[AmeerNuub]

Question:

I’ve been thinking up to now that the way ships will be handled is the way I handled them in my own mod. Altering the ship ID’s of my favorite Star Wars ships to match the same vanilla ship ID it would replace in the game. Is this the way it will be handled?

[DrRickMarshall]

Doctor Rick Marshall once again,

Well I can't look at anything until the weekend, so I can't tell you if that will help or not. Like I said, I use the program Blender (its much quicker and has as many useful entities and tricks as AutoCAD and Autodesk 3DS Max), so if the ship bases can be imported and scaled correctly, then changing their detail for the polygon count that X3 uses won't be a problem. As for the IDs for the ships - I will be saving them like this:

SS_SH_SW_CLC (carrack light cruiser)

This way they won't overwrite any files and should be easy to see the tag ID and know what ship it you're looking at without having to open the files to investigate it. For the 'wings' - xwing, ywing, etc I'll probably do:

SS_SH_SW_XW1 / _YW1 / _XJX (XJ-X-Wing so that you know its an xwing but the T-65 XJ X-Wing)

If you'd rather I did it another way just say so. Or I can simply make all the parts and upload them for you to assemble the ships as you want. I'm only here to model, Ameer - you're in charge

[AmeerNuub]

LOL... that's cool. The SW focused ID system is definitely cool for now, just to get working .xsp’s going.

I'm not heavy on the coding side, so I’m just trying to see if we know yet which approach we will be taking when it comes to final ship ID’s, since I’m doing a lot of the grunt work for ships we already have. Adding custom ships is easy, but if they have unique ID’s then they really aren’t used much by the game, and end up just being an option to buy at shipyards. It’s going to be a total conversion, meaning no vanilla ships will remain, so having the ID’s identical to vanilla ID’s replaces the vanilla ships (again what we are actually wanting).

However, I could also envision an approach where that particular method of using identical vanilla ships ID's to replace them is moot if somehow all the code references, T-jobs files, etc. will be totally custom and have no reference to vanilla… again, not a coder, so I really don’t know what everyone has in mind. I just know that the “identical to vanilla ID” replacement method works on a very basic level, but it would be cool for me to know before I complete the files I’m processing right now.

But again, any naming system is good for these not-yet-existing ships you are making.

[Stilgar]

The thing is that we will set-up the game to be using the new ships with their ID instead of the old ones. In fact the game will just look at the mod/cat files and won't go into the vanilla files. You just need to create the ships with the specific IDs and the little workers coders will make that working in the game.

Like DrRickMarshall said this method has many good points :
- More easy for modders to find the ship ID, it will be a more "clean" modding and will prevent bugs like ID still used in files we wouldn't have modded and interfering with our modifications
- The ships can easily be added by others
etc

I do think that using vanilla IDs is making you wasting time, because we don't need to use vanilla IDs. I don't find words to explain that correctly in english, but the less we use vanilla things the less we may encounter bugs, the less it will be a mess for coders to find "who's who" in a total conversion (for ships).

But the thing I don't understand is why do you do xsp files, the game don't need them. XSP files are good for mods with ships only, but here we will put them in a folder compressed in the cat/dat format. It's less long and easier.

[AmeerNuub]

The thing is that we will set-up the game to be using the new ships with their ID instead of the old ones. In fact the game will just look at the mod/cat files and won't go into the vanilla files. I do think that using vanilla IDs is making you wasting time, because we don't need to use vanilla IDs. I don't find words to explain that correctly in english, but the less we use vanilla things the less we may encounter bugs, the less it will be a mess for coders to find "who's who" in a total conversion (for ships).

Ok, that's what I was wondering. So there will be no references to vanilla ships ID's in any of the ship related code and jobs files for the mod. If that is the case, then it would be best to use a total SW reference ID system as you say.

As far as the reason for .xsp, as far as I am thinking there are several. I do understand the game uses the Tships, jobs, .bod, .dds etc. etc. etc. files in all their separate locations to handle ships. Mainly I'm making and requesting these ships in .xsp because it is a completely self contained file for everything related to that ship, that gives the community the option to use the ships even if they don't want to use the mod. Not having that option is what was frustrating to me about other already existing Star Wars mods for X3. Also, being a self contained "one button" option, it allows for adding, editing, and deleting individual ships and ship files on the fly and all in one place, without having to locate, manipulate, etc. all the separate files in all their separate locations when you want to do something. After the mod is finalized, this won't be the case, but unless I'm missing something, it's been easier for someone like me to work that way anyway.... I understand you can pretty much do the same with things like the X3 editor, etc, without .xsp's but it's not really quite the same. For me anyway. For example, there is an xwing cockpit that one of the Star Wars X3 mods uses that I'm going to have to figure out how to grab. And you said when you were working with some ship files that there were some references to things and / or locations that did not exist, you couldn't find, etc. (I'm running into that working with them now...). None of that has to be worried about when you are working with .xsp's. They contain everything the ship needs in one place, and it modifies, adds, or deletes all the different tships and other files accordingly with one click.

You just need to create the ships with the specific IDs and the little workers coders will make that working in the game.

Yeah, I think you have that backwards... that's why the little worker here, (me) was asking the masters (coders) for their bidding...

[DrRickMarshall]

AHHHHHHHH!!!! DRM here,

It'll be a week from this Wednesday before I can start because of the graphic designer's best friend, the MOTHER F%$^ING catastrophic harddrive failure. It went down Friday night while I was tooling with my finished cruiser, so that's gone, as is everything on my hard drive. Needless to say I'm more than a little agitated. I'm on my laptop now, but it can't handle those big scale programs for anything. I apologize for having to take us a bit more time to get started - I will have it done (and then of course others) as soon as I get the new HD and get it installed and get other things back on my computer.

[AmeerNuub]

AHHHHHHHH!!!! DRM here,

It'll be a week from this Wednesday before I can start because of the graphic designer's best friend, the MOTHER F%$^ING catastrophic harddrive failure. It went down Friday night while I was tooling with my finished cruiser, so that's gone, as is everything on my hard drive. Needless to say I'm more than a little agitated. I'm on my laptop now, but it can't handle those big scale programs for anything. I apologize for having to take us a bit more time to get started - I will have it done (and then of course others) as soon as I get the new HD and get it installed and get other things back on my computer.

Hehehe... sure, man, been there. Sorry to hear about that. Times like these that one understands how those Carbonite type services really are worth the $50 or so a year.

So before the crash, how was the cruiser coming along? Did you import and modify an existing mesh from one of the other sources?

[Stilgar]

Good luck with your computer