Never mind about the textures, I solved the problem *slaps his own head* I found the solution while looking through the forum under a completely different subject. I had failed to notice the MIPS <-> MIPO / DDS <-> TGA Relationship.

For reference for anyone else.

MIPS = DDS file formats
MIP0 (and the the subsequent MIP1 upwards) = TGA file formats.

Something so simple yet so easily over looked.

I am still looking for a solution to the vibration problem though.

Freeworlds Mod Developer
Author of Modular Station

'There is no Good nor Evil in the universe, just perceptions and circumstances.'

Don't just tease us,post some screenshots!I've been dreaming of making my own bridge for my bretonian battleship and i've got to see how you made out

Sorry about the double post earlier and double signature. Tap on the back of my hand there.

Ok, since you insist, here is a picture of the bridge I built in action.

ISD Bridge

Funniest bit about it, the ship I used to test it on was actually a Tie-Fighter Mk II, kind of a big bridge for such a tiny ship. And in case anyone wonders, in front of the ship is the Imperial Salvage Station in the Yavin System (part of the new stations design done for are next version of the mod). There is not much Field of View from the bridge though (I might need to adjust the camera angle a spot), but then again, the only thing that should really cause a major problem with is combat and who fights combat in a capital ship in bridge view anyway?

Once you have a grasp of the 3db process, it opens a whole new world up in modelling for Freelancer, as can be demonstrated with this picture which I couldn't resist adding (only because I proud that I managed to work it all out):

Female Twi'lek

Since I wrote the custom cockpit tutorial... and it was my first tutorial here... if you'd be so kind to email me some feedback about what steps were missing, I'll correct any flaws in it. It wasn't much fun- that much I do remember

As for cockpit shake... I don't have an answer for you, other than these things:

1. The cockpit's shaking seems to be directly tied to the engine's thrust level, and thrusters make it go beserk. On a slow ship... it's not nearly as noticable. You saw what it's like on a fast fighter... try it on the Star Destroyer itself, and you'll see what I mean here.

2. I'm pretty sure it's hardcoded, not an INI. Not 100% sure... but pretty sure.

Not a problem at all. Give me some time (between my other many projects down at Freeworlds) and I will try and trace back what I did and which bits were missed (I think it was a couple of renaming issues etc... in the file itself and there were surplus nodes to be removed with additional textures from the files - and the whole MIPS / MIP0 issue I had above off course). And I know what you mean about the pain in the neck it was. I found it easier creating the Twi'leks multiple parts then getting that bridge to work.

Aldebaran you said you actually edited a .dfm file after figuring it out yourself after the previous team had already figured it out,Do you think you could do us all a favor and write it down so it isn't lost to the void again??(mmm... pun)

@ no one in particular..........why isn't there a 3db export?It seems like its only an oversight in the CMP exporter that wouldn't be difficult to fix.the extra nodes/re-placed nodes are:

VMeshPart->VMeshRef,moved from multilevel to root
Hardpoints
material library
texture library

that doesn't seem so complicated eh?i've converted some CMPs to .3dbs with UTF edit but for any serious model with lots of textures it quickly becomes tedious....especially since you can't drag'n'drop nodes but rather just have to delete them when you realized you left one out *doh*

@Aldebaran:That is one sweet bridge



Edited by - Cold_Void on 3/27/2005 6:11:52 PM

I'll take another look at my Cockpit template. I'm sure that (by now), it'll be obvious what all is wrong with it, and I'm also sure it'll be easy to fix, now that I've done a bunch of custom weapons for WOS.

And yes... I, too, would really super-appreciate it if the Free Worlds team would share the following information:

1. Editing of THNs, in greater detail. It's not documented well anywhere here, and I'd really appreciate it if somebody with experience would document how things are done with THNs, as I've been wanting to make custom Rooms for months now. I understand that Wasabe coded your amazing Intros for Freeworlds... any chance I could entice you guys to explain them to us?

2. What, exactly do DFMs do? From the looks of things, they're animation instructions + mesh and texture information. It'd be *extremely* cool if this could be made common knowledge. If you'd be willing to share what you know... maybe I could hack one up and make a proper tutorial.

Edited by - Argh on 3/27/2005 6:43:06 PM

@ Cold Void: I think the trouble with a 3db exporter might be that different 3db's have additional nodes for different things. For example, the Cockpit also has the camera information in it that other 3db's don't. But a base 3db exporter would be handy (one which merges the texture and mesh files and can have Hardpoints thrown in).

And thanks. I was rather chuffed with the way the bridge turned out.

@Argh: Ok, now've had some sleep (my sleeping patterns are all over the place at the moment), Some of the things that might be worth adding / correcting in the tutorial:

1. I know it is the same as orientating a ship, but it is worth emphasising again here that the model should be orientated the same way as the ship (I can't remember if the tutorial mentioned that or not). A handy tip to knowing if it is orientated correctly is by opening it up in HardCMP. If the cockpit is facing you and the correct way up in HardCMP upon load, it is correctly orientatated. It is also worth noting to model builders about removing facings that are away from the camera (this will both reduce the size of the final file by a little bit and bring the poly count down make a more efficient model inside the game).

2. The first node under which the VMeshData is stored should be renamed to the first group of your CMP with .lod0.vms tagged to the end. For example, if I called the first group isd_bridge, I would rename group1.lod0.vms (as it is in your sample cockpit) to isd_bridge.lod0.vms.

3. Under the the tree of Cmpnd/Root/File Name, you want to change the string (worth emphasising for the less experienced users out there that all variable changes in this process need to be done on string) to the name of your first group with .3db on the end. For example, isd_bridge.3db

4. Your sample cockpit has a load of extra texture references in the Material Library and Texture Library that will only serve to increase the file size and confuse which texture changes to the less experienced. If you want to keep it simple for people with the one texture thing, it might be an idea in your downloadable samples that people use as a base to remove the extra textures from the 3db or give people instructions on how to do it. Otherwise, their 3db is going to much larger than it need be.

5. .tga needs to be added to the name of the texture in the node under the Texture Library. It's pretty obvious to most people, but in the tutorial, it mentions only doing this to the Dt_name string variable.

6. The master node which leads to the VMeshRef needs to be renamed to your first group as well, with .3db placed on the end.

7. It is also worth noting that TGA textures can be used instead of DDS (some people prefer to use TGA's). However, to do so, MIPS needs to be renamed to MIP0.

8. A little extra piece on the tutorial on how to implement it into the mod would not go a miss either. I.e. Place the 3db file somewhere into the cockpits directory and then create (or just copy and paste one of the original) an ini for it (normally with the same name as the cmp with ini on the end instead, doesn't need to be the same name, but it is easier for reference). The code inside the ini will appear as:

[Cockpit
mesh = cockpits\swcockpits\isd_bridge.cmp <---- this needs to be set to look for your cmp file.
int_brightness = 5 <--- not sure how effective changing this number is in smaller cockpits, but it had little effect in internal brightness (which I gather it is reffering to) on my bridge model.
head_turn = 30, 10 <--- I gather this is probably about how much leeway the camera moves when you turn. I'd guess it is related to X and Y co-ordinates, bridge models and restricted view cockpits should probably have a lower values than more open smaller cockpits.

[CockpitCamera

[TurretCamera
tether = 0.000000, 12.970000, 41.888000
yaw_rotate_speed = 3.000000
pitch_rotate_speed = 2.000000
accel_speed = 1

(note the turret camera's speed and tether is controlled via this ini as well). Finally, to include the cockpit on one of the existing ships, this line needs to be found and changed in the shiparch.ini

cockpit = cockpits\civilian\civilian.ini

This needs to be changed for the individual ship that is using the cockpit to point to the location of your custom cockpit (for example, cockpits\swcockpits\isd_bridge.ini as in my bridge design).

I hope all off that is some help. Thanks for the tutorial though, it was much needed. In answer to your other questions:

1) In simple answer, yeah I'd like to know as well lol. You see, Wasabe programmed those but since 1.65's release, Wasabe has been around only sporadically (he also programmed a custom base scene .THN at Cloud City). Myself and Burnout have pretty much taken over the mod for development of 1.66 (Burnout is dealing with the ships and surs and myself is dealing with pretty much everything else). Over this next week I am going to try and crack them myself (as I want to build some custom rooms, including a senate hall for Coruscant) and I need to fix one of the intro THN's that seems to be a little messed up by the changes we made to 1.66 (that scene with the Jedi ship chasing the Slave 1 through an asteroid ice field, I think Burnout's renaming of the ships for easier reference has caused them to drop out of the scene). I will share anything I learn. Wasabe has popped in a few times to the forum and been able to answer any mod related questions Burnout has thrown his way, so I will PM him on our forums and see if he can drop into TLR and share his wisdom with the rest of the modding community as well.

2. The simple answer to the dfm's is that most of it is just texture changes, with only new models being built for props. But there are 9 levels of detail to each texture, but once you know the formula they use, it is easy to suss out. I will write up a tutorial for the Lancers Reactor either tonight or tomorrow. I am pretty sure this is all the original developers of Freeworlds did to create the Storm Troopers etc... as well as being how I made the Twi'lek that is pictured above. From what I have worked out, you are pretty much on the right track as to what the dfm's contain, though I think the actual animations are stored in another file (the fidgets for example) and all the dfm does is tell Freelancer where the animations are applied to the mesh. It would be cool to create custom meshes as well, but it would probably be a lot of work as well considering the about of mesh references in the dfm file.


EDIT: I've now added a tutorial to the tutorial section here about making custom NPC's.

Edited by - Aldebaran28 on 3/28/2005 2:15:55 AM

Thanks for the feedback... I'll see what I can do about altering the instructions and the Cockpit template

Your toruring me dude, the links wont work!

_______________
i dont suffer fools gladly , in fact i dont suffer them at all

Lob this address into your browser address bar, this will take you to the topic which contains several pictures of my work. The bridge and the Twi'lek appear on the second page.

http://www.freeworldsmod.com/Default.as ... sts&t=6879

Hi guys,

Well unfortunately it has been about 8 months since I did the THN files, and I am afraid that I have forgotten much of it. I do remember that the tutorial was wrong in several spots and completely missing other information. However, I will try to look back at my work to remember what I did, and maybe come up with a simple Q&A type tutorial. I don't have time for a real tutorial, but I can skip all the basic stuff since I'm sure you already know that (like getting a thn decompressor, using notepad, etc).

The biggest problems I encountered were with camera positions and especially orientations. I never did actually figure it all out, BUT I did learn of ways to "cheat" the system and just eliminate all the fancy orientation math calculations, and it seemed to work ok.

@Argh
Have you tried looking in some of the user-created thn files? It's usually easier to understand by looking at ones created manually, as opposed to the original ones that were created by the developers in an editor. There are obviously some in Freeworlds, and we created some custom ones in Evolutions as well. The intro scenes are usually good ones to start with - it gets harder when you start on rooms and in-game cutscenes.

Yeah, I've been "borrowing" stuff from Free Worlds... and will be looking very hard at Epsilon's intros, which are fabulous

I'm just wanting to get my understanding up to the point where I can tackle custom Rooms- thus far, it looks like I have a loong way to go here