SEV Models in Starfury?

[Fizar]

Thank you rstaats10, I will try to get anim8or and see if I can fumble my way through it. I've now managed to get 4 SEV ships into SF with your advice and they are all "mostly" working. I am still having the same two problems though.

"As far as the speed do you mean the torpedos are not fast enough? You can change the speed of all the weapons in the Main_BitmapEffects text file. There is a place in each wep effect for speed. "

No I meant for like Beam weapons. If I set the ship's top speed past 1.5, and I start a fight at that speed, the beam starts behind my ship, or in the middle of my ship (depending on size of the ship) instead of at my firing points on the front of the ship. When I slow down, it works fine and looks perfect. Tested with only 1 weapon on each ship, so that I was dealing with one firing point at a time.

The second issue, was only tested with SEV ships, and not SF ships yet (although I will test it when I get home from work, to see if it's something to do with the SEV models). If I take a large ship, say a carrier, that I think would look nice as a fighter, so I shrink it down from carrier size to fighter size. The collision border is still carrier size. So As I wooosh past a planet that is clearly not even close to touching my ship, I explode.

I can take a Terran battleship through an asteroid field in the stock campaign, but my carrier-turned-fighter is too big, even though the model is shrunken to the size of a fighter.

[Campeador]

There are limits that should not be crossed, like speed and size.
It sounds logic that if you double the speed of the game, all aspects of the game play from screen action, to AI execution it would be double the normal speed, but it is not. Too fast and the graphics cannot catch up, and the AI cannot catch up either.
So the best way to go is simply to try, see the results and adjust accordingly. I do not try to pass 1.6 (Zentradi fighter) on fighters because it may be too fast for player reaction, AI reaction, turn rate, sounds and more that you will see if you try. But by all means by trying is how we learn.
As well as the speed there are limits about size. For example I did try to make few ships really big like a Zentradi flagship (4km in length), or a Borg cube (3km cube), and many others but the results were not satisfactory. For example if the enemy ship is too big you may fly inside the ship (all in 3d by the way…) really cool - but not the initial intention. A ship too big also affects collision, weapon range and many other factors which not only affects the ship in question but also the other normal size ships when on the same screen.
For example if a fighter weapon range is 60, it may never fire at the big ship due to collision or range of the ‘hearth’ coordinates of the big ship, ('Base Model Radius'?), may be greater than the fighter range. By the way to this date I do not know how the 'Base Model Radius' setting affects the ships on the game even thought I have use a great array of different numbers.
I do not know much about SEV to bring any helpful input on ships conversion. On star Fury you can internally scale your ship by editing the 'SpaceObjects_XFiles.txt'
On my whole series I used the Terran battleship as the standard scale for the Yamato. Then I used the Yamato as the standard to scale all the ships I made on the game.
I am not that bright on the ways of graphics. I do not have a smart way to set up firing points, so I use the old fashion way of placing a firing point on a spot, try the game, see where it shows up and then re-adjust until it lands on the tip of my cannon. Time consuming but works for me.
Please note that my observations are only what I have tried. Not like somthing is impossible, simply that maybe I have not found the right way of doing something.

[rstaats10]

Quote by Fizar:


No I meant for like Beam weapons. If I set the ship's top speed past 1.5, and I start a fight at that speed, the beam starts behind my ship, or in the middle of my ship (depending on size of the ship) instead of at my firing points on the front of the ship. When I slow down, it works fine and looks perfect. Tested with only 1 weapon on each ship, so that I was dealing with one firing point at a time.

The second issue, was only tested with SEV ships, and not SF ships yet (although I will test it when I get home from work, to see if it's something to do with the SEV models). If I take a large ship, say a carrier, that I think would look nice as a fighter, so I shrink it down from carrier size to fighter size. The collision border is still carrier size. So As I wooosh past a planet that is clearly not even close to touching my ship, I explode.

End quote by Fizar

Hmm on your first issue I usually don't change the beam speed just the torpedo and bolt speeds sometimes. My fastest ship is probably 1.7 and I didn't notice any problems with beams on my ship. Try and set the wep firing points to 0,0,0 (x,y,z) and see if this happens when at top speed. You could always experiment around and make a special beam component for that ship then create a new bitmapeffects for that weapon and increase the beam speed. I haven't tried increasing the beam speed yet or had the need to.

There is a good tutorial for SF for slots and firing points. Check out http://koti.mbnet.fi/sfhaven/tutorial1.php This is how I learned about slots and firing points and such.

Hmm with your second issue. I am not sure. I have taken a dreadnought ship from SEV and reduced the scale and gave new textures to make it a fighter and I had no trouble. As Campeador mentioned try reducing the base model radius in spaceobjectsXfiles.


Do you have LithUnrap? If you want to use anim8or you will have to convert an xfile to obj or 3ds to import it into anim8or. On ships that I really care about I can set weapons to fire from any point on the ship. If It's a minor race ship I usually don't bother and just set points to 0,0,0. Just read through the tutorial and at the Starfuryhaven I listed above. It took me a few trys to get it figured out myself. Now I can make firing points and engine glows in just minutes.

There is so much to learn when modding and I am continually learning new stuff along the way. Many thanks to Campeador and Suicide Junkie for their hard work and SF tools to make SF modding attainable.