I have 12 ship submissions for inclusion in 4.84 second beta, with two more on halt for now. The code for all 12 ships was done during the last week, and today I started to testing all ships. Unfortunately, the results of the testing are far from inspiring.
Out of 12 ships submitted by 3 different people, only 4 had no graphical issues. These are all ships by Mohr (two), one ship by Doom, and one ship by Angel of Mercy. All other ships had texturing issues in the game: severe or not, but all notable. One ship crashed the game on launching from base - any base, or planet.
I've already sent the model creators reports about all errors I've encountered.
However, this also means that including 8 models out of 12 is useless before they are fixed, and this means that beta 2 will be delayed again. Last time, there was only one corrupt model (Mohr's Kusari bomber, didn't test it yet), so I could release the beta without it. But now it's just too many.
One more issue. All ship makers use different approach to hardpoint creation. Mohr, Vaporlynx (if I remember correctly), and Legeonation don't make the hardpoints at all. Others do make models with hardpoints, however they usually need tons of fixing. And in case of re-sumbission of the ship, all my tweaks are lost, which results in repeating the same work multiple time.
Those who don't make hardpoints for some reason may continue to do so, but only if adding hardpoints is absolutely impossible or too complicated. If hardpoints are present, this does save alot of time, even if some or even most of them are not placed correctly.
However, those who DO make hardpoints really need to increase the quality of what they are doing. I've already posted hardpoint list in ship submissions thread here. And there are more common errors that I have to fix almost every time.
1) HpMount point - for large ships it MUST be under the nose, on the same level as the bottom of the ship (excluding some protruding elements like radars, wings etc).
2) HpPilot point MUST be added to all ships. If it's a large ship, it should be placed inside the hull, approximately where the bridge is located.
3) Lights. Please use right angles. Lights should point forward (in most cases), backward, to the side or up/down. Angles should be 90, or 180, or 0. This also applies to dock lights and forward lights.
4) Lights MUST be exactly symmetrical, and must match ship elements precisely, but should be some distance (0,2 - 0,5 units, or more where needed) from the ship hull. Even a small misalignment of lights is very notable for player in the game.
5) Same about contrails. They must be symmetrical, and must be next to the hull, but not inside the hull. If there's some point where a contrail should be, never place a light in the same location.
6) Turrets. Turrets (like weapons) MUST be aligned precisely where they should be, for even a small space between the hardpoint and the hull will be visible in-game. That's why it's preferable to use right angles for hardpoint mounts. The green "disk" in HardCMP that indicates how the turret can rotate should be right above the hull, with no visible chinks, or slightly inside the hull.
7) Turret angle. What for make it rotate 360 in one direction, 360 in another? 180 and 180 is enough for that.
8) Engines. It's better to inform me what engines should be used in your ship. With what engines did you test, and what engines you prefer to see in-game.
This is all for now. I will extend the list later, and possibly place it into the sticky ships thread.
Perhaps not to make this public is the way to go, but....
I skinned the Spyglass, and wish to know what flaws I entered so I can fix them up. I think that the Spyglass is a little too complicated, as the model caused MS3D to crash upon texturing, so a little dulling down is in order...
I honestly do not know how it's too complicated or time sonsuming to Hardpoint your own models, honestly it's not.
In Milkshape, assuming you know where the Hardpoints are going to be and you've models the Hardpoint mounts (a la the vanilla ships have small boxes where the HPs are to go) than all you ned to do is:
1) Select the faces that the hardpoint should attach to
2) Duplicate these faces (Ctrl + D)
3) Scale this duplicate by .00001
4) Move it along it's normal into the model by approx .02 Milkshape units
5) Apply a completly transparent texture, even a 1x1 would do.
6) Rename this duplicated section accoring to the naming convention*
It's not difficult, this is how I used to do it way back when, frankly, if you're not doing it, it's laziness. Obviously, use HardCMP if you want, but it's not my preferred method.
* Naming Convention:
Hp|Type|Name: Type will be either Fixed or Revolute: Name will be HpTurret01, HpEngine01, HpMount, etc
Angel of Mercy, I have Radeon 1650 Pro. This isn't a rare or outdated chip, and if the models don't work on it, we've definitely got a serious problem. I never had any similar problems with other models, submitted or taken from standalone ship packs with owner's permission.
I use HardCMP for hardpoints, but I've got no Milkshape so there's not much choice.
As for SUR exporter (Angel of Mercy - you mentioned it in your mail), it's well-known that the tool is bugged. Better leave creating SURs to me, I got some experience about that:)
for sur files i have found one nice thing...FLModeltool..that nice proggy will use any prebuilt sur file and scale it and shape it to fits your model...only thing u need is to use sur file that generally follows shape of your ship...after some checking in HardCMP how sur looks like and maybe with small additional manual resize u will be able to make quite good sur files...
but as Igiss stated above...he has the final word...we can only help as much as we can...but that sometimes isnt good enough
also graphical chip that supports direct X 8 shouldn't have any problem with Freelancer...
if texture doesn't work..it is always skinning and mat file...
About the .sur exporter. Thats the reason why i wanted to pin my thread "First Aid for Developers". It is so frustrating to search the whole net (incl. lancersreactor) for the needed tools. As i started modelling four weeks ago. just had MS. With the help of community members, an immense time of searching, tutorials and a lot of learning by doing i'm advanced now.
For other beginners i wanted to save their time(better used to implement HP ;)). I'd never known, that some of the tools don't work, like the older versions of HardCMP editors.
May i suggest, that you, Igiss, or any admin would spend a bit of time to post the needed (working) tools, to avoid further mistakes and waste of time. Also it will safe time for the future updating of the Mod.
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