well if it's that small you will need to :

if you want it the size if the defender (appox.) then select the whole thing and scale by about 13

Note: if you still can't i'll send one of my models to help you....

also you may need to rotate it 90 degree's, and flip it upsidedown....

A good way is to import a standard Freelancer gun using the .cmp importer for Milkshape. Adjust your ship so the gun fits as you want. Then delete the gun. Finish the ship, and scale up by 100. Your ship should be perfect size that way.

it would be great if you could send me one of your models... the cmp importer from milkshape crashes the app so I cannot import something already on my system...

i downloaded the flmodeltool and scaled my ship by 1000 and it is still the same size in the game. I scaled the .cmp and the .3db files. is there somewhere else to set this? When i scale it in Milkshape much bigger, it just get's too big for the tool so I must be doing something else wrong. if there was a way to upload files, i would be happy to upload it

So i am looking at the .SUR file and then use the FLModel tool to resize it to my .cmp just to see what the relative sizes are ... it goes to zero. below are the before and after ... (I just grabbed a .sur from a liberty fighter)

.SUR original values
exts_part (bounding box) :
tag : "exts"
xMin : -4.521804 yMin : -6.591597 zMin : -10.034886
xMax : 4.569182 yMax : 7.565523 zMax : 8.646748

.SUR after resizing to match my .cmp file
exts_part (bounding box) :
tag : "exts"
xMin : 0.000000 yMin : 0.000000 zMin : 0.000000
xMax : 0.000000 yMax : 0.000000 zMax : 0.000000

OK, i got the sizes right - the exporter for milkshape wasn't working properly for my .cmp - no hardpoints exported. So the .cmp and .sur look ok.

I noticed that some of the .3db files have hardpoints, couldn't find one for a ship so can't compare it to mine... what exactly is the .3db file used for and how do I know if mine was generated correctly? mine has no hard points, just material and texture libraries.

Ships use cmp files for the mesh and hardpoints and mat files for the texture, 3db files are mostly stuff like missile ammo, icons etc.

Thanks for the info!

When I said above that I got the size right, i just mean that when viewing it in the FLModelTool that the numbers look about right ... my ship is still too small to see in the game... what should I look at next? Here is the info from the tool:

Bounding box info :
x1 54.092575 x2 -46.123360
y1 0.000000 y2 -79.924080
z1 30.672913 z2 -42.400063
Center :
3.984608 -39.962040 -5.863575
Radius :
131.764648

which seems about 10x what it should be but the ship is still too tiny to actually see.

the bounding box is the little box that you see around the ship, it sien't the scale, like i said before if it diden't work scaling the first time try it again, on my first ship i scaled it 5-10 times before i got it right.....

Ok, i have scaled about 5 times for a total increase of about 10,000 and the ship still looks exactly the same size, if I remove all guns, missiles etc, it looks like a raquetball sitting on a plate (the ship is spherical and is sitting on -below- some squarish thing that I assume is the shield generator or something.. what the heck am I doing wrong?

ok do you mind if i have a look at it? send it here, [email protected]
and the origanls

ok i changed :

the folder name
the package name
the LODranges from 0, , 999999, 999999, 999999, 999999 to 0, 999999
the DA_archetype
the material_library
the camera_offset , just so you could see over it....
the ids_name to say Bluefish
the script.xml , just slightly
the textures to work with .dds
the model was scaled by 8 using the bluefish.ms3d, then was rotated 180 down
the .mat , exported from MS, for frame work

and that's it