silly me! I forgot to mention missiles. Lots and lots of homing missiles. And naval ecm. You did put pylons on that thing didn't you? I'm sorry if I got you killed... 
Seriously Gernot, you are really getting your act together on this whole modelling/skinning thing for Pioneer. Very high quality work. I know that it is all a matter of taste but I really like your attention to detail. One thing I like in particular with your models so far, is the fact how certain details like e.g. the cockpit containing a human model or lighted control panels, put the size of the spacecraft or building into believable perspective. I think it is important to be able to tell the size and composition compared to each other of the objects in the game world, and your models does that really well.Now this your latest baby, what is she called and where is the cockpit? Is it that daring round ball at the tip of the craft? What is her primary purpose? Explorer? Freighter (to small I guess from the pictures)? Landing and extraction module? She does not really look like a warrior but I guess that looks can be deceiving.Anyway Gernot, keep up your fantastic drive and output, it is much appreciated.Thank you and all the bestFrans )this ship is driven only by a class 4 military drive, less won't work, other won't fit.no carrier, no fighter, maybe a very old exploration ship from time space was the last frontier... a challenge for every pilot to fly, low cargo capacity/hull efficiency (100/200), no autopilot, no nothing, main thrust is vertical, has to be controlled manually, because speed control works in "wrong" direction, very low lateral thrust, roll and pitch is exchanged, gun direction is still horizontally.but due to the massive hull, she can stand some laser fire or meteor impacts (which is easy to see).i would like to see her as part of a mission, not as common ship. find her and bring her "home", if you dare.[attachment=227:2010-09-21_055805.jpg]
(i`ll add that to my notebook)(and wow,i had another idea for missions,the historical ones,another one for my notebook) the problem is not to rotate the modelno, you would have to change the setup for the thrusters, to give that a senseso that { 1*10^7,-1*10^7,4*10^7,-2*10^7,-1*10^7,1*10^7 },3*10^7, will become { 2*10^7,-4*10^7,1*10^7,-1*10^7,-1*10^7,1*10^7 },3*10^7,textures,yes, light from a given direction results, or brighter and shaded sides, but i like i said i dislike that a bit on spaceshipson a building it's ok, usually you will have light from somewhere on top at day, so a assumed light direction from top fits.but a spaceship can be lit from everywhere (i know cities are at night to, seems to be a "frontier" special) and "wrong" shading results then in inverted dimensions, if you don't look to close usually you won't recognize that, especially on a chaos like seen in the tutorial, which is a good start (when you forget the light reflection dots, i wouldn't do such).sometimes "no light" looks better to me, it leaves the shading to the program and the details of the model.when i started out with car models, i often used no shading on the texture and felt it looked better rather to "cheat" a missing depht with a shade on the texture.but for a worn look you will need light from a given direction else it comes out to flat.some break the lighting rule (light direction changes) when creating such base textures like in the tutorial,that can help to. but for panelling it's no solution, only light from a given direction or no direction (all sides have shade and light)but i think i have to learn still a lot Pretty please Tomm? but we'll see...
edit: i put both variations as selfextracting zip into the model folder.there is also a different texture for the sidewinder in work, it will support the colorvariable material better (like my cobra mk1 or the new texture for the courier), so this won't be the last update for shure.a collision mesh can save your "asp" , the stardust, lanner and courier won't work without, if textures applied on a somewhat bigger sized mesh (~5000 polys) and the same mesh is used for lod1, everything stucks (you can see by the comms screen that the "snowing" gets massively slower when purchased such a ship).it helps when the mesh at lod1 is free from textures.better create a new low poly mesh only for collision check and set lod1 to .1 pixels, assign the mesh then only to lod1,this mesh will then be only used for collision check and is not visible in the game.any else that has not to be checked for collision (e.g. greebles) and the "full" model assign to "lod > 1" .low poly meshes can speed up the processing remarkably.check the modified panther in modelviewer and zoom back, zoom more back, at lod 2 you will feel that the zoom gets faster again.also smaller textures can help, how much i can't tell exactly. but i know from experience that i.e. a racetrack can be turned from unsuitable to well running only by sizing down the textures.and allready a fix for the forgotten correct price of the ships (semper idem) Oh and the thruster graphic didn't seem to be appearing.Sure go ahead, I don't mind , In fact I appreciate it Ironing out the kinks and all ;)I have made a few changes to each of the ships though since I posted them here, Only the Boa's mesh has been changed though. I flattened out the back-plate of the Boa, which had those odd folds/creases in it, now its a flat smoothed plate. And I was toying with adding the radar to both and the back-coil thing from your adder for the boa if its ok with you? But that might not look right anyway, just an idea.Edit/ Looks like you already flattened out that plate, nice one. And a better job than I did too.I like the smoothing too and was having trouble with some of the smoothing, but it looks much better now, so thanks :)Thanks for sorting out my selector problems on the panther, having two seperate ships was only a temporary solution.I hope your package is up soon so I can see how you did it.Edit, and there it is Edit2, You asked in the file why I started to add the selector then stopped. Its basically I was having some problems getting it to work correctly, most probably all syntax related (this was before there was error checking on the model viewer) and it was late so I just added a second modelI had planned to add LOD to settings into the LUAs but still don't really get how it works. Is it all based on the distance to the object? eg, High LOD close up to see extra details, and Low LOD far away? Because I haven't really noticed this in the game except when coming up to a planet..For the collision mesh, is it ok to run 'optimise' or similar on a model to cut down on the polys?I noticed that with the LOD settings for the boa, I was not seeing the high quality texture even when zoomed in. Can you see if it happens to you too? Replacing the large texture with something else allows you to see easily if it changes.changing this: )but of course not easy to handle with .obj, you would have to create meshes for each lodmodels based on commands have a advantage here, their divs get lower with each lod down and a different mesh has not to be created.later on i stumbled over this texture at lowest lod problem, it was first with the courier and lanner, both are somewhat larger models in polycount, when i loaded them at first try to the game everything has slowed extremely down.it took me a while until i found out that it's not good to have textures on the lowest lod.first i tried to evade that by leaving them simply away, but then the material changes when the model comes to the critical lod. next was i set lod 1 to 1 pixel, that has worked well for the courier and i could leave away the material to because you won't see it.but the next smaller model gave me some problems (i guess it was the eagle), because it's a smaller model the model is still visible at lod1 set to 1 pixel, what to do now? first i left that as it is and used it to my advantage i removed texture early from the model (lod2) and changed the material so it will represent the textured color it has.but then a different problem appeared, colorvariable materials i couldn't change and a skin removed from them makes the material much brighter, what was really annoying me.time for experiments 0 won't work (infinite) 1 is to big (still visible), ok, i take 0.1 pixel maybe that works?it has, ok i can abuse the lowest lod only for a "collision mesh" and have still three to go if i want to use them.if you check your models you will see i have done both, the panther is rebuild using the main vectors of the model, because it's a easy model. the boa i have polyreduced using the unsubsurf script from blender, this has given me the best results so far, but never gets as low as when rebuild.best remove duplicate verts after every step and set again to smooth, then make triangles to quads before you execute the script again.if you force it to hard the mesh will lose it's original shape, but still useful as collision mesh as long as the main parts of the model are covered (other games use a simple box as collision mesh, that works to, only that you can get hit at parts where nothing is, i.e. between the wings).after all make shure the landing gear is loaded at lod 1 to, or create a simple replacement mesh for it, since landing gears use often much polys, a box or a quad will be enough just to land on and mark the right level when landed rough or to release docking procedure.because the panthers collision mesh is so close to the original shape i used it also for lod 2, like it should be done.btw, if you look at the collision mesh of the stardust (actual download, before i used a polyreduced one) you can see that it is a rather simple model, build from spheres.originally lod 1 wasn't ment only for the collision mesh and simply the lowest lod should represent it, but due to the several problems bigger meshes gave me, it turned out to be reserved only for this, instead of used as smallest sized visible mesh.