You msut flip the textures and re-import them into the mat via UTF_edit. Textures in tga format must be flipped for Freelancer. If HardCMP shows a model using tga textures correctly, you need to flip them. Because, unlike FL, HardCMP reads the textures correctly, while FL reads them upside down. No one knows why, but FL behaves this way.

No that didn't work... But i didn't expect it to work. Cuz I had a ship with textures, that were not mirrored, in the game once and it simply didn't displayed the textures right, but they were there and the game didn't crash.

This seems not to be the problem.

And the CMP is also working perfectly (when I am launching I can see the RunningLight hardpoints), so it is not an error because of a wrong ship model or a wrong UV map.

More info would be helpful like the the type of image file used the names of your materials etc. Also the ilst of hardpoints you have included in your model would help also.

I have had trouble using 32-bit .tga files in the past, they would never show in-game. Reducing them to 24-bit did the trick though but they never caused a crash to desktop.

This leads me to believe that there are several problems at work here possibly hardpoints.



Edited by - PantherX on 2/8/2005 1:53:21 PM

Hmm, all hardpoints are copied created using HardCMP, but I included a hardpoint called HPScanner (it is menshioned in Drizzt4.0's ship creating tutorial). Maybe this causes the crash.

My textures are: body, pipes and wings, which reffer to the texture library correctly. Do the imported tga's have to be called like the nodes they are imported to. (Can I import a example.tga to the node wings.tga?)

That's the only mistake I can find.

As with the crash problem, I will also recheck my hardpoint-refering package-entries.

I think that Hardpoint should be named HpScanner01 as far as I remember.

Makes no difference, I deleted it, it still crashes.

I now given the whole thing to a pro. I will keep you up to date if I get to a solution.

I had the same problems and I'm almost shure it was because I had ä ü in the names of the milkshape groups.
I changed the names in Milkshape and it worked.

So don't use special letters by naming the groups.



tja pasiärt no schnell wemä usmä land chunt womä soviel umlut brucht
happens very fast If you come from a country that speaks a language that uses these letters a lot.

When naming things... if a unique name isn't used for both the model and the texture, the usual result of such an error is usually an invisible model. I name every model part Argh_something_something else, such as "Argh_KewlSpaceShip_Wing". And every texture follows the same naming conventions, i.e., "Argh_KewlSpaceShip_TEX". Since I use my handle to start every name, the chances of it ever conflicting with anybody else's work is close to zero.

But your model is visible some of the time, not all of the time, which leads me to believe that you're having problems with either shiparch.ini or the textures, and possibly with the model file itself.

One way to figure all of this out is to make sure that in shiparch.ini, the line in your ship's INI that reads LODranges = is LODranges = 0, 2500 (this being the longest distance the engine will draw a spawning ship at, by default).

You don't want LODranges = 0, 100, 500, 1000, 2000, for example, because your model doesn't have multiple LODs (one of the areas DA over-engineered their game content was that almost every model has 4 or more distinct meshes, which are displayed at the specified distances... no wonder they made so few spacecraft for such a huge game world!).

There are errors in your model's geometry that can also cause draw errors, but almost all of them will also cause the CMP exporter to crash upon export, so that's not very common to see... and most of them cause the game to crash.

And btw... if the TGA's "backwards"... it'll still draw just fine... the texture will be wrong, but your ship will NOT be invisible. Just keep that in mind