Hmm. That's a tricky one. I talked to Anton about this issue, in another context (I was talking about weapons, which also have multiple parts).

I think you have three ways you could solve this problem:

1. Do what 99% of us have chosen to do, and make the docking_sphere entries in the solararch.ini file much larger than it currently is, for each and every object with Berths.

2. Make it so that the ship can successfully dock with Moors. The Dogfight Mod has some very big ships that dock with Moors, and it works very well... so far, it's the only mod I've played that has big ships that dock with Moors that actually works right (not to say that there aren't others out there... I have not played every mod around).

3. Export the gunship to MS3D, shrink it there, and then export the shrunken CMP. If you shrink it around the Origin, and then use FLModel Tool, and have some luck... that might work. But don't count on it.

There seems to be a misunderstanding.

My gunboats are all able to dock, using large moors. But they are just not displayed in the rooms i.e. equipment dealer. So they are playable, but it looks crappy, because they don't fit into the rooms.

The MS3D option is out of the question, because the CMPimporter is kinda bugged. Or did I miss something regarding that?

I also tried to shrink the Rheinland gunboat. The result was a pretty crumpled ship, it seemed the polygons where kinda pressed together like an accordion. However, the individual parts of the ships were at the right place.

Could someone go and ask Anton to have a look at that? Is this mistake also happening when scaling fighters or freighters?

Ok, I broke down and took a good long look at this. Curiosity may've killed the cat, but I can always buy another cat

The only way that I can see to do what you want is to export the model's LOD meshes via the CMP Import plugin, and then importing/exporting multiple VMESHDATA and VMESHREF files and a trip through the rabbit-hole with Meshconv. In short, what you're talking about doing wouldn't be very easy...

There is a less painful way than that. Just export the highest-detail VMESH information to MS3D (I just tried it, and it imported correctly) and make a new custom ship that just "happened" to look just like the Bretonia Gunship, used its DDS textures, and didn't have breakable parts or multiple LODs. For all intents and purposes, it'd *be* the Bretonian Gunship, except for any breakable parts (which, if I recall correctly, aren't a big deal with that ship anyway). Because it lacks LODs, it might not be good to have 50 of them on the screen at once, but really, even high-poly objects in FL are pretty efficiently modeled, so that probably wouldn't be a big deal.

FLModel Tool's not really designed to handle multi-part objects correctly yet- Anton has this on his wishlist, but getting SURs under control has been a bigger priority up until this last release- you can blame me, Slivik, Crabtree and all of the other weirdoes who're making custom content with really strange parameters for that

Okay I will try this out...

But if you have exported the smaller model, then it could be possible to create multiple parts. And you could also do the procedure for every lod, so that there is even more then one lod.

And another question: When I look at the CMP's vie UTF Edit, I only see one lod. Every group is only defined in one lod. Where are the others? Or am I too stupid to find them?

No, you're not too stupid... the parts are defined inside the structure of the VMESHDATA, which is why I was shuddering about the jolly nightmare of trying to implement the LODs + parts back again after importing them, re-skinning them, and then exporting them... to make it fully-functional as the "same" ship.

If you look at the UTF, you'll see the LOD references in the VMESHREF entries, in the sections that look like this:

Level0
Level1
Level2

You'd have to basically import every LOD via CMP Import, re-skin, and export the entirety as as a single CMP. And then you'd have to break it up again, using MESHCONV, figure out which of the VMESHREFs created went where (that alone would cause me nightmares) and you'd probably have to repeat the process to some extent with every breakable part.

In short... unless you've got one heck of a lot of free time... this is a really inelegant way to do things. While we now know enough to build breakable ships without too much pain, the original game's content is still waaaaaaay more complicated than anything that we modders build, and I have yet to here about anybody implementing multiple LODs in their ships, since we figured out early on that the performance hit for relatively high-poly ships are pretty small- iow, other than the breakable parts, there really wasn't a lot of *point* in this complexity (although I'm sure that the game designers were convinced that there was, at some point... if you look at the creation dates on some of the models, they speak volumes).

If I were you, I'd just cut to the chase, use the highest LOD, get rid of the damage meshes, ect... and get things done. But that's just me- my method would still take at least a couple of hours, mainly because you'd have to hunt down every single DDS texture used on that ship and export them, and then import them into a new, custom MAT, build new Hardpoints, script it... etc.

Edited by - Argh on 12/22/2004 8:03:24 AM

Okay, okay, you convinced me...

And I suppose it would also be logical, if a gunboat has no destroyable parts. Maybe because of the better hull... I will find a reason... ^^