Texturing WCP ships

Eder

Eder

Mr. Standoff
I've finally managed to get one of my models running in the WCP engine. Everything works great, but I don't know how to texture it (and it somehow has 5 missiles when I set it to have 4, but I can worry about that later). The ship uses a single texure, but this single texture isn't scaled or offset correctly.

So, how can I fix that? Any suggestions are appreciated, as I would really like to get this done right... I'm feeling like a genius already simply for getting the model to show up in WCP :p

TIA,
--Eder
(PS: in case anyone's wondering, the model is a Stiletto, from P1... with "clean-looking" textures made by yours truly, believe it or not :))
 
I can't help with model conversion, but I'd be very happy to help you implement the stats and such :).
 
Hmmm...what method you used to make the conversion?
If you uses texconv, you need to rotate it vertically before getting it into mat format. As for the missile hardpoints, check the ship iff, you probably entered one too many mission hardpoints setting
 
Thanks for the info on the rotating thing, KW... but I just noticed that wasn't the only thing I screwed up :p While converting the model to .obj format, it somehow lost all texture data. I'll try re-converting everything and I'll see how it works.

Wedge: I'll show it once it's done... believe me, it doesn't look nearly as appealing when its canopy is drawn on its wingtips :)

--Eder
 
Alright... thanks to everyone's help and support, and to Wedge's constant bitching about how shiny everything should be, here's my WCP Stiletto! ;)

shot0000.png


shot0001.png


Now I only need to figure out a good way to convert P1 stats to WCP stats... Using the original P1 numbers, this damn thing can't survive the slightest collision... any ideas, anyone?

--Eder
 
That is so good! Really! :cool: :)

Now for the stats: Wasn't there a number with which you had to multiply the stats given in the manual to get the actual stats?
 
Pretty enough, I s'pose (no no, nothing wrong with your work - I just never considered the Stiletto to be a particularly neat design :)).

About the stats, there are two things you can do. One, is to multiply them by 10. This isn't quite perfect, but it works well enough, since a WCP laser does 18 centimetres of damage, which is 7.2 times as much as a WC2 laser, and exactly 10 times as much as a Priv laser (assuming the Priv manual stats are correct). The alternative is to leave the stats exactly as they are, and instead change the guns themselves (which I can do if you like). The problem with the latter is that the guns may need to do, for example, 1.8 centimetres of damage, and I don't know if WCP could handle fractions like that.

Note, BTW, that it is perfectly correct for a WC2/Priv era fighter to take serious damage in the slightest collision - ever tried ramming a Jalkehi? Trust me, it ain't worth trying :).
 
Some more WCP editing question just popped up in my head, so I thought I'd ask here again and revive this thread in the process :D

- Can I resize engine flames? Sometimes the biggest flame available just isn't big enough :p

- How do I change VDU info for the ships I make? (I mean, when I target one of these Stilettos I made, it still says "Piranha" on the VDU, and it still shows a picture of a Piranha, even though I already edited the corresponding mat file... 00000921.mat, IIRC)

TIA,
--Eder
PS: By the way, I've beefed up the Stiletto textures, they look much better now, and I've also made a Gladius model which I'll post pics of sometime soon.
 
1. No, you cant...at least i dont think so.
2. To edit the image display, you change the mat, to edit the name, you must edit spacefli.eng
 
1. Probably (since the engine flames have meshes), but difficult, because when I tried decoding a mesh it was, well, different :p. You'd have to learn once it all means first.

2. Odd. If you've edited the MAT file, it should show up looking correct. Unless, of course, you're editing WCP...? SO handles editing much better than WCP does.
And as for the name, what KW said :). All I've got to add to that is that by editing the file ship.iff, you can change which line in spacefli.eng the ship uses.
 
Thanks for the help, both of you... I managed to get the names to show up correctly, however the pictures are still AWOL. They're there, but they don't show up in the game... And yes, it's WCP I'm editing... can this really be the problem? Cause I deleted SO from my HD after I played it thru for the first time (I needed the HD space) and even though I have plenty of free space now, I really don't want to have to unzip hundreds of backup diskettes, one by one... :(

--Eder
 
In indeedly can :). WCP handles its TREs differently than SO. SO checks subdirectories first, then it checks the TREs. WCP does the reverse - it checks the TREs first, asks questions later. Thus, if a file is found inside the TRE file, it will use it, rather than a file placed by you in the \MAT folder. SO, on the other hand, will prefer your file. And besides, SO is in general much better for editing purposes, having a few more programming commands, and of course HCl's hires patch :).
 
Oh my, that's a really stupid method of checking for files (WCP's, that is)... These boys really don't want you to edit their games, I guess :p

Anyway, I just renamed my data.tre to something else, since I have all the files extracted, and it didn't work... but now that you reminded me of the hi-res patch, I'll just download the speechless version of the first episode from the SO website anyway. A 3 hour long download sure beats unzipping dozens of diskettes, and besides, who needs the rest of the episodes anyway? I only care about the ships :D

I just hope that the hi-res patch doesn't remind me of how low-res 256x256 really is ;) I really really really like using multiple textures better, but the vision engine rules nonetheless, so I guess it's just something I'll have to cope with.

--Eder
 
I sayd probably no for the engine flames, because i cant extract them as the regular meshes, unless theres any way i dont know.
About multiple textures, you can use it. What conversion method you use? There was a tutorial i made for the wcdc about this, but the site isnt online anymore.
 
I have your tutorial saved on my disk right here :) It's just that it's simpler to use a single texture for the models, and besides, maybe because my models tend to be a bit overfaced, too many textures make them not work with WCP, somehow...

In fact, it's already a bit too complex for me to convert ships that use only 1 texture... I was almost asking you for a portuguese version of that tutorial, but I think I got the hang of it now ;)

--Eder
 
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