I'm confused. Do you mean when, say, you click on the screen that shows the ship, the weapons, their parts, etc. in space? If so, I would also like to know. Forgive me if you know this, and were refering to this, but I *think* it is stored in the CMP as I'm looking at FLModelTool, and it shows it. Have you tried just eight verticies in a simple box formation? I have no expertise in the field, I'm just trying to think up ways to make it work.

MK

it's useless - the only person who knows anything about building new Vwires or why they won't work in a new mesh is anton

I'm new to cmp files,I just started adding the ships back into the Rebalance mod, but I have noticed that there is a big difference between vanilla and non vanilla ships. Could the fact that non vanilla ships only have one LoD under VMeshLibrary be the problem, when you look at the ships in the HUD, you look at a dumbed down version which is what the other LoD's in vanilla ships are.

Rebalance 3.5 Dev. Team
rebalance.blue-ion.net

no, lod's are not the problem. In the cmp of the vanilla ships they have a seperate node on each of the ship parts called VMeshWire, this is what make the wireframe models in the hud view. At the moment we cant generate that in any of the cmp exporters.

As Cold_Void says, only Anton has delved into this mystery, only one I've seen any way.

link to related thread

and also here on the ship modelling forum

actually - there is a link to LODs.if you go into a FL original cmp and delete all but the top LOD wireframes disappear *eek*

maybe the wireframes are refereneced to the lowest lod then

something I have noticed, even when you clone a model with the clone model tool the wireframe will become intermitent or just wont appear at all. I cloned the border world ships but the wireframe will only show if one of the original ships is in system, there has to be some sort of precache action going on as well :-/

yep - sounds like the cloner needs an update to rename the crc id in wireframes

VWires are very easy but also very hard Make sense? Ok let's do this thing...

Essentially they are very simple, being 3d vector drawings generated from the vertex data in one of the cmp's lod sections. What makes them hard is working out *which* -expletive deleted- verts to join up

The structure of VWireData goes as follows :

struct TVWireData {
DWORD header_size;
DWORD vmeshlib_crc_id; // crc of lod to use
WORD unknown1; // offset into vertex buffer? - pretty certain on this
WORD no_vertices;
WORD no_ref_vertices;
WORD highest_ref_vert; // vertex reference for the highest one used
};

struct TVWireDataLine {
WORD point1;
WORD point2;
}

So... what we need is a 3rd party program that can make a wire frame of the model or someone unbelievably patient to do it by hand.... In the case of slave1.cmp some 60,000 verts. Oh and to make things better each 3db's VWireData can only hold < 255 verts It may be less as I have only experimented with low poly models (look out my post in modelling forum which includes a screenie).

edit : thread here

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

Edited by - anton on 11/15/2005 5:06:33 PM

well it couldn't be too hard to convert if it just did one triangle at a time - you could signal that the poly is a vwire by a similar system to hardpoint tagging/exporting.me,i would just be happy to have _anything_ to represent the orientation of a ship on scanner -even if it looked like garbage it would look better than nothing...and custom weapons not showing on the scanner wireview at all,ugh don't get me started

Edited by - Cold_Void on 11/16/2005 3:53:40 PM

hehe weapons should be easy tbh... not too many polys. If you have the patience convert a weap to polylines and test it out

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

hehe sure i got lots of time - what did you use to edit slave1.cmp? frankly,i think i ought to be able to make new vwires by using very simple LODs that are never called by LODranges - like i said,a few triangles is all i need

I used a custom version of my original fladdradius tool to automate basic vwires. Its in the dl section of lancers and compiles with any windows version of gcc (free compiler). Just tinker with it to extract verts on way thorough. Also check your mail for an extra helpers My solution was to extract verts to use as line ends, save to seperate data chunk and insert using utfedit.

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

the example .cmps are super simplified versions of their respective ships i assume?
ah.. %$!# i am totally lost..so i run auto.bat and it makes a new .vwd,but I don't want a 20 poly ship - so how do i get that 20 poly root .3db for referenced verts into the full poly model?utf edit & modelcloner?.the example ships are all set at lod0, perhaps you rename their meshes - but then that would invalidate the crcs in the vwiredata i'm guessing >_<

K i think i set 20 lines purely as a demo... try using it on a weapon cmp instead. I havent touched this in quite a long time so memory of exact internals is shaky. As for 'how do you get the super-simplified version - thats the grail vwiredata needs. I don't know

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