swambast

Looking for good recommendation on appropriate North Vietnamese Mig fonts - thanks for any insight you can share.

Menrva, special THANK YOU for all your incredible dedication and commitment in bringing these to life...Artistic terrain building is a tough and demanding skill and it always wonderful to see your updates - know that they are appreciated and keep up the great work!

Hey fellow modders... When an EffectOffset is defined for a building model in the _Types.ini (say SmokeStackEffect) - where is source of the originating start point that is offset? For example, 0.00,-32.86,24.81: is the offset relative to the model's pivot point, center mass, etc,? And how is it handled for models with multiple mesh parts?

Isn't there already F-5A available, granted I'm sure it's nowhere near this level of detail, but what am I missing? Are you really trying to scratch build a model with what was supposed to be the level of detail Sophocles was going for?

Personally, hope support for LOD based terrain ends up on the bottom - such an unoptimized, clunky terrain rendering approach with such little potential. TOD support would be really interesting, and would love to see progress made on that feature. But above all this: would much, much rather see enhancements to the existing tool such as support for copy/paste, display of world/map coordinates, etc. ability to group and move objects as a group, etc.

Krfrge, Initial base work done - properly scaled, optimized mesh counts/naming, finalized all smoothing groups, added in specular and bump mappings, set pivot points including for top gun. Will work more on it later and send you PM with further updates. P.S. Just my opinion: vehicles are not the easiest models to take on initially. Vehicles require a different level of complexity and logic based on the parent/child relationships and hierarchies to make the .INI gurus like KJakker's job easier! If you're just getting up to speed, I might suggest simpler ground structures/buildings like hangars, water towers, etc. Grab some free models, but then try to model them scratch. Old Diego many years ago was by far the greatest influence and mentor in building my skills - and I had no artistic talent at all. I learned everything on the fly by experimenting - he literally shared with me his models and over time I learned to reproduce them completely from scratch (and dare I say even improve a few). Anyway, I'm happy to help anyway I can - will PM more details.

You need to smooth that model out, looks way too blocky and follow the instructions I sent if you want to set up parent/child hierarchy - which if you're using vehicles with weapons you should especially do! Also, keep in mind poly counts and texture limits that would impact FPS - please don't make the mistake of bringing in 20,000+ poly count vehicles with no LODS found from some free model site like others tend to do (p.s. that model looks like a rip from Men of War or something).

I don't know what blender allows for import/export (been years since I last used it). But in general at least with 3ds max, I like to natively import .obj files because they tend to retain texture mappings and then work on the model from there. I am not a fan of .3ds format personally, because you tend to have to remap textures and the smoothing groups are typically awful resulting in blocky models.

If you're joining all the wire frames together as one mesh, there will be no hierarchy. Hierarchy would exist if you have separate components of the vehicle, like a "body" mesh, "front right wheel mesh", etc. then link them. I use the native 3ds max so blender doesn't really apply to me, but point is you would have to find out how to do equivalent linking in blender. Here to help you out even more, this should describe it: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/editors/3dview/object/properties/relations/parents.html

Hmmmm, not necessarily. Many modern 3d models especially make use of Multi/Sub-Object material properties to assign different materials to faces that share a single mesh. I bring this up because when working with these models you must of course change those assignments so there is only a single diffuse texture map or color applied so the game engine recognizes them. Russouk2004, I am sure you already know this but just putting it out there for the benefit of others that might stumble across models with multi-sub-object material assignments!

Great to hear your plans Mue, and of course even better will be active updates. For what it's worth, my vote is #2: I believe this will be beneficial for a greater majority - plus there is a tremendous opportunity and need to enhance basic functionality in these tools (e.g., copy/paste in TAE, etc). And also selfishly, I'd love to see the requirements/wish list I drafted up a while ago come to reality some day! Thanks for your update and consideration...

Wow, I usually don't tread into the Gen1 Forums these days so not sure exactly how I arrived here...but anyway relevant to this post. This totally reminds me of an old program I had developed for some of the CombatAce Leaders to solve the exact same issue back in the day. Think it basically did exactly what you were looking for at least regarding the Aircraft. Here was an old screenshot. Program was super simple, checkbox which aircraft you want out of your build and it gets automatically moved out. Then one press of a button to swap paths and restore the aircraft. The nice thing is once you set it up, you could set "defaults" that remembered your selections so you didn't have to re-select anything. Here was an old screenshot, not even sure if the thing works anymore these days or if I still have the source code around...

I have not seen any evidence to support the engine can handle more than 999 target areas - but I could still be proven wrong. For what it's worth, for my dev tools I also program only to 999 max entries Mue. Even then, depending on the flight engine settings, object counts that high typically will get cut off anyway not rendering the full desired effect depending on values like maxmesh/model, maxvertexcounts, etc.

Awesome Mue, THANK YOU for the advice - and for your ground breaking tool, much appreciated!

Does anyone know what is the logic used in Mue's LOD Viewer to read _Data.ini files? I don't understand why so often I open aircraft models that clearly have the correct _data.ini called out in their base .ini file - but the top of the viewer still reads <no ini file> <no data file>

OK Ed, I'll bite...F-18 or F-35?

Understood Gerwin, yes that is not what I would need - actually it would be VietnamSea July 2013 which were the latest, let me see what info I can pull together for you, thanks again for your help.

Thanks everyone - Gerwin since you already have the lists compiled, hate to ask, but would it be possible to create a text file listing now that has: Only and all of the Vietnam .LOD related files is one text file (e.g., without any .bmp, .ini, etc. and that combines all the .LODs from the other CAT Files into one "master list")?

Awesome - thanks a lot, I'll give this a try and this should be incredibly helpful...

Gerwin and Mue, thanks both for the tag team support. @Mue, isn't there a way you can just point CATExtractor to a base folder that already has just the .CAT files in there? From the looks of it, would I have to install the entire game and patch it, etc. to use your program? I say that since it is specifically coded for the "Strike FIghters 2 Installation Directory" and just needed some clarification.

Gerwin, that is a great start and should be very helpful - THANK YOU! Do you happen to have or could obtain listings specifically for the Vietnam CATS which includes the list of protected .LODs by chance? And just in case, is it possible to get the listings without the file size info - literally a straight sequential dump of just the file names?

Thanks Wrench and Sundowner! I'm not interested in the actual .LODs themselves. Just literally a text listing of .lods that would be found in each directory. Sundowner, that sounds like exactly what I need - I'll keep looking as I was almost certain someone had dumped out and listed the contents at one point. Not sure if it's exactly going to be what I need, but I can picture that post in my head and thought it was in the knowledge base...time to search again!

I thought I might have saw this one time in the Knowledge Base but I can't seem to find what I'm looking for, or it doesn't exist. Anyway, do we have a "master list" of all .LOD files that would be found in each of the respective directories for Vietnam CATs; for example: \Terrains\VietnamSea \Objects \Objects\GroundObject etc. I know some of them are protected, but I would think one could reference the earlier versions or we might have a list of what .LODs were later locked away. Thanks for any insight.

Thanks for the replies. Sounds like there's a few conflicting theories out there. If anyone is interested in helping me with a series of test scenarios, please PM me, thanks.