Yea those damn non disclosure agreements are a pain in the @ss

Therax: Well it's "easy" I could explain it to you but you need an hex editor and lots of patience. I can give you the file format doc.

Also, you could wait a bit if you don't know how to use one, I'm hoping for a crude importer tommorow night depending on the amount of free time I have after work. Could be longer depending on how many snags I hit.

Ok I've made a quick website that I've meant to be doing for a while to host the file. It's at : Code Herer's website in the sins section.

I think that's great that you guys figured this out but has anyone bothered finding out how to make a civilization selectable once it's been created.

I mean after all you'll probably have all these nice shiny models why not put them to use in your own custom civ.

Well, I wouldn't know how they assign the various emitters, like engine exhaust, lights or weapons in max or maya I'm guessing it's a single vertex with a specific tag/name on it that's exported like you said.

As for the entity files, well as far as I understand it for weapons you just specify damage output for each side of the ship: front, back, left, right. There's no firing points set in there. The firing points set in the mesh file are just cosmetic emitter of bullets, you can have as many as you wish for each side.

It should be automatically assumed that all players in MP should have the exact same files when playing a mod to avoid sync errors. I think blair answered that question a while back which was a yes about the mod folder iirc.

What are you guys using for hex editting and comparison tools?

Wow, I wrote char eh? Well, I guess I made a typo and then the evil copy paste did the rest .

As for the unknown2 thats a good observation, I hadn't happened on a file with 2 set of texture. A more appropriate term would be a material I suppose as that's the term usually used for combination of properties for texturing. On another note, I've often seen model with one or two texture per material, some models like the shield even have no texture.

If those unknown floats are attached to the texture I'm guessing it would make sense for them to be things like the emissive light, specular or some such lighting parameters. Maybe not of course, it would be a bit odd with shaders and the way they read a lot of it from their data texture. Could also be parameters for the shaders, we'd have to experiment with them.

On an annoying note, the unicode string seems to follow a different pattern for the texture name in some files. I either miss calculated when checking offsets or there are different formats supported. Some meshs could be from say version 0.1 and others from version 0.2. I just need to check for the version value to find out.

You could check out EffectMesh_GreenBlock.MESH for an atypical example. Two textures for a material and the unicode strings are a bit odd, might be that I miss calculated their sizes but I don't think so.

Blair: I'm using Hex Workshop, it's a bit dated I guess but I'm used to it. It has the ability to view chunks of data as data following a pattern I defined which is nice. The new hex editor I've seen seem to have these now of course and even scripting language in some cases, maybe I'll upgrade soon .

Ok, I've solved the material list format issues I had remaining with a few files. Turns out even if the model is using two texture or one instead of two, it's going to leave a blank longword to indicate it's empty. I've updated the file format file with my finding.

Well, I've really hit a wall with the last part of the file. Just after the indices, there's a bunch of values and I've no idea what they're for or even how to determine their number. setting them to 0 seems to do nothing in game but erasing them crashes the game on load time. I would just set them all to 0 but I cannot determine how many should be present to begin with. Suggestions?

Mmmm yes you're right adding more seems to work fine.

Damn Stress you forgot i'm suppose to help ya on this mod, sheesh, no love!