So, 10 pages of sleep deprived scrawls and random bits of hex aren't easy to follow now? Kids these days....

Just j/k, good luck in writing your tut, might wanna team up with Harrier, he seems to have his head round it too. I think you'll probably end up having to write a nifty little GUI tho, although it is fairly simple once you understand it is hard to explain (i think .

Anyways the reason for this post is the age old guns with multiple HpFire nodes and sounds problem. As you have discovered as soon as you add a second HpFire node you lose the sound. Wanderer (is he still around?) got really into the custom weapon thing and he never got the sound to work either, although it pissed him off alot.

AFAIK 'Vanilla' FL guns with multiple fire points dont make a sound either, which always made me assume that it was an inherent code problem and could be fixed. Thats a bit of a defeatist attitude tho so kudos to you if you sort it.

Hi,

Yes this has been the problem with multi hpfire guns. I solved the problem a while ago and a couple multi-barreled guns are going to be in the Epsilon Mod's next release.

Its true that guns with 2 fire points make no sound. But I did find a way around it.

It will require more editing than just your weapon files, you'll have to create a new effect in beam_effects.ini, effects.ini, and weapons_ale.ini. Consult my previous weapons tutorial if you need help on making effects. Once you have created your gun and your effect, find the name of the sound your gun uses, e.g. Fire_Laser2. Then go into effects.ini and type a line in your entry for your effect that says "snd_effect = your sound ." For example:

snd_effect = Fire_Tachyon4

You can comment out (put a semi colon in front of), delete, or leave the audio reference entry in weapon_equip.ini alone. Your multifire weapon will now use the sound you typed into effects.ini.

Have fun with it

@Redeye:

No offense was intended- if your article and the helpfile included with Meshconverter didn't exist, I would never have figured it out at all... so all kudos go to you- I was amazed and chuckling when I finally made a new custom weapon and it actually worked !

@Parabolix:

Whoa... wow... that's like... elegant! I shall try that out in about 5 minutes here, or whenever I get done reviewing email! Very, very nice work there, and thanks very much for sharing

<comes back from testing>

OMG!! It works!! It plays sounds! Not only that, but it's clearly playing the same sound at the same moment- it was quite loud and nasty-sounding Allllllright! Now I can have Quad 50 Cals that actually fire 4 shots at once, and sound like Quad 50 Cals.... sweeeeeeeeet. TY Para!

Edited by - Argh on 11/26/2004 6:53:28 PM

Argh,

For what its worth.. I would be happy to help with the tutorial if you need it..I already did a tute use that as a basis if you want to.. let me know if I can help.

@ Redeye,

Good to see you are back after a fairly long absence.. welcome back.

Harrier


Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!

@Harrier

I've got my steps written down (I am pretty obsessive about documentation, because otherwise I forget how I did things, lol)... I think for this one, as it's a bit more complicated than making custom cockpits, and involved a fair amount of editing in the UTF, what I'll do (when I get done with Alpha 4, which I'm hoping is tonight) is make a couple of illustrations demonstrating what's going on, so that people like me (I'm a visual artist, and a very poor engineer by nature) can see some visual concepts about the VMeshes, and have an idea of how the process looks as they build their models and split them up using Meshconverter, which is a fairly tricky tool for the uninitiated. EDIT: And I'll send them your way when it's ready, for fact-checking

@Redeye

Speaking of which... you wrote that app, didn't you... I don't suppose I could convince you to make a version that didn't need to be called from the command line? It doesn't need some "leet" GUI, but it'd be nice not to have to know enough DOS commands to find it, let alone run it, and I assume that you could write a little GUI in VC++ in about 10 minutes, that would pass the appropriate commands to the main exe... Anyhoo, I was lucky there... my "running old-skool DOS games in WinXP skillz" saved my bacon

Edited by - Argh on 11/29/2004 5:45:24 AM

No problem Argh. Glad I could help out. I thought as noone had figured it out yet that I would go and try to crack it. It turned out the answer was more logic than complex modding. Maybe I should make a proper tutorial covering it

Edited by - parabolix on 11/26/2004 8:17:31 PM

@Argh

If I had the sourcecode then I probably could stick together a GUI, however that along with all my FL modding stuff was wiped by a complete HD crash some time ago. Between that and moving I dont even think I have my FL CDs anymore.

With a little bit of patience and 'old school' (g) DOS knowledge it is possible to use Meshconverter to do the job, although I will admit it isn't exactly intuitive.

Feel free to try write the GUI yourself, or even ask someone else to do it, I'd be more in the dark than you if I tried to be honest. One I had worked out how to do someting in FL modding I tended to put together a bare bones tool + tut then move onto something else.

Although if I were you, I'd be quite tempted to retain the virtual monopoly yourself and Harrier have on the custom weapons scene - there is nothing to stop anyone else doing exactly what you guys have done and learning it

Good luck.

I come from the Open Source school... there's no point in maintaining a monopoly, because if my skillz don't pwn, then keeping "trade secrets" just makes me another dork with a bad attitude about sharing

Seriously speaking... I noticed, when I got into modding FL, that certain things had been solved... but the people who solved them didn't bother to tell anybody else how to duplicate their work, or they'd done their work as one-off technical demonstrations, and then never gone beyond that point. When people don't share, it annoys me- it's an admission that you're afraid of somebody doing "better" than you. I have no secrets, and I'm doing work that nobody's ever seen before in an FL mod- and if people want to take that work and make something even cooler, who am I to complain?

The way I see it, making it possible for lots of mods to include custom weapons would lead to a lot more cool stuff for me to play with, which is the whole idea, right? Heck, it might even produce some "leet" content creators who could help me with my crazy TC project... which if you haven't seen... go check it out.

@Argh - Good man... too much dispute over open/closed source in general (takes care not to mention certain OS vendors or mod makers). I guess it doesn't need to be said but without people sharing their knowledge here i wouldn't have taken the time to learn everything from scratch to mod FL.

@Redeye - A welcome sight you are; any new thoughts on sur files? aside from bringing the last unknown DWORD down to an unknown byte we could really use some help with these things. I can send you latest beta of my resiziing and type changing tool but issues remain about radius damage weaps and a strange data type error for a ship that crabtree sent me... (soz to wander off topic btw)

+++ out of cheese error - redo from start +++

Xtreme Team Studios

@Argh

Hehe. Maybe I've got in a bit over my head here...

I am obviously all for open source and sharing information. Regarding the whole destructable components / custom weapons ideas, I consistently posted all my working and step by step lists of what I had worked out. From these rambling notes alone it would have been possible to build a ship of multiple meshes or a custom weapon. This would have put me in a literal monopoly position. However, as with you, I had no interest in that hence I then sat down and wrote a complete 'clean' tutorial. It does look daunting, but that is because it assumes very little knowledge of modding and is probably over zealous in detail.

After I wrote the tutorial people still had trouble using it, so I wrote Meshconverter to remove the hex editing. The reason it was written in DOS was because I write utils largely for myself and never needed to produce a flashy GUI. I didnt even own a windows compiler.

At this stage there were at least 3 posts on TLR regarding the info. A few people emailed me queries and I even took a few models people had (Wanderer & Leonhart) and converted them to working weapons myself.

I will admit it was a mistake not to post the source code. That was anal and largely to do with accusations of theft of code that were flying round. It never occured to me I would lose it all and this was short-sighted.

My point is that I am not for withholding information for the sake of becoming some sort of 'keeper of knowledge'. Like yourself I am keen to see people working with my ideas, I had little interest in modelling myself and was pleased to see ships coming out with destructable components and new custom weapons models.

On the other hand, the whole 'point and click' school of modding does annoy me. I cant really justify this, it just bugs me. These boards are full of posts from people winging that UTF editor is too hard to use, or isnt there a prog they can just feed in a pencil sketch of a ship and it will turn it into a working game object (o.k. not really ). Like i say, I cant justify this, it would probably be better for the community if every idea for anything was easily translatable into in-game objects. It just annoys me that people are so lazy. If I was going to be really *****y (which I am..) I would say that the people willing to put in a bit of effort, or even just use the search button, will probably produce better quality ideas anyway.

I think i'm just digging myself into a bigger hole here... I was half joking when I suggested you guys keep your monopoly, I also said you were free to incorporate Meshconverter into a GUI, or have someone write one for it. If I had the source you would have it, but it is now residing in that big HD in the sky

@Anton

You guys have really excelled yourselves with the whole sur thing. I tend to keep and eye on whats going on here from time to time and the release of the resizer was a massive breakthrough. I see that some large ships have followed and I assume they utilised it.

As I said, I lost the whole lot in an HD crash, I may have some scribbled notes in a drawer somewhere but even if I could understand them (no chance ) I had only ever got as far as resizing some of the basic shaped cargo crates - you have gone well beyond that.

I am always tempted to get reinvolved and give a helping hand to the team that finally produce a Milkshape -> .sur converter, however I have so little free time these days that I always put it off.

I suppose I could always pick myself up a new copy of FL and give it a whirl over christmas.. Although maybe by then I'll be too late

Argh,

Without jumping on you from a great height.. I offered to share what I knew, I even offered to help.. only to be rejected.. If you look at the tutorial I wrote on weapons creation, I was grateful for the help I got from both Redeye and Wanderer.. 2 people who took the time to not only work out how to do it but did share what they knew with me, real pioneering work... I spent the time (on my own I might add) to apply that knowledge and learn how to do it from go to whoa.

I have never considered it a monopoly and have tried to help others.. but the fact remains.. in comparison to weapons (and I have made a few) ships are a breeze... I agree with Redeye, that 'point and click' apps are nice, but without an understanding of the methods involved it will be a long hard row to hoe.

Custom weapons seem not be be an area of modding that any but a very few actually take the time to do...

Best of luck...

Harrier


Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!

@Redeye

LOL... I'm definately not out to paint you as "not sharing"... my apologies if my attempts to make my struggles to get things accomplished was taken that way. As I said above, if it hadn't been for your documentation (which for meshconverter is actually quite readable, actually) and AGT and Porche building some working objects for me to examine to pieces, I'd have never solved many of these things. What I've been whining about is mainly having to re-invent the wheel. Which every modder has probably whined about dozens of times, including the pioneers like you, who probably cursed DA more times than I can count for making the game more resistant to modding than they should've.

I have to respectfully disagree with you about the "point-and-click" modding thing. Sure, if it were that easy, it'd result in a torrent of crap. I think that every intelligent person realizes this is true- we'd see kiddie modders with no skills other than the ability to click on things (and write really terrible attempts at sentences) produce a torrent of really horrible "ultra-leet" mods, where everybody drove battleships and the like.

We're already seeing a fair amount of that, as the tools get easier and easier to use. But is that so bad, really? Most people will rightly ignore those mods that aren't all that exciting, and the kiddies will maybe learn something... and their next efforts will only sort've stink

But better tools would also free up people like me (who, let's face it, can barely hack his way out of a wet paper bag) to do what we are good at, which is game design. I really don't share the opinion of many coders, who think that game design = coding skill. Having been published (in the non-computer gaming world), I know that designing a good game isn't very easy, and a lot of it's not "math"- you reach a point of interlocking complexities where hunches matter, and some of us are better at that than others. A great game like Counter-Strike or Master of Orion can be described mathematically, but like chess, doing so falls flat when confronting the number of possible moves.

I can make you a good game design to play with coins and bits of string, if that's what I want to do, and it's my skill. It's not engineering... it's art. Like any artist... the better the tools I have, the better art I can produce. This even applies to the crappy artists- crappy artists with good tools will still produce crap, but it won't CTD every second time you fire it up

So the less time I have to struggle with technical problems... the more time I can put into translating my dreams into a player's reality. It's just that simple, really. Tools like Anton's represent where I think we want to get- his latest Betas are really very easy for even people like me to use, and I've been very happy to serve as guinea pig.

Now, with what you've made... maybe I can either figure out how to write a VB exe that can pass commands to your program, or not- I'm sure it's not too difficult, and I've worked with VB a little bit.

As the sourcecode's missing, and I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody but you really understands what you were doing with that particular operation anymore, it might be awhile before somebody else comes along to replace the software, and let's face it: once you get past the interface and the understanding of WHAT does WHAT and WHY... it works just fine. I mean, I got it to work , and I'm a relatively non-techie kind've guy It'd be nice if the learning curve involved less swearing and pacing back and forth though... so I'll probably get my tutorial materials done, send the results to Harrier, and we can make this process a little more idiot-proof for folks like me... who may not be good engineers, but can read instructions

Yikes... how did this become a remotely controversial thread? I feel like I'm speaking in tongues or something

I'm very tired after working to get Alpha 4 released, so I'm going to stop writing right now... maybe after I've had some sleep, it'll be obvious what I've said that was touchy... right now, it's not. And I still intend to get step-by-step, idiot-proof manual written for this, to submit to you (Harrier) for editing and review, so that we can present this to the community. I'm not trying to diss you, really ! I just want the tutorial to be easier for newbies, is all- like my Custom Cockpit instructions, with step-by-step instructions and warnings about steps that can go wrong... I have the basics written down, but I've been so busy IRL and with Alpha 4 that I haven't gotten it all cleaned up yet, is all... I'm only human

I do think that we'd see a lot more interest in custom weapons if it were presented in an easy way (preferably with a good showpiece model, so that people can see that impressive things can be done with this knowledge). After all, there are a lot of mod concepts that would be cooler if people did this... for example, it'd be neat to see a lot Anime designs, which often feature Really Huge Guns with long, slim barrels and other things... have weapons that fit the ships. And with this knowledge, we can get there.

Argh,

If I was hasty, I'm sorry if I offended you, or put you off. It may appear that way, but was not intended as an attack per se .. damn I cant think straight now.. I will help as much as I can, tho my skills lie more in the modelling area than modding. And my success (if you can call it that) was more by dogged persistance than skill, and hacking files is not a strength.. The lessons I learned were hard ones with many failures.. and there is still alot of work that can be done in this area that will benefit the community as a whole.

I will think some more on this and post a longer reply tomorrow...

Harrier


Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!