question regarding modelling and hardpoints

from Sins Forums

i have been modding some of the existing ships and came across an interesting problem.....what determines if the ship will fire front or sideways?? for example the mazra always faces its target when firing but the colonyship turns to its side.....is this derermined by the damage per side or the number of weapon points facing a direction??

 

also, how do i fix this??

modding
26,392 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

it is determined by which side does the most damage overall as far as facing the target goes,. as far as which way the weapon fires on the model, that has to do with the direction the dummy points are oriented (or null points if you use XSI). as for the collor issue, im willing to bet you didnt add the textures to the .mesh file after you exported it to .mesh format? well, anyhow, use ConvertData.exe to convert the .mesh to text and then add in the 3 textures. thers tutorials on this forum on how to do this.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Cobalt answered your direction question already but I can give you the answer to your ship color issue.

Your ships are read because your -cl.dds texture, the color map texture or diffuse property in XSI is either missing the alpha channel or has an all white alpha channel.  The alpha channel of the color map controls team color and if it's missing the game just assumes it's all white.  Since your team color is red in that screenshot, your entire ship is showing as red (team color) because of it.

-dolynick

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Actually, a missing alpha will default to black - exporting ARGB using the nVidia plugin will strip the alpha channel if there's nothing there anyway, and the game will just plug along thinking there isn't a team color channel. But if the channel's white, you will definitely get that problem.

Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top

For the texture file itself that is correct.  That is not the actual behavior in game though.  If the alpha channel is missing then the game will act like it is all white.  I have seen this happen myself with some submitted models for my own mod.

Also, I have noticed that (with the NVidia photoshop DDS plugins at least) that if you have an all black alpha channel it basically sees it as not being there as well.  You need at least 1 non-black pixel in the alpha channel for the game to properly register it, even if that pixel is in a region that doesn't actually cover any of the viewable texture.

-dolynick