yes there are a number of problem areas... i'd really like to find a way to resolve this.. could you explain the problem further? How is pioneer different? It looks like the UV's have been scrambled.. does it look like this in your modeller viewport?

the front landing gear is a cargo access ramp... really its intended to be separate from the landing gear, dont worry about animating it if its a pain.

Its different because Im not using the materials file, I could perhaps try and use that and save even more time 🙂

But basically there are areas on your model without any UV mapping, and since Pioneer is blanketting the whole model with the texture, it doesnt know how to apply the texture to those areas. Whereas the materials file contains that information, telling it not to put a texture there.

Its just like when you apply the wrong texture to a model.

So you can either use the .mat file or seperate the relevant sections from the main model and apply them seperately in the .lua with no texture to solve the problem.

Edit// It seems the .mat file cant be used which is a shame. I'll have to correct that manually then.

Or if you fancy doing it yourself, I can hand the model over to you once its all set-up and show you what needs to be done.

Edit//

Actually Im not so sure about that now. Ill have to look into it further.

Edit again//

Problem solved 😉

[attachment=329:modelviewer-msvc-9 2010-12-06 05-33-56-28.jpg]

Here she is :

[attachment=330:pioneer-alpha7 2010-12-06 07-09-51-02.jpg]

[attachment=331:pioneer-alpha7 2010-12-06 07-10-03-34.jpg]

Collision mesh and LOD need some work. And she also needs some radars and missiles ect added to the .lua, but other than that she is nearly ready 🙂

ah, you've done some great work in this short time, i guess the model is not the most efficient but it works! I'm happy enough with that landing gear!

Sorry to say though, i'm still seeing uv errors.

there really shouldn't be! one thing you should understand is that i never leave surfaces for games untextured, so all surfaces also have UV coordinates.

I'm wondering if there was something screwy with the file i sent you, if you apply the texture to the ship in your viewport, the UV#s should look perfect with not a single deformed surface and the texture should cover every area.

looks like you managed to sort out a couple of the bigger problem areas, Whatever you did to fix the other areas needs to be applied to the interior of the intake, the upper engine, the lateral engines and their recesses and the cockpit, also around the join between the hull and the fins.

I dont mean to be a pain in the arse, 😆 but i made sure the model was perfect before going into d3d, and i think it reflects badly on me if there's errors with the UV's, so i think we need to get that fixed, i probably wouldn't be happy with releasing it with errors like that... IF you explain what you did with the other parts i'll probably be able to fix it myself... it kinda looks like it might be looking for the coordinates from the wrong mapping channel or something.

the cockpit may need some extra attention btw... the windows should be transparent, but again with a texture. if thats difficult it can be left opaque as long as the mapping is good!

Thanks again,

Steve.

finished uv-ing the wheels and chassis... textures are still a wip really but i guess they're nearly acceptable.

There isn't, as I mentioned in the previous or one before that post. It was something else.

Theres nothing wrong with it, its just Pioneers quirks and I really couldn't be bothered to get any more done last night as I was falling asleep at the wheel 😉

Pioneer is completely unfinished and .obj support is relatively new I suppose, there was a time a short while ago when .objs would have many more issues with them than they do now.

Ok I will repeat myself for a third time:

To fix this you must seperate the areas from the main model (the parts that have problems) I have started along this course.

I realise that I write some long posts, but I already mentioned all of this.

And sorry if I seem rather groutchy 😉 Im in a bad mood, stupid Women.. always the problem.. 😉

Mostly done, where are you basing that on... from the pictures or from the copy I sent you?

Just load up the copy I sent you if you havent already, load it up in the model viewer to have a real look at what needs fixing, all I see wrong is cockpit and one or 2 lines on the wings/fins. You may have to circle the affected areas in a picture, because the rest looks ok to me.

Sasquatch is looking cool, I like that detail on the wheel rim 😉

ACTUALLY!!! The problem is with smoothing, but I stumbled on this fix by accident (seperating it from main model), it will allow me to fix a lot of models 😀

The way I avoided this in my models was to simply not have smoothing on the affected areas.. But I suppose now I can go back and fix all those quirks that my models had originally.

whats pioneers preferred format? the viper should be really friendly for converting to other applications since its just 1 mapping channel and 1 texture. And hey please relax as i'm in no particular hurry so take your time:) i'm just confused as you'd earlier mentioned that you'd have to remove the textures. i appreciate what you've done so far... take a deep breath and move on, if you want to do some more then great, but if pioneer is not ready for the model yet then i guess it'll just have to wait, sounds like something that will be resolved as some point.

hope your women troubles are resolved soon. as for me, i've got 99 problems but a ***** aint one. 😀

Or a spliff, that works wonders for a bad mood.. hehe.

Sorry to be groutchy with you. 🙂

Anyway I have no doubt that between the two of us we will get the Viper looking just as you envisioned it originally.

I do want to do more on the Viper, its fun to work with such a high quality model that makes you drool when you check it out in the model viewer 😉

Another thing I was thinking of is that the ship doo-dads that we normally add to the ship arent really going to do this model justice.

By Doodads, I mean the missiles, radar dish ecm attachments ect...

Its a small thing really, but if you want it to be inline with the other models and have detachable parts, then it could look a little tacky.

Simply because they are a much lower quality than the main model.

Anyway, I'll run down whats in the viper model/lua so far:

1: All-round thrusters

2: Animated landing gear (It can be made to look better with some

...more time spent on it.)

3: Very basic LOD added.

4: Very basic Collision model added.

5: Corrected a handful of the strange smoothing based texturing bugs,

...more corrections to follow.

...(This is not anything to do with how you made your model but

...a flaw in Pioneer's .obj rendering I think, but it can all be

...overcome)

6: Correct Viper MK-II stats added from FFE.

I suppose the preferred format is a scripted model like the original FFE and Frontier ships.

However its really hard to make a ship like that.

Then its .obj as the next preferred format.

If someone was to have as much skill at scripting ships as say you do in a CAD program, then you would certainly see the advantages of scripted models.

A lot more can be done on the animation and transformation front.

You could have fully deformable ships that appear to be a liquid metal 😉 Like 'flight of the navigator' hehe.

Or like Mal-metal from the Peter F Hamilton books.

Scripted models are also very good for the LOD, as the model could dynamically change the number of faces it contains.

Careful the polizi aren't reading that, i dont think its tolerated in this system and they may impound your ship and do things to you;)

I think it should use all the same bits as the other ships, perhaps those will be reworked at some point... I probably dont have the time to do that myself, and i dont want to piss people off by redoing others work.... i'm sure whats there will look fine.

and along those lines, and i dont want to overwrite anyones existing contributions, but in FFE its a replacement for the mk1, or should be... i remember some complaints about its triangle count or something and i don't know how they configured it in the install.

i suppose it really doesn't matter, but i'd have liked to have had a reason to see the polizei skin in the game:D

As for morphing ships, i think in FFED3D i could actually make that happen, as the IIRC, the DX format allows vertex animation to be baked into the file. the equivalent i guess for pioneer is that you would have a converter or export tool / plugin / script, that turns animated meshes into scripts. as for doing it 'by hand' though i have edited and built very basic surfaces inside a .msh file with notepad, i can think of better things to do with my life than do it the old fashioned way.;)

Anyway, thanks for your hard work i really didn't think it would work as well as you had it in the last update you sent, whatever you're spicing up your life support system with, you deserve it.;)

Damn it, I'm used to the Imperial Law, drugs, weapons and slaves. I had better watch what I say around this system, thanks for the tip 😆

I'll change it to the Viper MK1 then, or just Viper.

I can't see any problems with the amount of triangles, in fact it has far less than I originally thought it had when I first inspected the model.

Its only about 500 more than the average for that size of ship.

So basically if you can fly the adder, and everyone here can (I think), you can fly this ship.

The only thing its lacking is a good low LOD model, which is something I find very hard to make from a high quality model. When I do my models I make them the opposite way round, start with the low LOD and build higher quality models from there.

Normally I'd say its not such a big deal, but this ship will probably take its rightful place as the Police ship, which means lots of ships on screen and some computers might struggle to show them all without a LOD.

The problem with it is that the texture co-ordinates will have to be redone for the lower quality model. It would be best if you could do that, as you have the benefit of remembering roughly how the textures were laid out ect.. Plus your better at that than me 🙂

The lower LOD though would never have to be as perfect, as you would see it at quite a distance.

I know what you mean. Its something I would like to learn, but everytime I try I end up thinking about how much easier it would be to just use my program, and how the same task could be accomplished in minutes.

Thanks hehe.

anyway I was able to have a play with the model again earlier, I have very nearly fixed the cockpit area, as well as all the other strange textures problems.

Can you notice on the 2nd picture in the intake, the out of place bright white line?

Thats one part I have had trouble repairing as its so tiny its hard to select it in the modelling program....

😈

Eeexcelent! *rubbing hands together with glee* This should definitely be the default police ship, with flashing blue lights and all. I hope that this skin will be available to the police exclusively, with your other skins showing randomly in the shipyard. Perhaps a career as a police officer should be a possibility. When I discovered FFED3D and found that my old save games worked with it, I was amazed to see my last game went from this:

[attachment=333:ffesave2.jpg]

to THIS!

[attachment=334:ffededsave2.jpg]

I did try to use all of Steve's skins in the .lua, but theres a problem to do with loading the model up that way, as it slows the game down a lot.

If its loaded up under a dynamic function then it just runs very slow, and to have changing textures you need to load it up under the dynamic function instead of static.

Ah Ive had an idea, maybe I can try another way of loading the model...... watch this space 😆

you've done some great work here, only thing i could do in D3D was manually change the skin.

Really like the idea of the different versions having different performance values...

I think this is a really good idea that you could apply to other vessels, and you have like a consumer spec, and miltary spec with a different skin and better performance.

its beyond the scope of a single craft, but you could also have performance degrading with time perhaps until you service or replace your sublight engines.

Getting back to the viper, before its released, I need to take a look at trying a couple of things out, i could use the file you've been working on and your obj export settings.

Thanks!

Cheers. I did make a version that could randomly select the different textures, but like I mentioned earlier it made the model run slowly.

But theres a few things I can try to attempt that version again.

That would be awesome, but its not possible until ship defenitions can be changed dynamically, such as dynamically changing thrust for various situations.

Well actually there are probably other ways of doing it, but all would probably require large changes.

You have all of the files, there was a max fle I was using at one point but its not up-to date now, since I've just been changing the .obj instead.

For .obj export settings, I just pick Blender in the pre-configured settings and then change scale to 1.

I think Dan spilled the beans a little early on this, but i've been working on an interior / dashboard, the flat panel is where the standard control panel could be projected as possibly an easy way to a clickable cockpit, which could then possibly make an easy template for adding virtual cockpits to other ships. Doesn't mean that one will actually be coded, but perhaps again if its built, some functionality will be added for it.

Wow 😯

Nice work Steve. Things are looking good for the next alpha 🙂

....amazing, simply amazing. A high detail planetary exploration model which now also has an interior and it's made by a pro. It's almost too much... this... 😥 .... (those are tears of joy).

Now I do hope this model will eventually be put to use 😀 .

since i'm back from death...

some (a lot of) pics of you viper, it bare, no uc, no setup thingies exept the glow for the scoop

i hope you like how i added the random material to it .

it's gettin' seeded from the reg. if it's used on top, top and bottom, or not, the lizard skin has no cv because that wouldn't fit

and the acid green is SUPER

i hope you don't mind i added the glow in for the engine inlet(?) as scoop

further i removed the FFED3D controls from the interior.

a nice cockpit has to be made i guess, no?

well it has no UC, because it's hard to handle like dan said.

and unfortunately when importing the DX file to blender (known problem not only blender), all parts are either completely displaced and splattered over the whole scene, or all centered at worlds center, aligned in a way that gives me headakes.

i didn't even animated the hatch, personally i don't like it opens when lowering the uc, control with a key would be fine or,

maybe i can make it depend on the docking state (final) that would be best imo.

ahh, that's better rather to post 12 pics, a slideshow

http://s790.photobucket.com/albums/yy187/potsmoke66/sshots/PIONEER/coolhands%20viper/?albumview=slideshow

hey tht fetus has a standart connection plug, i like...

please go back one page to see steves viper...

the cockpit of the sasquatch is a KILLER man!

does anyone see a difference to the common viper in ffed3d here?

i just ask because i named the hacked .exe "coolhands_viper", but actually i can't remember what is the difference.

maybe i liked to get the labels back on the ship.

i will examine the file.

coolhand,

YOU DID TRANSPARENCY WITH A PALETTESIZED 8BIT TEXTURE????????????????????????????

I'M BLUFFED,

no i'm impressed

i found this out because i was wondering why i can have no submodels on the your viper in ffed3d

i se the text labels that high over the ship that they MUST appear but they are nowhere to see.

any other tricks used? material setting (i tried, it had no influence) a flag ican't see?.

you see i did transparency with the alpha channel of the texture jahell was concerned it's not possible without cutting through the ship, i showed him yesterday tht it's just a matter of the meshs hierarchy.

but now i'm 😮 no 😯 but also 😎 and :ugeek: for you

Youre moving into implants and eve online type implant-pod technology

eve is an ok game along with a lot of others the exploration there is restricted , the old jump gate rubbish

finally got around to mapping the fuselage / hull. currently working on the textures.... check out the attached image.

@potsmoke, yeah i think i got it down to 255 colours and 1 bit transparency... its not always practical but i think it worked here. most times you'll find people include full res images, which is fine usually but uses up a lot of resources - which is a waste in many cases as not everyone does all that much with textures anyway.

If anyones wondering wtf we're talking about, its reducing the palette, the bit-depth of the textures to save resources and increase the frame rate, in a way so that theres little to no noticeable degradation in quality. For example photoshop or most current software from the last 14 years will by default most likely give you a 32bit image, which means for every pixel you will have 8 bits of data for red, 8 for blue and 8 for green. the remaining 8 bits define how transparent the pixel is. this means the amount of storage space, memory and so on needed for each pixel in a 32 bit image is relatively high, for example an 8 bit image of the same resolution would be capable of being passed into memory or sent down that data bus 4 times as fast as the 32 bit version because its 1/4 the size (and forget about compressed images such as jpegs, they only save space on disk, if you want to look at them you have to uncompress them and they become much larger at that point).*

btw, Even for fairly high quality (non-realtime) rendering you can get away with 16 bit colours and save some rendertime and (possibly a lot of)ram for no discernible loss of quality.

the dithered transparency is a sneaky trick and the only time i've ever done that, its a bit like one method that was sometimes used for sprite shadows in 2d games that didn't support transparent effects, i can't recall an example in 3d games but i'm sure its been done many times before. i also had full 32 bit versions of the textures but i'm not sure where they are now. 🙁

for getting the ship into ffed3d, i did nothing special, as i've said before, i found FFED3D extremely easy to add the model and have it working in game, it required basically no effort and i made no attempt to do anything fancy so if you've spotted something strange with it, i have no idea why it might be like that. its basically just how it ported over, though i'm sure i tweaked the materials as much as i could.

yup reducing the amount of colours used if the graphics isnt required to reduce the load on the graphics card. Sort of like a middle of the PC range thing. And u can dedicate system resoruces for other uses

true, most professional games use only 8bit textures, there are many advantages to that, i.e. you can compress all to a archive and give them only a few needed palettes, you won't feel when you play the game.

someway it's sad pioneer accepts only >=24bit bitmaps. else we could make maybe some advantage of that and gain a little speed for "low-end machines". since there is allway a wide range of users playing the same game, you can't assume everybody's using the latest and most modern computer.

i know a lot of players here and Frontier forums still using machines from ~2000, it works fine for what they need, so why should they go and buy a new one. shurly not because of a open source game that is free to get, that would make no sense.

others they have computers with stunning power, but i guess they're minor to the others.

(erm, you didn't commented my conversion of your ship you might have missed it? http://s790.photobucket.com/albums/yy187/potsmoke66/sshots/PIONEER/coolhands%20viper/?albumview=slideshow )

well then you penalise people who do upgrade more than once a decade, and make the game less appealing to your audience because it looks dated and so experienced modellers are put off because they'd have little room to show off or build anything that would look nice in a portfolio...

if that sort of thinking prevailed then no one would bother with directx updates for things, and we'd find our favourite games become unplayable on newer hardware without having an archaic machine around just to play falcon 4 or whatever.

The best solution is to have some sort of scalability built in, as pioneer does already. what it does with planetary surfaces and so on i imagine are already way beyond what a 10 year old pc can cope probably even on minimum settings... but that aside dont see the sense in writing a game for a pc in 2011 (which may not even be complete for many years) freeware or not, specifically for computers that are 5 to 10 years old already.

But i think thats really a moot point as pioneer is already well beyond that point, but cleverly includes the scalability. there's also the opportunity to replace cities and ships at will if they choke an ancient rig.

Having said that, its still important to keep models as lean as possible because you may want many on screen at a time or have them in the same scene as a complex environment but again triangle count itself is not the be all, end all of fps.

additionally, there should definately be more support for different texture formats - i'm sure this will give a good fps boost for everyone if theres a way for reducing the bitdepth of the textures or at least have more chance of running it on older video cards.

btw This becomes all the more important if you have multiple maps per object, bump, spec, etc... if you can get 4 maps in the space where you used to have one, you're not going to see such a large performance impact and it wont take up any extra texture memory but will look a lot better.

My ISP has finally decided to let me connect 🙂

If you plan on making a new .lua simply copy over that section of code for the landing gear that I did, as that is still better than a pioneer scripted one.

I'm with Coolhand on the whole 'technology' debate, it would be nice to see some more 'high-end' features such as parallax/bump-mapping