doh. sorry


Thanks

HCI hmm very intresting may look into that, but i did have a breakthrouh yesterday as i was working on my new system. I found that missing pecie i was talking about for wave files, the refrences are the msg=gcs_name tags you will find in a lot of ini files, espically system bases and so on. I attemped *rather hurrily before i headed off to church* to try and create a new working system wav file *for my new system* using the file= found in other dialouge, i know i'm on to something and very close, because it is playing the wave file, *though no audio comes out it's a blank like space* i'm defintly close to something. Thought i'd share this info with you all so you can try to get this work too *i will work more on it today and if i finnaly get it working i will let you know*

As for the thn files i had a feeling they were in some sort of programing format, I will have to take a look and see if anyone has been working on it lately, thou for right now there not as an important as i feared. I will keep you all informed and if i do finnaly mange to get new dialog/waves playing correctly I will defintly post it on the fourm. BTW thnx for the info and help HCI u ownz

quick question...in the postion data which number is forward/backward, up/down, side to side...thanks

The position numbers are respectively x,y and z coordinates. If i remember things correctly: X position is side-side, Y is up-down, Z is front-back.

Quickshot, keep us informed of your work

Edited by - HCl on 25-03-2003 05:17:40

btw....dont use the no_thruster.cmp as the graphic for mines or countermeasures...and dont place them inside the ship....crashes the game if either of those things are done...(the no_thruster graphics works nice for makeing thusters actually come out of engine hardpoints without a silly graphic showing....works nice for shields too)

I'm trying to add 3 new turrets to my Domesdary (to those 3 hardpoints the programmers obviously intended but never implemented). I worked out the position field, but can somebody explain Axis, Max, Min, and Orientation?

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War does not decide who is right, only who is left.

The only thing i'm sure of is the orientation entry: it's a 3x3 matrix describing the ship orientation. First 3 values are the X vector, next 3 are the Y vector, last 3 are the Z vector. (you may need to brush up on some algebra)

Max and min might be angles describing how much the hardpoint can rotate, but i haven't confirmed this. Axis seems to be 0,1,0 most of the times, not sure what it does.

Ok here is what I have figured and not figured out about the wave files, it has become aparent that it is finding the msg= tag i placed in the voices_space_male and this is what i know. The males space voices have a refrence and the female do not, so when it comes time to 'say' that tag it cuts off on the female cause it can not find it. However in the male it finds it but it plays a blank wave *or just slience for that period of time* i have tired everthing to the file= tag i added i even used one of the wave files i extrated from the utf to no sucess the only thing i can think of it is looking for the wave file in the utf file and so is ignore what i put there. The problem is that i'm not sure how the utf files that continas the wave works, all i know is that that when u open it in the utf editor u will see hex on the tree strucutre, these are the places that contian the acutall wave files. This is the problem, and something *when it comes to hex and hardcoding* i'm not very efficent at, I will continue to try stuff *yes i tired adding a new wave file to the utf and it still didn't work* hopefully someone else will help figure that last little piece out.

In the meantime I am continuing to build my new systems *starting bit by bit of course* it's a slow process *witch i expected as I am learning along the way* and theres still a lot of 'spifing' to be done but so far I have been doing well, I have also figured out how to add new news *brand new news topics* and how to add news to new bases *or any bases you like* it's not that diffcult and i will give you a quick summary in the reply bellow this.

In the meantime what I have done so far is a new-tradelane, and gate to my new system from colorado and new york, with full tradelane and jumpgate traffic. In my new system i have two new trade lanes from thoese gates with two liberty battleship *stations* with full trafic in the tade lane, gates and the battleships. I have now just started adding the first planet and docking ring, also with full traffic. If anyone would like I will of course post screenshots or anything else you would like to see on a new thread. Also if your wondering I do plan on adding new ships *basicly re-texurted modles new names etc.* I will let you all know when I start to work on that. Quickshot14 reporting back to you HCI

Edited by - quickshot14 on 26-03-2003 06:19:09

First off where the news items are kept, in the data/missions folder is the news.ini of course back it up before you edit it. Heres an example from the ini file of how it works:

[NewsItem
rank=base_0_rank, mission_end
icon=world
logo=news_hawaii
category=56446
headline=56446
text=56447
audio=
base=Bw02_02_Base
base=Hi02_01_Base
base=Hi02_02_Base

Let me break it down, the first part the

rank=base_0_rank, mission_end

Tells freelancer when this news item is to appear, this is esspically important for multiplayer. This specific base_0_rank, mission_end bassicaly means ALWAYS SHOW, so if you wanted to add new news for multiplayer you would want to use this tag to show it.

The next part:

icon=world
logo=news_hawaii

is the small icon and large picture that is show when you access the news item, these are based off another ini *i assume i havn't looked in depth yet* or on the acuttaly names of the texture files it refers too, for now i am *and you should too unless you know how* use the built in icons and logos.

Next is:

category=56446
headline=56446
text=56447
audio=

This is the meat and bones of the news items, this tells a category and headline, with are the name of the news story basicly, the catgeory is for the list area on the news and the headline is the acutally news story name, almost always theses are the same numbers, the numbers of course reffer to the number to a string table. The text is the acutall news story it is an infocard or in XML format of text, and so the number points to that.(Note: I have not been able to find the orignal news headlines or storys so far since i use the FL ini refrencer and it can't calc these low numbers.) The last is audio= leave this out, it looks like *and confirmed in freelancer.ini* that they were going to have audio speech for the news storys but decied to take it out for whatever reason.

And lastely:

base=Bw02_02_Base
base=Hi02_01_Base
base=Hi02_02_Base

If you hadnt gussed already this tells where the news story will be 'show' or accessable. For instance if you wanted to add this news story to mathatten you would just add base=Li01_01_Base to do so. Very easy.

Thats pretty much it, not really that hard at all. I have added one news story and it works perfectly in single and multiplayer. Have fun

Edited by - quickshot14 on 26-03-2003 06:18:19

Edited by - quickshot14 on 26-03-2003 06:19:28

Edited by - quickshot14 on 26-03-2003 06:19:43

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The only thing i'm sure of is the orientation entry: it's a 3x3 matrix describing the ship orientation. First 3 values are the X vector, next 3 are the Y vector, last 3 are the Z vector. (you may need to brush up on some algebra)

---

Don't quite get it. If there are 6 degrees of freedom to describe the orientation of an object in freespace, and the 3 axis are perpendicular to each other, why are there 9 elements?

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War does not decide who is right, only who is left.

Not saying this is what it is, but :

the 3x3 matrix is location (X, Y, Z vector coordinates)

the Min and Max could describe the rotation limits of the weapon on the hardpoint - if I were doing it, it would be the dot value of the weapon rotation (described as a unit vector) with the forward normal of the ship's rotation (though these ought to be meaningless for turrets). As i think about it a bit more, it'd be interesting to see what the normal values for these are - if one of them (the min) is always the same, then it's not so much a min/max description, but a centered/range relationship.

Orientation vector is most likely the normal vector describing which way is "up" for the weapon as mounted on the hardpoint.

Keep in mind I've not done any experimenting of my own, just throwing in some programmer perspective.

- Pfhoenix

Guess I should have read more carefully. Replace Orientation with Axis. I don't see the need for a 3x3 matrix in order to describe the base rotation of the weapon. You can always take the rotation vector and multiply it into the ship's rotation matrix, so storing the individual weapon's rotation matrix (which is what I'm understanding Orientation as) is generally a waste of space (and doesn't necessarily simplify anything, since the Orientation can't be absolute, since the weapon has to be properly aligned with the ship and the hardpoint it's mounted on).

- Pfhoenix

It seems to me that there are 2 coordinate systems involved here, with the weapons having a different set of x,y,z definitions, and this orientation matrix refers the weapon's coordinate frame to the ship's body frame. I don't understand why they did it this way, since having a seperate frame for the weapons and using a 3x3 matrix to describe the orientation alone seems rather redundant to me.

By the way, I think the Max and Min values are in radians. The top number refers to how much the turret can rotate side ways. I haven't seen a bottom number that is not zero so I don't know what it does yet.

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War does not decide who is right, only who is left.

Uhh, this is a dumb question but how exactly do i add hardpoints to my ship with this? im a newbie to editing FL in case u didnt notice lol

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