Darkshimmer i have absolutely nothing to do with this plug-in. Its all Code Herder.

I thought you were already the Trek mods resident code monkey.. Aren't you?

First thing to come to mind at that photo... Transformers the Movie (the first one, the cartoon one... where Cybertron is attacked by that planet eater...)

lol, awesome! Looks like my WoW Dwarven Warrior!!!

that image is made of win.

when do the space ponies of various colors go in?

i'd like to get my hands on it, i got some trek ships i'd like to import to aid in my galactic conquest.

Stress i'm no coder, just a good trek fan who likes it done the right way!

This is made of win.

Waiting with bated breath, Herder. You're really pushing the envelope on what we can do with the Sins beta.

That is some awesome work there. If this keeps up we will be able to import models before the official tools come out. That program of yours reminds me of the old Visual Mex Edit, or Homeworld Ship Editor from way back when. For those who dont know what the hell i am talking about, the MEX on a homeworld model (short for "Mesh EXtensions") was where all the hardpoint, collision box, and navlight data was keeped. In Sins it seems all this data is in the model itself (which is a good thing IMO). I am assuming you are going to use normals for firing arcs like in VME, and HWSE?

The only file formats we truly need are .3ds, or .obj, because they are pretty much universal, and can easily be converted between formats. MS3D supports both 3ds, and obj.

To IC. What units did you use for scaling? are the ships "truescaled" EX: 1 unit in the modeling program = 1 meter, or did you make up something else for this?

Each emitter has a position (relative to the model center) and a 3x3 rotation matrix. The rotation matrix is applied to a forward-facing unit vector [0 0 1], and the result is treated as the normal vector for the half-plane in which a weapon can fire:

Forward firing weapons have an identity matrix in place:
1 0 0
0 1 0
0 0 1

And the resulting normal vector [0 0 1] specified the half-plane in the positive Z (forward) direction.

Significantly, the firing arc for a weapon is *always* a half-plane. There is no facility for specifying a different firing arc. (Yes, I've asked for this before. )

Pretty neat find about the half plane firing arcs. I was 70% sure it worked that way but I hadn't gotten around to trying it yet.

I don't know what I was thinking when I called them "half-planes." A half-plane is a 2-D object. I think the appropriate term here is a "half-space." But I'm glad you understood what I was talking about.


As I mentioned in passing back in reply #40, there are some Sins models that feature multiple materials, with 3 textures for each material. (I don't blame you for missing it; there's a lot of info flying around in here.) I don't know if Code Herder has found the field in the vertex data that indicates which material a given set of U,V coordinates corresponds to, however.

Regardless, I think you're fine with multiple textures per model, without mapping everything onto a single sheet.

You guys are way, way over my head now

Bad news: it looks like firing arcs aren't actually based off of the emitters' exact rotation matrix.

I made a ship with one turret pointed at 60 degrees right, and one pointed at 60 degrees left. In theory, with 180 degree firing arcs, this should give an arc of (-150,30) for the one pointed at -60 degrees, and (-30,150) for the one pointed at 60 degrees. Unfortunately, when I tested in game, both turrets could fire at any target in the (-90,90) degree range.

It looks like the Sins engine just uses the rotation matrix of the emitter to classify a weapon hardpoint as front, left, back, or right, and once that classification has been done, all checks are then done in the model's coordinate system, not the emitter's coordinate system.