STNG Ship Set Available.

[Atrocities]

Here is a save game. I have already designed the ships. This way all you have to do is load the save game and then run a simulated battle using whatever ships you want to see the crazy firing arc problem.

[Suicide Junkie]

To be safe, add a generic 360 degree firing point (or two complementary 180 degree points to be safer) in the middle of your model.

Once you've got the safety backstop there, then you can add more firing points on your ship's gunports with logical arcs to make it look better in action.

[Atrocities]

Ok I think I might have the firing arcs figured out somewhat.

I set them to 0-90 90-180 180-270 270-0 This seemed to give the ships the correct firing orientations. I am testing now.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Ok now I see what you mean by the firing slots being screwy. Wow! Anyway the slots are going to need cleaned up too. And is there anyway to add some details to the model in the ship design screen? That Star Fleet primer gray looks odd under the slots.

[Atrocities]

The firing arcs are a real PITA. You have X Y Z values that are seem to be near impossible to calculate. I speculate that 0 represents the center of the ship. And that X Y and Z represent the value to where you can move the starting point of that arc. I just haven't figured out which one moves the firing point forward and back ward, are they positive or negative numbers, which one moves the firing arc up and down, and which moves it side to side.

Seems like every change I make, apart from what I did in my previous post thank to SJ's help, just results in an unwanted reaction.

To answer your question PES, I am working on it. I had to use DOGA to make those images because I couldn't get a large enough TOP DOWN view of the ships. They need to be 512x512 jpeg's and the best I could do was mid 200's. If I enlarged them they looked like crap. (I can darken the grey if need bee, but given what the stock ships look like, I thought it would work.)

[Suicide Junkie]

Look in your modeller to find where you put the 0,0,0 origin.

The firing point coordinates will be relative to that. If you can point your mouse at a location and pull coordinates off that, it should make your life much easier.
You may or may not have to multiply the above coordinate by the scaling factor you specified in the text file.

[shinigami]

From this thread: link

Engine Glows and Weapon Flares

Getting the engine glows and weapon flares placed on your model can be extremely frustrating. Hopefully this will make it a little bit easier for you.

Assuming that you are using a test mod to check out your new ships (highly recomended) add a Pictures folder and then an Effects subfolder in it. In the Effects folder add copies of "EngineGlow.bmp" and "weapon_flare.bmp." In your test empire folder add a copy of "BitmapEffects_Combat.txt" and the shipset viewer. Edit the "BitmapEffects_Combat" file so that only the entries for Engine Glow and Firing Flare remain.

Once you've done all that go into the "_Ships_XFileClasses.txt" and find your ship. Change the number of Engine Points to 1, set all the coordinates to 0 (including the offsets,) and make the glow radius 0.9. Save and open the viewer. Go to your ship, zoom in a bit, and press "G" to make the engine glow brighter. To get a really good idea of where the glow is at you may want to zoom in very close and spin the ship.

Now you should have a good idea of which direction you need to move the engine point. In the "_Ships_XFileClasses" file the coordinates are laid out like this;

* x = left and right, positive is right and negative is left
* y = front to back, positive is front (away from the camera) and negative is back (towards the camera)
* z = up and down, positive is down and negative is up (yeah, that's backwards from any 3d I've ever worked with too)


The offsets are just to move the glow off of the model, you can choose to use them or just make the engine points equal the glow points. Once you've got the first one set where you want it you can add the second one and so on. The weapon flares can be done the same way.

It takes some (a lot) of trial and error so you'll find yourself bouncing in and out of the veiwer often but at least it loads quick.

Hopefully this'll help someone out. Any questions please feel free to post them here or pm me. Now, back to working on my set!

[Edit] If you have a hard time finding your engine glow you can always use a weapon flare slot to help you pin down the location. Set one to a 90 degree arc and the arc lines will form an arrow for you. Once you have it nailed down you just put those coordinates back into the engine glow slot. Hope that makes sense!

[Atrocities]

Thank you for that information, I have one question though, the viewer?

[shinigami]

The shipset viewer.

[Atrocities]

Ok found the viewer file. Can you tell me what a bounding box is, and how do I adjust it. In the viewer mine are not placed correctly. Instead of being even and encompassing the ship, they are centered but facing up and down.

I have included an image.