exactly as explained in your tutorial (Goods.ini, shiparch.ini etc.), the ship was buyable at Manhatten. When I switch to the ship buy screen, the game crashes. So I thought I must have messed up with all the .ini changing.
In my second try, I used the XML script from the Enterprise NX-01 mod, the method's easier and faster for test purposes (the script appends the needed entries in the right files). I modified all the names to my mod's name, but again the game crashes when I switch to the ship buy screen.
Then I renamed my .cmp and material file to the NX-01 conventions and replaced the original files, but again the game crashed when I switched to the ship buy screen.
The xml script works with the NX-01 enterprise mod, so the method is allright. The error must be in my converted model.

So what could be the problem ? Is my thought of converting the formats too simple ? The converted model has only 35 kb size, other models have above 100 kb. Do I need to make more (and what kind of) changes to the model ?
I recognized that there is only ONE texture material in the model, could this be a problem ?

- I used the UTF editor linked in your tutorial
- I used Milkshape 1.6.3
- I use Freelancer 1.0 without patch or other mods, FLMM 1.21 Beta8

I would be very grateful if you could give me a hint !!
Thx in forward
Khan Goldi

Edited by - KhanGoldi on 2/22/2004 10:32:46 AM

Helmer...
did you use the backup method i discribed? did you create an actual mod folder like i described? while it is tedious i really think it would be a good idea to use mod folders to test the ship rather than using the real files.

now the only possible thing i could think of besides what you have already excluded is that another mod rewrote the moded files. or something happened and the files got rewrote. thats all i can think of. cause if you are using the right station code and are off-on switching ships than i can say that your ship SHOULD be there. the only other thing i can think that would stop it was if you had another mod active when you changed the files. OH yeah and about the REAL reason you posted... im sure someone here will know about modeling weapons im sure... but i dont, sorry. and scaling is simple, the easiest way is to select all and use the x, y, z, dimension boxes... no negatives though... use decimals with a value less than 1 but greater than 0.5

KhanGoldi...
I never really intended for my tutorial to be used in guiding the conversion of other game ships so i cant really garauntee that i can help on this one...
no... having only one texture isnt a problem... i do that all the time.
no... the file size has nothing to do with it.
what was the results of your first ini changes? did you check for typo's?
dealer screens causing screen crashes... there were a few things i remember causing that... one was the infocards... i really need to find out how to use these infocard helpers so i can make the infocard area better... mental note!
another was typos in the inis
and the last is FORGETTING TO TURN OFF A SHIP BEFORE ACTIVATING YOUR SHIP.

but thats all i can think of.
hope it helped... and hopefully someon else will have answers as well.