A good starting points for modelling questions is the modelling forum! Its located around 4 below this one. Once I know you have seen this thread, i will move it there for you

1. What is a good Polycount?

3000 or less. You *can* go higher, but 3000 or less will ensure good performance.

2. Does Freelancer Support partially invisible textures?

There are examples of textures using alpha-channel transparency, yes. Getting them to work as a MAT file requires that you build up some expertise, first. Read the ship tutorial and the MAT File Exporter for MS3D documentation to learn more about how to make basic transparent objects.

3. DO you have to rotate attachment points in a certain direction for them to work?

Sometimes. Mainly, you're going to worry about this for Weapons and Turrets, where the position/rotation of the object matters quite a bit. You can do it to other things, though, which can have various useful effects, such as making smoke go "up" instead of "backwards" from a Hardpoint, and other things.

4. Are there any limits on number of engine and weapon/turret points?

I don't know the absolute for Engines, but I'd suspect it's the same as weapons- 32. If you can't realise a design with 32 weapons... uh... well... I guess that's too bad

BTW, it's never *wise* to mount more than one Engine or Thruster on a ship, unless you're aware of the complications that ensue.

And one last note... which you will hopefully read before this gets moved:

Take things very slowly.

Do NOT... repeat... do NOT try to build some ultra-complex million-part model with 5 LODs, etc., etc., etc. on your first try. If you do, you will very likely fail, and nobody will help you fix it.

When people ask me about shipbuilding... if they don't even know how to skin their models properly, I send them back to Square One- not because I'm cruel or heartless, but because if you "only" know how to model, you're not ready to make ships... which is a series of practical problems, from modeling to skinning and code.

Instead, build a simple cube. Texture it using UVMapper or Gmax or MS3D or whatever, with proper UV maps set up. Export it to CMP, and play around with HardPoints. Then read about shiparch.ini, and replace the Starflier with your new ship- it's the easiest way to test things out, because the game will almost certainly run (with errors, but not CTD) if you just switch out cv_starflier with your ship's CMP (which you'd name cv_starflier and put in the right directory in your mod, of course).

Read the TLR manuals, but be prepared for certain things to be much harder/different than the manuals suggest- Drizt's tutorial sort've... glosses over a few difficult steps that tripped me up for over a week. I've been thinking about writing a "shipbuilding for total newbies" manual that's a little easier to digest, but haven't done so yet, in part because I haven't gotten custom Infocards or .3DB icons hacked up yet for my mod, and I wanna make sure that I understand the process from beginning to end and can explain it to everybody in clear, simple language. But until that happens... the current manuals will help you understand what does what... why... and how. They're not perfect, but if a newbie like me can go from nothing to "mod" in 2 months... it can be done

But keep it simple at first- don't worry about "art" until you know how to hold the "paintbrushes", k?

Edited by - Argh on 11/25/2004 3:56:33 PM

Edited by - Argh on 12/12/2004 11:42:36 AM

Thanx for the advice. This isn't my first time modding - I've been modding Trainz and Quake 3 Arena for a long time, and just recently got the tools to mod Freelancer. So, I know my way around GMax like the back of my hand. I'm no stranger to difficult code either. Once, it took me 16 drafts to get it right. Thanx again!

NP

BTW, with Gmax--->MS3D-->CMP Exporter... watch out for polygon problems with verts that aren't facing the correct ways- I've reworked a lot of Gmax-made content for export to CMP, and I've had to use Rhino3D to get the polys properly unified (and many cases, I've had to unweld and then re-weld them again, or fix other bad bits of geometry).

So if you export your new ship models from Gmax into MS3D and the CMP Exporter crashes... you're probably looking at a geometry problem. I've found Rhino3D (with the Bonus Tools for working with polygonal geometry installed) to be a great tool for fixing problems with bad surfaces that MS3D's tools don't seem to know what to do with. If you don't have/can't afford Rhino3D, then there are several other things out there (like Wings) which can probably do what you need. Or maybe I've just been dealing with really horrid geometry in the first place... but I've had this experience both with things I modeled in Rhino and then exported to Gmax (to lower polycount) and with other people's objects, so I think it's just that Gmax's Quake 3 export and MS3D's Quake 3 importer don't get along very well... and somewhere along the line... geometry gets built that the CMP exporter can't handle.

Oh yeah... ! If you haven't gotten these two tools... go get them... I think Drizt's tutorial doesn't mention them (it was written before they existed).... go get HardCMP (for working with hardpoints... it's awesome and easy) and FLModel Tool (for resizing CMP and SUR files, so that your ship has somewhat-appropriate hitboxes... again, it's awesome and easy, and waaaaay better than any of the other tools for SUR/CMP work).

And get Kasdian's Overhaul texturing guide, which talks about the specifics of using DDS textures (I dunno whether Quake 3 uses DDS, so I'm assuming "no"... read the guide, it'll tell you about texture specs and export settings... very handy).

Edited by - Argh on 11/25/2004 5:27:45 PM

Edited by - Argh on 11/25/2004 5:32:12 PM

Max Polygon Count:

Gee Whiz. I allow our staff to go to 5000 without the blink of an eye at Asylum51. We never have any problems with this number as far as MP lag goes.

I think freelancer can handle a lot more polygons than people give it credit for.

Just my opinion.

Glock36
"No Comment"

Well,

Polycount huh...... max and min... freelancer works just fine with NATIVE ships that are well above 3000... the examples are there... try importing a few and looking before you make definitive statements.. I have seen ships that work just fine with 15000 polys.. its not about max and min its about CUMULATIVE totals...

Giskard wrote:

"The "average" is 3000 per model but I dont believe there is a limit. However, if all your models have 21,000 polies then each one of your models will be the equivalent of 7 normal ones. Once you hit 16 models in space some computers start to crash. So that would be 3 of yours at 21000 polys = 1 crash."

Harrier.



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

Edited by - harrier on 12/8/2004 6:02:52 AM

Harrier is correct. One of our staff once built a flying station by importing many of the parts that are available in freelancer, assembling them, and exporting them as one cmp file.

It flew......but if you flew more than one in MP the server got so slow it eventually crashed.

This thing was about as large as a planet though.

Glock36
"No Comment"

It's not whether the engine can handle the polys, guys... it's what you're aiming for in terms of user experience. The "lag" people have reported with high-poly models isn't lag, of course... it's a dramatic drop in framerate, caused by having too many polys/textures onscreen at once, on low-end systems. Remember, every poly has to display its texture, be lit (often by multiple sources) and have the material-map applied to it. Each step takes a pass through the rendering engine... and the higher the polycount, the longer each step takes. 4 20,000-poly models on-screen at once will result in a noticable framerate hit on all but the very fastest systems.

I think that models built for multiplayer mods should keep the polycount below 5000, and 3000 should be the goal. Those are the goals that I set when building WOS, and we're keeping within those limits... without really feeling much pain (after all, if you optimize a model carefully, you can keep polycount much lower than people think).

This way, even minimum-spec systems can play the game smoothly. Of course, feel free to ignore that if you want... but then expect some users to have a less-than-optimal experience. Most won't, these days- video cards have gotten better since the release of the game, and the ones that were low-end then are almost twice as slow as a mid-range card now. But there are still a surprisingly large number of people running older systems, and I try to make them as happy as I can, short of building LODs <shudder>

Yeah, but still Argh, making CapShips with 3000-5000 polygons isn't as easy as making a LF .

And isn't FLModelTool's SUR Resizer still buggy?? Last time I heard about it it was still malfunctionning...

"BTW, it's never *wise* to mount more than one Engine or Thruster on a ship, unless you're aware of the complications that ensue. If you have to have the glowing effects of multiple engines, you can mount multiple hpEngineGlows... and one Engine."

He? If you look at the existing ships, there is one single HpEngineglow usually, far behind the engines, even if it has more exhausts; actually, that thing is used for the special trail in tradelanes afaik. The HpEngine01, 02 etc. is the way to set up multiple engine flames, they have nothing to do with the engine declared in engine_equip.ini. Actually, you will find that is the way the original ships are set up, too

I think it's at least as easy to make a 5000-poly Dreadnought as a LF. Look at the polycounts on the FL ones... they're surprisingly low. And you can do a lot of modeling tricks that DA did not, such as burying boxes into the sides of a model, without creating any problems and adding lots of surface detail with low polycount. You don't have to model ships as one continuous skin- the engine doesn't care, and it's more efficient not to. Check out my "freighter" or the "speedboat" in the latest version of WOS... the "speedboat" has, if I recall correctly, less than 100 polys for the whole model, and looks reasonably good in-game.

The newest version of FLModel Tool (that'd be Beta 5) is almost completely bug-free. I've been beta-testing it (after all, if anybody's doing weird things with SURs, it'd be me) and I think that users are going to be extremely pleased with the newest version

And Mephistopheles is right, the Engine01, 02, etc. HPs are what creates the dynamic glows... my bad, I'll take that bit out before it confuses anybody. I was trying to refer to adding multiple Engines to a Ship, not to the Engine HPs, and got myself completely bass-ackward. The reason you don't want multiple engines, of course, is because of the way that Linear_Drag is applied... but in the latest beta for WOS, I've completely worked all of that out, and now I could have multiple Engines without having any problems, if I wanted to. Not that I want to, but hey, it's an option

Edited by - Argh on 12/12/2004 11:47:21 AM

The number of engines is only used for the number of exhausts seen.
You can mount more than one engine, but except for a few mods, all ships only have one, despite the number of exhausts.
Although, each exhaust MUST have an engine hardpoint!

Not sure about the limits, though...
We've got a ship with 12 engine exhausts, another with 27 weapons, and a station with 139 lights!

Translucent textures in Freelancer fall under envglass.
(Used for Windshields.)

It's my understanding that Milkshape is limited to 8,000 polys...
(That's the program used to make FL models.)
I've been told that FL can handle up to 20,000 polys, but depending on the system, it'll slow things down.
We've got models in our mod with 6,000-8,000 polys, which slow down only on some of the older Win98SE systems.
And usually, only when there's a lot on-screen at the time.
Like our Perry Naval yard, with the Station, 27 docking bays, and 32 capital ships!
Add a few Battleships, Fighters, etcetera, and almost any system will slow down.
I'd stick to the 8,000 poly limit of Milkshape, just to be safe.

As to hardpoints, and their orientation...
Irregardless of where it's pointed, items placed on any hardpoint will work.
Whether it looks right, or does as it should, is another matter!
I've seen thrusters that shot flames straight up, even though the ship acted as it should!
I've seen ships flying sideways, or even backwards, but everything else worked fine!
I've had headlights that shone out the rear, through the ship.
I've had weapons that would only fire backwards...
I've had weapons that would only fire if you didn't target anything...
I've had weapons that would only fire at one part of the screen, or another...
And all of these examples were corrected by realigning the hardpoints.

Watch your 6!

Edited by - warzog on 12/13/2004 8:53:41 AM