Hi,

Any new models would be great 🙂

Pioneer uses .obj format.

I dont know the limits for polycount and texture size as they have not been decided, but lower is better. 🙂

is there anything special needed?

Well Pioneer does have some quirks, but I don't think anything particularly special is required... Is that what you meant? Or maybe you meant any 'special ships' required?

The only difficult part is getting it into the game but I can help with that.

It doesn't use the materials file, which is any colour and texture settings you make in the modelling program, however it will use the texture co-ordinates that you apply to the model.

Doesn't use bump maps or spcular maps, however we can create specularity another way.

Lets say for example your ship has some glowing thrusters, now we would seperate them from the main model file and have them saved seperate so a specularity setting can be applied to that piece in the .lua file.

P.S I really liked your latest mothership for minerwars... the one on your avatar 🙂

It looks mean as hell. 😈

As for what's needed for Pioneer, my suggestion is to play it for a bit and look around. Do a search for posts from potsmoke66, he has a lot of info in them, and check out his thread "P66 Models, one by one". And, BTW, welcome! 🙂

from where do i know you? Sci-fi meshes? SW universe? FFED3D?

your nick sounds very familiar to me.

short overview of what i suggest,

polycount:

no special limits given, but like s2odan said, the lower as better, but that can change i guess the engine will evolve i'm shure. additionally you can get advance of the LOD, for "build" models a bit a boring work, but if you script the models they do that "themself".

textures:

neither no limits, but textures can break things more down as polycount does. so use LOD at least for them.

further, you have 4 LOD, LOD1 is used for the collision mesh, but if you apply textures to LOD1, the models make pioneer week in the knees.

best is to reserve LOD1 for collision mesh, it's not intented by tomm this way, but i found out that works best even and especially when a ship has >10k polys (if you have scripted models that use no textures, like tomms own very first pioneer ships it would play no role).

to achieve a reserved LOD1 for collision mesh, set in lod_pixels the first to .1 so it will never show up rendered (0 won't work 0 = infinite = LOD4).

at this point a suggestion, it's not cool neither it's a programmers dream (more a nightmare), but useful.

a separate collision mesh, maybe simple boundaries of the parts used for a model (i guess the can be calculated from the objects used for one model).

of course you can get hit more easely and proper placing on the ground would be nearly impossible. it isn't yet now, it seems the collision mesh is allways taken from the "in flight" model, else i can't explain myself why i.e. the courier and trader "parks" 30m over ground level. i tried a lot but couldn't get rid of that.

well maybe tomm didn't thought about ships like the courier that have lower parts "in flight" as when landed.

this goes to tomm, well as we speaking about LOD, intentionally i thought LOD pixels, would that mean if i choose a lower resolution the higher LOD's won't appear? no it checked that right today because i was checking the LOD for one model with clear to recognize textures, one plain red, one plain green, and one plain blue, but all the steps appear even at the 640x320 res. wouldn't it be logical to have only the lowest two, you can't see details or difference above that on 640x320.

and oh, my suggestion my fault, the original FE2 res is banned but yeah sometimes... even just to look at it and think, "it could have looked that way 20 years before"

640x320!

well if it would really help to gain speed i would play at a "classic" res of 1024x768.

wavefront is the chosen format, that's cool and i didn't thought for a minute that it can offer so much, but i guess i asked that before, can we have advantage of the possibility that wavefront offers bezier stuff?.

(SW universe i would say)

more to come, but it seems i forgot it right now what it was (i was out to get me some tobacco and a beer).

needed for shure, some (little) experience in scripting and setting up scripted animations, a good knowledge of what can be done with a mesh for a game e.g. knowlege about how meshes are structured will help much.

i wan't to overestimate myself, but the understanding of FE2's object's has helped me very much, also that i'm a very curious guy who allways likes to find out how it works. (i'm allready a bit proud of myself, because i showed the modellers at elite-games how transparency works for FFED3D, strong will to find out how! i also showed off that blender can export proper to DX for FFED3D, hacked a lot of proggys to customize them for me, re-enabled hidden functions, basically i think impossible didn't exists for 0/1, there was times when i was quite younger i believed you can explain the whole universe with it, like it would have been just a giant code tree. but then a (the) force showed me i'm wrong. fortunatly there is something between 0/1, i guess we call that life).

animations are a bit of a treat, but therefore absolutely cool imo.

because you can't simply export the animation to a file that uses transform matrix and transform frames, you would have to setup them by hand. but anyway that's "uncool", lame or cheap i would say now.

well, if it was my opinion no other than scripted models would be needed they might look basic and effort you have to put in is huge compared to "build" models. but really cool and you can be sooooo proud when finished one halfways reliable looking model (sometimes i just sit in front of the screen and get excited by my models).

advantages: (more)

materials, how much you like and which you like.

a (2) colorvariable material, a sensation and it looks heavy, i said i checked the LOD today with three skins set to 255,0,0 - 0,255,0 - 0,0,255, they was placed then, because it was just a test, on top of the colorvariable material, metal, anodized aluminium, that's all i can say (how do you achieved that? i love it, i love metal).

TOMM YOU ARE GOD! (at least one of the gods, the god of the first material that didn't looks like plastic)