ROFLMFAO

In milkshapes GROUP list you will find that your ships have group names that are the same, every part of your ships have to have a unique group name to stop FL from creating a CRC conflict and swapping meshes on you. You're using multiple groups so only parts of your ships are swapped, there are one or two startrek ships that swap the whole ship.

I use names like this:- BJM_Ship001_Main_Hull or BJM_Cravic_Main_Hull if I have a name for it, this breaks down as "my initials_Ship name/number_body part", it means that every part is unique (I hope) to me and unique to each ship.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

LMFAO SO TRIVIALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL XD

Cheers dude, but that means i gotta rename them......... re-export them............then use HARDCMP to add my hardpoints in ............ again for the billionth time!

anyways. RANT over xD, cheers agen, ill upload it soon enuff, i just need to figure out how to add the liberty insignia with it going all crazy on me. I LOVE CHALLENGES!!!!!!!!...........................................yea right

Cheese On Toast:
Like the name
Beware the player

I have found that if I name the groups of the ship as:
Group1, Group2, Group3, etc, etc...and make sure the mats are unique, this works fine. The main thing is when it's exported as a cmp/mat is when you give the ship it's unique name.
It works especially well when I have several groups using the same texture. I just regroup them into a new group without remapping it and it holds fine.
Then, when you run it through the hard cmp editor, extract your 3db file from the mat file of that ship. Just make sure you grab the mat file to do this and not the cmp to create the 3db file. (If you grab the wrong one...you'll end up with a crash and the ship won't show up)
I hope this helps.
If there are any questions, feel free to ask.

Also,
I make sure my ship is centered in Milkshape and add all my hardpoints in milkshape. When everything is centered, placing hardpoints is a matter of creating a face, moving it to the location, then duplicating and mirroring left/right or top/bottom or front/back.
When it's centered, it turns out perfectly in hard cmp editor and there is little other work to be done except fine tuning the hardpoints and creating the 3db file.

Edited by - Rankor on 11/2/2006 10:25:10 PM

Rankor every nickname, group name, material name & several other names are only loaded once by FL, each name is converted into a CRC and if 2 or more objects have matching CRC's then FL uses the first object for every occurance of that CRC. Just giving your CMP's unique names does nothing as the internal mesh names are all the same, if your the only person flying your ships then you won't see any mesh swap, having NPC's flying some of your ships is when you'll see it as they are loaded first. The 2 Star Trek ships I mentioned in the above post had this problem, thier VMeshLibrary name was something like "saucer.lod0.vms" and the part name "saucer.3db".

The CRC's are why we can't just copy and reskin a vanilla ship we have to clone them renaming all of the internal names of both CMP & MAT, if not every ship get's the new skin or your new skin is ignored and your left using a vanilla one.

@ Cheese, my SUR test ships have been exported dozens of times each so it's par for the coarse bud, if it's not right the first time it has to be done again.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

@ Bejaymac

I am aware of the naming conventions. That's why I don't have problems.

(Sits down with drink in hand...shaking head.....some people just assume)
Here is an example: The Hammer_pb3




Edited by - Rankor on 11/3/2006 8:27:10 AM

doooooooohhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! >__<

ill get it right in the end =D

starting work on it now ^^

Cheese On Toast:
Like the name
Beware the player

WOOOOOOOOOOO FIXED!!!!!!!!!!! thx guys! this means im a almost done =D

Cheese On Toast:
Like the name
Beware the player