If this disappears in the next few days (and you've clicked the box at the top right that says "see threads older than" to select 30 days etc), then please check the general modding forum.

If no-one responds in here, i'll move it there on Saturday

Ok, that means i'm not just a beginner but an advanced moder, and i should be glad about that, but never the less my ship is still crashing the game (grin).
Well, seems that i have to wait if someone has mercy.

By the way, while searching around in these forums i used the option "show threads since last year". Its very exhausting to read EVERY post and find the right info without even knowing which one is useful and which one is not!

Alone in the dark again...

I can help you if you send me the ship you are working on and the part of shiparch.ini file where you defined your ship.

[email protected]

That would be very nice. You mean the MS3D file of my ship and the shiparch.ini - entry?

I've been making this offer a lot of late, if you want me to take a look for you then mail me your CMP, MAT & ms3d, the ms3d is incase the CMP is knackered and I have to make a new one for you (addy is in my profile).

When you make a model using Drizzt4.0's tutorial follow it until you reach the hardpoint section then skip that section. That is a bit of a no brainer of a way to make hardpoints and shows how inexperienced at modelling Drizzt4.0 was back then. Follow the rest of the Tutorial and texture and export your CMP and please get the MAT Exporter plug-in rather than trying to hand build your MAT with UTF_Edit. Then hardpoint the CMP with HardCmp, this is the easiest way for a noob to get thier model into the game, you only hardpoint in Milkshape if you want to get really serious about modelling for Freelancer.

Not being able to see your ship is down to 1 of 3 things:

1} No HpMount, your ship has no anchor for it to show on screen, probably the cause of the crash as well.

2} No or corrupt MAT file, this means an invisible ship as it doesn't have a skin to apply to it.

3} scale, your ship has been exported at such a small size you can't see it.

The exhaust nozzles are the HpEngine hardpoints, if your ship has 4 HpEngine hardpints then you need 4 nozzles other wise you'd be missing a flame or two. The actual engine (engine_equip.ini) uses what I call a ghost hardpoint as it doesn't exist in you ship, as does the power plant, scanner & tractor beam, they don't need hardpoints in your CMP to work. If you check the packages in the Goods.ini you'll see them attached to "Internal" <-- my ghost hardpoint.

As you can't mount equipment I'm starting to think that you don't have any hardpoints in the CMP, at least nothing the game recognises, as by copying a shiparch entry you should have seen some hardpoints.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Edited by - Bejaymac on 11/25/2006 9:23:40 AM

(importing a generic pilot into the current MS file will give you a good idea how much to scale the ship). But this is probably not the reason you're crashing. It could be something as simple as a missing hard point, but I doubt it. It sounds like something in your files is mixed up, so Freelancer doesn't know what to do with it and kicks you out.

So, your ship is crashing the game, eh? (did you send it an invitation? ) just kidding.

There are alot of factors to consider when getting your ship ready for flight in Freelancer. cmp/mat/3db are just three of them.
(You can put a plain box in the game if you do it right)
If you wouldnt mind elaborating here on what you're doing to get your ship into the game, perhaps I can give you some assistance and get you going in the right direction.
I've got over 40 custom ships that I personally created and fly in my own game.
(samples: www.sirius-engineering.org )
What help I can give you here may also help others to learn how to get their custom ship into the game.

I don't want this to be some sacred and closely guarded secret by modders/modelers. It's senseless and everybody deserves a chance to be creative. (unfortunately, not everybody is good at it as crashing whole game mods with poor performance will testify to that)

Edited by - Rankor on 11/25/2006 10:04:25 AM

First of all, thanks for paying attention to my problems.
But most of your advice i'm allready aware of, so i think i have to be more precise.

First attemt of modeling my ship was Drizzt tut, and after not beeing able to mount any equipment i recognised by myself that his tutorial section actually must be not the right way to create HPs. So i tried to imagine how it could be done in the right way, and my second attemt was at follows: i opened shiparch.ini, noted all the HPs i found on a peace of paper, then created them in MS (each as a single triangle), and moved them at their location. I left all of the HPs (except the interior ones) a little bit outside of the model, so they don't have contact to the models surface, i don't know if that may cause the crash?
Have to mention that i used the engineHPs as noozles (2 nozzles = 2 engineHPs, also changed shiparch.ini "number of exhaust noozles = 2) and created no HP for the engine itself and neither for the power plant (just edited them in goods.ini), because that is explained correcly in Drizzt tut. But still the game crashed.
Third attemt was to open the original ship i used as template for my ship (rh_fighter) in HardCMP, again noting all the HPs i found on a peace of paper, and finally added them in MS, and after that reopened it with HardCMP to adjust the HPs. Still the same crash.
By doing that i noticed that the HPs listed in shiparch.ini aren't the same as are shown when you open the model in HardCMP, so now i'm confused about which HP should be created and which not.
By the way, i DID create HPmount, in each of my attemts. Also i used the MATExporter for creating the mat file. And i didn't forget about scaling the ship. And also i recognised that the nose of my ship, opening it with HardCMP, pointed to annother direction than the the standard ships noses, so i changed the position of my ship in MS that it matches with the position of the standard ships. Don't know if this is important, just thought it could be useful to mention.
But - still the same crash.

I wonder if the problem could be caused by too many polygons, but i think using the SelPolyCount - option in MS is a good way to control that (my ship has just about between 2000-3000 polygons), isn't it?

To come to an end, i have to mention that my ship doesn't have a sur file yet, but i don't think that this is necessary to build a flyable ship?

But what about that 3DB file, first time i hear about that?

My conclusion of all of this is, that it MUST be something wrong with either the HPs or the MAT file. So i now will try to create the HPs with HardCMP and not with MS, but i think i will take advantage of your offers to "control" my MS3D, CMP and MAT file, and thanks a lot for that.

Greetings Leo

ah, i forgot one more question concerning the HPs: As you pointed out before, engine, power plant, scanner and tractor HPs are internal (as one can see in goods.ini or shiparch.ini), and therefore can be ignored (at the creation of HPs). But in shiparch.ini there are also HPs for the baydoors, and one is interior and the other one is exterior! Unfortunately i didn't found any info about baydoors. Can they be ignored as well?

i forgot:

Bejaymac, thanks a lot for your offer. Now after you gave me some hints I think i first try to put my ship into the game once again, because i want to be able to do it by myself, and if you do all the work for me i will never be able to learn how to do, i hope we have the same opinion about that. But if i shouln't be successful i would be thankful if you still offer me your help.

Rancor, thanks for your offer too. If i understood it correctly you asked me to describe what i did to put my ship into the game? (i'm german, and i'm not sure if i understood the word "elaborate" correcly)
Now here a short description:
as i said, i used drizzt tut, built the model in MS, copied goods.ini of rh_fighter and renamed it to create my ship, copied misc_equip.ini and engine_equip.ini of rh_fighter to rename and edit engine and power plant, copied shiparch.ini of rh_fighter to rename and edit my ship (just edited some small things like hitpoints, cargo amount, mass, amount of nanobots, number of exhaust noozles, added HpWeapon03/04 at weapon_special level 7, didn't forget to edit DA_archetype for cmp and mat), edited ids numbers using freelanceremty.dll (by Griskard), edited market_ships.ini, used shiparch.ini and HardCMP to find all HPs, created HPs in MS, textured my ship with LithUnwrap (for tha purpose i used a LithUnwrap tutorial), exported cmp and mat, created mod folder paying attention to use FL Hierarchy, put it into FLMM, and finish.
Think except of the HP section Drizzt tut is pretty good for beginners like me. FLMM activates the mod, i can buy my ship, infocards are shown correctly, just no equipment is mountable and my ship is invisible, and when i'm at the landing zone and want to start into space the game crashes just in the moment i hit the start button.

---

I don't want this to be some sacred and closely guarded secret by modders/modelers.

---

Rankor the only people that keep modding info secret are some of the server admins who develope new features/programs and keep them for use on thier servers.

The reason very few people are forth coming with info is that most of the people who have the knowledge have long since left this community. There are only a hand full of thier followers left as well and most of our knowledge is from the data in the forums and our own experiments. Around here atm it's basically noob teaching noob which leaves us with a lot of gaps in the knowledge base.

Take your post in the Noobs thread about THN's, afaik theres only been about a dozen people who have done any serious work with them. Apart from a couple of Tutorials and the 1 or 2 people who still show up here, it's a case of help yourself to figure things out, with a little help from the boards from time to time.

@ Leopard2A6, The Baydoors hardpoints are where the cargo pod gets attached when you jettison cargo, they're not needed in the CMP as we can't add joints or do animations with the CMP Exporter, and you'll find that most people just leave them in the shiparch and I think it's how the sound effects of the cargo being jettisoned are applied.

The fact you can edit the CMP in HardCmp means your CMP isn't corrupt but the crash might still be your hardpoints, make sure it's HpMount and not HpMount01, this is the only hardpoint that is critical in your CMP as you can put your ship in game with just this hardpoint (you can't go anywhere but you can atleast see it).

Poly count isn't really an issue as anything under 5000 polygons is ideal, over 10,000 is a problem as a couple of ships like that on screen at the same time can LAG a server something rotten.

I wasn't going to do the work and leave you with no idea as to what I'd done, I'd have fixed any problems and sent you the fixed files and a Read Me explaining what I'd done and how to avoid doing it in the future. I bug hunt regularly and always add a read me to help people understand where they've gone wrong.

**shuffles of with a new headache**

Bejaymac, thanks for giving me ne knowledge about baydoors.

I named it HpMount and not HpMount01, because looking around in shiparch.ini it's obvious that every unique HP is named without a Number, like e.g. HpPilot or HpHeadlight (at least in the case of the rh_fighter).

Good to know that my cmp file doesn't seem to be corrupt.

About an hour ago i recognised that my mat file is over 18MB huge!!! But even if the mat file isn't working right i still should be able to fly the ship, it's just that i wouldn't see what i'm flying, isn't that right?

Right now i'm about to do a new attempt, think it will take me a few hours to see the result, if i shouldn't be successful i will send you the ms3d, cmp and mat file, if you don't mind.

So, the night is over, i haven't slept yet, but - my ship is flying!Looks like there was something wrong with the HPs, but i can't say what, the only difference to my other attempts was that this time i created the HPs with HardCMP.

But still i got this invisibility problem, and although i read a lot about in these forums i'm not sure what the problem is. Bejaymac, would you mind to give me a little lesson about texturing? Or would someone else? I'm sure my textures aren't shown because of this flip thing. I downloaded this ddscv converter to convert my textures to tga format, but there is no option to flip vertically. The only graphic software i have is painter classic, and there you have the option to mirror vertically, but that means that the texture is still shown on the same side of the plane, just upside down.
Maby i'm doing something wrong in texturing, the point is that i can't figure out without being able to flip textures, so what else could i do?

Textures:
I use 8 bit .tga textures on a scale of either, 128x128, 256x256 or 512x512,
although .dds textures are the primary format for original FL ships. However, FL recognizes .tga fine. Just don't use anything else but .dds or .tga . Any other format will result in your ship not showing up and possibly a crash.
Texturing:
One thing that makes ship not visible is that it's vertices/faces are facing the wrong way. (If the untextured object looks black...it's inside out). All outside facing vertices & faces must look "silver" to apply the texture for it to show up.

Just a little basics here: a face is made up of exactly 3 vertices. Flat textured, it appears silver on one side and black on the reverse side.
To create a simple "face" or later on a "hardpoint" in Milkshape this is what you do:
With Graph enabled and flat shaded/textured selected, click on "vertex", then click on the grid where you want the vertex. (It'll be a red dot). Do this two more times to create a triangular pattern.
Next: click on select (by vertex) and draw your box around all three vetexes. (all three of them should be red dots now)
Next: up at the top select "face" and scroll down to "Create Face", click on that...BAM....there you have it, a brand new face. (it will show up in your groups as "Create Face". Just rename it to whatever hardpoint you need.
I usually keep my faces/hardpoints small as possible because cmp takes the average "center" of that face to align it on a vertex.

THIS may be the reason for the crashes:
Something I found out that can cause ships not to show up as well as cause a crash to desktop is a simple mistake in how the cmp editor is used to create the 3db file. (I did it to myself alot) .
Ships/objects are created in cmp/mat and 3db formats.

IMPORTANT
When using the cmp editor, after you have placed your hardpoints on your ship and saved that information, you'll need to create the necessary 3db file, you must open the corresponding mat file for the ship. You will notice that the mat file will now also contain the exact information you had in your cmp file that you just saved. But, what ever you do, don't change any information in that mat file or you'll end up corrupting the cmp file and get a crash.
Without changing anything in the mat file, save it as that ship 3db file and exit.
You'll find all three formats in your ship folder. (cmp, mat & 3db)
If you happen to overlook this and use the cmp as the basis for the 3db file, not only will the ship NOT show up, but it can also cause a crash to the desktop because FL doesnt understand it.

SUBNOTE
If making Hardpoints in MS, the cmp editor will try its best to orient the hardpoint to the closest vertex. When creating a hardpoint, it is necessary to orient the hardpoint "face out" practially on top of the vertex where you want it.
To avoid the (pain in the neck) tediousness of manually placing hardpoints through the cmp editor, I create "mounts" for my hardpoints. (a simple 1 stack cylinder with 4 slices. You'll see this type of mount on many standard FL ships) .
After creating and placing my mounts, I create a face (using 3 vertexes) and rename it as I go along to represent the various hardpoints and place them on the mounts. CMP editor sees this and precisely fixes the hardpoint exactly where it should be in it's correct orientation.
(If the ship is "on the square", a duplicate hardpoint will show up exactly opposite of it's original position once it's mirrored.) This has saved me alot of time in placing hardpoints. (For instance, placing weapons harpoints on opposite wings)

HARDPOINTS:
When making hardpoints in MS the format should be like this:
Any additional Hp's of the same equipment are marked as 02, 03, 04, etc.
You must make sure of spelling accuracy or the hardpoints won't show up in FL (even if they show up in the cmp editor).

Hp/Fixed/HpMount
Hp/Fixed/HpTractor_source
Hp/Fixed/HpShield01
Hp/Fixed/HpEngine01
Hp/Fixed/HpThruster01
Hp/Fixed/HpCM01
Hp/Fixed/HpMine01
Hp/Fixed/HpRunningLight01
Hp/Fixed/HpRunningLight02
Hp/Fixed/HpRunningLight03
Hp/Fixed/HpRunningLight04
Hp/Fixed/HpHeadLight01
Hp/Revolute/HpWeapon01
Hp/Revolute/HpWeapon02
Hp/Revolute/HpWeapon03
Hp/Revolute/HpWeapon04

****Hp/Revolute/HpTorpedo_special_01 (CD)
****Hp/Revolute/HpTorpedo_Special_02 (Torp)
****on these items, it's probably easier to simply use the cmp editor to create them since it knows the difference alot better than me.


I hope this helps.


Edited by - Rankor on 11/27/2006 12:03:05 PM

Edited by - Rankor on 11/27/2006 12:15:11 PM

Edited by - Rankor on 11/27/2006 12:19:04 PM

Well, i never used other formats than tga and dds (32bit and 512x512 - as i read this a dozen times in these forums). Unfortunately i have no software to get them to the size of 8bit, and i don't know how to do else (that noobie-thing again).
Maybe even my tga's are fine, its just that i have no software to flip them.

None of my ship models has any black faces, they're all grey, or silver as you called it.

Since i "rebuilt" my mod the day before yesterday i tested it many times, and there is no crash any more, it works just fine, and i even have no 3db file at all!Its just that i can't see my ship, so i guess this 3db file only has got something to do with the games graphics?
So i will make this 3db file and see what happens, thanks for telling me how to do.

Also thanks for the hint with the HP creation, I'm sure this saves a lot of time instead of fizzling around in HardCMP, but i'm not sure if this could be an advantage for me because of one reason: in my second and third attempt i extruded some faces a little bit because i wanted them to be the mounts for the HPs, then just duplicated and made them smaller as HPs themselves, and as we know the game crashed, so i think i'll stay with the HardCMP method (i think it would make no difference between making the mounts seperately or just extrude them from existing faces, as long as you put the HP right on it, don't you?).

Now i can't wait to see the difference between without 3db file and with it, thanks again.

And thanks for your effort to list the HPs, but that wouldn't have benn necessary as in the meantime (one and a half weeks) i get used to the correct spelling of HPs. By the way, you don't need HP/Tractor_Source at all, it works just fine without as its an internal HP (Bejaymac pointed this out to me). And HP/HeadLight also works without the "01" at the end (in HardCMP). Please don't think i want to offend you, i appreciate your help very much, i just wanted to mention it. Think the only problem ist left here is that texture and flipping thing.

Now let's see if my ship is visible if i have this 3db file.

Edited by - Leopard2A6 on 11/27/2006 12:47:33 PM

Edited by - Leopard2A6 on 11/27/2006 12:54:54 PM