A screenie and some WCP editing questions...

[Eder]

Here, flame/praise away:

Oh, and a general poll type of question, too:
Squadron logos on ships: aye or nay?

And now, the WCP editing questions:
-How do I change the cockpit's location on the ship? Currently, from inside view, the Crossbow's center Mass Driver looks like it's above the cockpit, and not below it like it should be, when you fire.
-How do I change which sim slot triggers which ship? I've changed simtext.eng and viewobj.iff already, so all the ships and their names are displayed correctly in the sim screen, but when I choose the gladius, for instance, it still looks for "ships\tigersha.iff"
-I wanted to have the Crossbow's torps come out of it's torpedo tubes, and it's Pilums come from below the wings... is there a way to do that?

Oh, by the way, I've got a new and incredibly more accurate Rapier G model, but I'm not gonna post any screenshots right now because I haven't imported it into SO yet.

--Eder

 

[Mekt-Hakkikt]

Very good quality as ever, though I think that the middle part, where the cockpit is located is too pointy and the big fat tubes at the side are not big and fat enough. But it looks good, though if I may dare to say so, it wasn't immediately clear to me that it was an Crossbow.

Squadron logos: I found the paint markings e.g. on the fighters in SL very nice. If they remain decent, not covering the whole craft, I think they add very much atmosphere.

 

[Eder]

Originally posted by Mekt-Hakkikt
Very good quality as ever

Thank you, thank you

Originally posted by Mekt-Hakkikt
...though I think that the middle part, where the cockpit is located is too pointy

Yep, the middle part is quite inaccurate, I couldn't find any good pictures of it, so I kind of used my creativity... doesn't quite look like I wanted it to either, but I think it'll get the job done

Originally posted by Mekt-Hakkikt
...and the big fat tubes at the side are not big and fat enough.

Yes, yes, I ran into that little inconsistancy when looking at Crossbow pictures from SO1.

You see, in the in-flight sprites, those tubes really are longer and fatter, but in the cutscene images - like the take-off sequence or those scenes where it shows Blair's Crossbow flying alongside the Bonnie Heather - the tubes are smaller, and not so fat.

So, both sources are cannon... how would I decide which one to go by? Well, I used the reference material which showed the ship in higher resolution - the cutscenes. Therefore, the "smaller big tubes" design

Originally posted by Mekt-Hakkikt
Squadron logos: I found the paint markings e.g. on the fighters in SL very nice. If they remain decent, not covering the whole craft, I think they add very much atmosphere.

Hmmm, thanks for your input. Right now, I'm simply using different colors of stripes to differentiate squadrons. Example: there's a recon squad which has blue, white, and red stripes on their ships, a medium fighter squad which uses red stripes on their craft, and a heavy fighter/bomber squad which uses blue stripes on their craft, as seen on the Crossbow. I think that's discrete enough, right? I didn't like the overdone "GIANT BLACK SPIDER" logos from WCP either... <G>

--Eder

 

[Eder]

Oops, forgot one question.

What are the mat numbers for the weapons? Both missiles and cannons.... and for the jump animation?

--Eder

 

[KillerWave]

As i already told you Eder: Good work!

Originally posted by Eder
-How do I change the cockpit's location on the ship? Currently, from inside view, the Crossbow's center Mass Driver looks like it's above the cockpit, and not below it like it should be, when you fire.

With a turret editor, change the position of the cockpit hardpoint. But it appears that you may have to change the gun hardpoint location, if the bullet is comming from the wrong location

Originally posted by Eder
-How do I change which sim slot triggers which ship? I've changed simtext.eng and viewobj.iff already, so all the ships and their names are displayed correctly in the sim screen, but when I choose the gladius, for instance, it still looks for "ships\tigersha.iff".

You have to edit secretops.exe with a hex-editor.

Originally posted by Eder
-I wanted to have the Crossbow's torps come out of it's torpedo tubes, and it's Pilums come from below the wings... is there a way to do that?

You need to use different hardpoint names for the launch forms for each missile type. Then place each hardpoint at the correct location

Originally posted by Eder
Oops, forgot one question.

No you already exceded your question quotes for today

Originally posted by Eder
What are the mat numbers for the weapons? Both missiles and cannons.... and for the jump animation?

Check bullet.iff, its the 3rd info on each data chunk (chunk 0 is for bullet 0, 1 for bullet 1, and so on). For the missiles, its used the correspondent missile model textures.
For the jump animation, its 00005002.mat to 00005029.mat.

 

[Eder]

Why, that's exceedingly helpful, Mr. KW. Thanks a whole lot, I'm sure I'll manage to edit most of that stuff thanks to your advice

--Eder

 

[Quarto]

Noting with some alarm that Killerwave is very quickly making me obsolete, I decided to prowl through my WC editing notes in a desperate attempt to show that I'm still useful .

But seriously, to add a bit more detail on what KW said about EXE editing, here are the coordinates of (hopefully) everything worth editing in secretops.exe.

0D34D0 - the name of the history folder
0D34E0 - the name of the save folder
0D34E8 - the name of the autosave file
0D34F8 - the name of the replay file
0ED39C - the name of the sim score file
0ED3A8 - the name of the sim score file (again? Apparently so. I changed both just to be sure).

The above are useful if you want your mod to use a separate EXE file and to coexist with the original SO without overwriting SO's own savegames. And if we were to offer coexistence with your kind, would you not accept?

0E3914 - the name of the mesh (mesh - not ship) used for the friendly SAR scene.
0E3918 - the name of the mesh used for the alien pickup scene.
0E7E44 - the names of the sim ships (same order as in viewobj.iff). The bug ships are what you see with the alswantsmoreships cheat, of course.
0E7EC0 - the names of the ships used by the ship selector option (ie., when you let the player choose between two ships for a mission). As with sim ships, what the player sees in the selector screen is based on viewobj.iff, not on this data. Therefore, the ship selector ships should be identical to the sim ships above.
0EC3A8 - the name of the mesh that is used in the refuelling scene.

Well, that's all that I've got in my notes... hopefully that's everything worth editing, anyway.

One final note - the length of what you type in does not always have to be the same as the length of what you're replacing. If the name that you're replacing was originally followed by two or more characters with a hex value of 00, you can replace them too - you must, however, always leave at least one 00 character between the name and whatever comes next, or the game won't realise that another string is starting (and it will get confused trying to load a file called bansheescim.iff ).

Oh yeah, and good work as usual!

 

[Eder]

Yeah, after a bit of trial and error, I got SO to stop looking for stilettogladius.iff <G>

All that extra info will come in handy, though... Thanks a lot! Specially the stuff about the Rescue/Capture ships and the savegame stuff (I certainly want my stuff to coexist with everyone else's... it's the least I can do to encourage SO mod production )

Edit: oh, and about those weapon textures... ermm.... the third info in each data chunk of bullet.iff goes like '167'. Great. But still a little too vague for my poor brain. Just what am I supposed to.... uhm.... 167?

--Eder

 

[KillerWave]

Originally posted by Eder
Edit: oh, and about those weapon textures... ermm.... the third info in each data chunk of bullet.iff goes like '167'. Great. But still a little too vague for my poor brain. Just what am I supposed to.... uhm.... 167?

Sorry, thats the sound file (00000167.iff). The texture is stored in the ending of the chunk:
" ....
long 2
long 20625 //thats the mat number
float 0.8
float 896
}
"

The long 20625 means the texture is named 00020625.mat
There, now i think its correct .

 

[eddieb]

Originally posted by KillerWave


Sorry, thats the sound file (00000167.iff). The texture is stored in the ending of the chunk:
" ....
long 2
long 20625 //thats the mat number
float 0.8
float 896
}
"

The long 20625 means the texture is named 00020625.mat
There, now i think its correct .

Hmm, I noticed that some guns have mesh file names in bullet.iff,
but other guns only have mats. Does anyone know which mesh files are used for those guns with only mat's. It seems that massdrivers are implemented as billboards, but I would expect that the laser, tachyon guns, etc, would require a mesh file.
Also, any ideas what the numbers after the mat number

float 0.8
float 896

represent?

Thanks,
Eddie.

 

[Quarto]

Originally posted by eddieb
Hmm, I noticed that some guns have mesh file names in bullet.iff,
but other guns only have mats. Does anyone know which mesh files are used for those guns with only mat's. It seems that massdrivers are implemented as billboards, but I would expect that the laser, tachyon guns, etc, would require a mesh file.

I noticed the same thing, though I never bothered to check which guns use what. I'm almost certain though that the guns without a mesh work the same way WC1/2 guns worked - as you said above, billboards.
Regarding the numbers you asked about, I don't remember ever experimenting with them. Presumably however, the first one would be scale.