SE:V Shipset Questions

[Suicide Junkie]

That's just because the destroyer's model happens to have been made small in the 3d editor, so it only needs to get scaled down a little bit.

The other one is a large model, and needs to be scaled down lots more to make both of them look the right size in-game.

[Noble713]

Poly limits- look at the SF ships. I'd say a couple hundred polys at most.

Is this an engine limitation, or a matter of playability for low-end systems? I tested a ship in the Starfury Demo that was ~1700 polys and it ran fine on my system. Right now I'm working with ships that are around 2k-5k polys, AFTER I've cleaned them up. I'm sure I'll be removing/simplifying more of the detail after I've had the chance to test them in-game, but I doubt any of them will go below 1k polys.

On a side-note, do the textures for the ships have to be 256x256 bitmaps? I've got textures that are 512^2 and 1024^2 in JPEG format that I want to use. The ships look horrible when crompressed down to 256x256.

[Phoenix-D]

SEV will have a LOT more ships on-screen at once, so keep that in mind. Its mostly a playability limitation as far as I can tell.

You can make the bitmaps bigger in Starfury, and even use multiple bitmaps (though I don't remember how to pull that trick off..), and SEV will probably be similar.

However if it isn't, design in 256x256. No compression issues that way.

[Noble713]

*smacks forhead* I'm retarded..... the meshes that I have include 2-3 different models within the file, for various view distances (the game they were made for would swap models accordingly). I've been taking the close-in, high-detail models and hacking them up to reduce the polys. I totally forgot that there were already nice, low-poly meshes included that require no changes. Some of those 5,000 poly ships are now a fairly tame ~1,000.

I've spent the past week doing little more than improving my skill at welding vertices and re-aligning UVWs... Oh well, I guess this is how we learn.

[Jarena]

Another question-
When exporting to .x format in 3DS Max 8 (using panda's .x plugin) I get a .x export, but in a very different format from the neatly ordered text files of Starfury. As a result (I believe) the Starfury demo won't load my ships. Any idea what might be going on?

[Phoenix-D]

X has a couple different formats- one is Binary, one text, one compressed IIRC.

Check to be sure you're using non-compressed; that might be the issue.

Also, if I remember right the starfury demo disallows most modding. You have to replace the existing Terran Destroyer with your own ship.

[Noble713]

Jarena said:
Another question-
When exporting to .x format in 3DS Max 8 (using panda's .x plugin) I get a .x export, but in a very different format from the neatly ordered text files of Starfury. As a result (I believe) the Starfury demo won't load my ships. Any idea what might be going on?

I had problems with the Panda plugin in Max 6 at first. The settings I used were:

Text format, only Normal and UV boxes checked, XYZ scaling of 6.

Don't worry about the jumbled format of the file, it will still load. Most of the problems I had trying to load things into the demo were caused by the changes I made to the other files (like the one that specifies where the hardpoints are). What ship are you trying to replace, the Terran Destroyer? Does it crash the game when you start a new campaign and try to select a ship?

[henk brouwer]

Jarena said:
Another question-
When exporting to .x format in 3DS Max 8 (using panda's .x plugin) I get a .x export, but in a very different format from the neatly ordered text files of Starfury. As a result (I believe) the Starfury demo won't load my ships. Any idea what might be going on?

Does starfury give you an error, or does the ship model simply not show up? If that's the case you might just have made the scale of your ship too small (by a factor of 1000 or so) Quite a few people, myself included, have been fooled by that. So check your game of starfury for any suspect pixel sized ships and try to rescale them. I hope that helps..

[Jarena]

Some good news:
I got the ship to work in SF, although inconsistently.
SF will load the ship in the ship select screen without complaint, everything looks good.
It'll load the model in-game, too, but not without an error box that reads "Error loading file: [texture pathname]" - but it'll load the texture just fine anyway.
Occasionally I'll get a error message after loading that reads "Steam read error" and the game will freeze completely.

All that aside, if anyone has my setup, these are the settings I used:
3D Studio Max 8
Pandasoft's DirectX Exporter ver. 4.8.63.0
File > Export Selected
[3DS Max Objects] - Mesh Definition, Materials, Inline, Optimiz mesh = normal, Geometric, Mesh Normals, Mapping Coordinates
[Textures & .fx Files] Convert texture Map, Use full pathname, White diffuse override (texture), Format = Bitmap, Overwrite = Do not overwrite
[X File Settings] - DX File Type = Text, DX Frame = Sub frame hierarcy

This is just a test ship I threw together to figure things out (and teach myself to UV Map) the texture file is pretty large (maybe that explains my texture error?) but it still runs.


(The ship is banking towards the viewer, kind of hard to tell I think.)

[henk brouwer]

Very nice and interesting ship design

I'm afraid I can't help with the errors.. I'm using blender myself which does not seem to have all those fancy export options so I'm clueless as to what the problem might be.

I do remember hearing that size of textures and number of polygons should not be a problem for the game engine, it would just slow down the game, but it wouldn't produce errors.
(David gervais once said he had a model of 30.000 polygons he got of the internet which worked fine in starfury)