Don't y'all jump and help me at once, now!

I did manage to fix it given enough facedesking.

Now I need to figure out how to make beams extremely bright/really bloomy. Any takers?

Unfortunately I don't really have the time or the skill to model other people's designs. My apologies. But if I make any models or find any models I have lying around that I don't need, I may release them for others to use.

Also I can't texture or skin... so that is going to suck.

/edit

So, my custom beam sound is also not playing. I tried it as both a .wav and an .ogg. Why is there no consolidated source of information for this kind of stuff?

Did you try playing with particle forge?

Awesome I remember the HW2 mod for those ships! LOL my account over at the HW2 modding community is still open actually, lol go figure Dragon Fury got swtiched to what I am named here

hey man totally post the model or w/e it is, so we indies can make it our pirate starbase. ok, well, maybe just me. but you know you other guys thought about it.

and yeah i messed around with particle forge one time and all i was ableto do was make a line go from x,y,z axis away. but i had no idea what that meant.

so i cried

Drop Danman a pm or something he might be able to help you out. I'm not sure how much help he can be but he's got his own huge mod going and could help out in the area you need help on

I'd love to know why all of the ships turn into gray blobs at a distant zoom, though.

It took the max exporter over 13 hours to export my Xenon Project Omega-class. Which is hilarious because it's only 23k poly, but also absolutely pathetic because it took 13 hours and I've never heard of a max script being so inefficient.

Also, here's the bug I was talking about. I sent a PM to Mansh00ter though I will likely discontinue this if there's no way around the tremendous export times I've been experiencing. I simply don't have the time or patience to wait a day at a time between exports, and XSI is just another giant mess I don't want to get into.

Most of them are models I made for one of my SC mods. They won't be made available to the public.

Well, I can't offer any suggestions on the export times.  I don't use 3dmax, so just don't know what's up with that one.  I actually use softimage xsi for what models I've played with, and it takes at most a couple minutes.

When it comes to the textures, this thread may help you a bit with working out what may need changed where: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/162482  Although I obviously don't know if you've already read it, or other threads like it.  I've had the same problem with the gray blob from a distance with some of my own models as well.  Not yet sure the reason behind them.  But I also only have placeholder textures on those ships too (I'm not much of a texture artist, so the process of making nice-ish ones for me is pretty slow), and have generally ignored the problem so far.  I *think* it may have something to do with reflection, or perhaps the tangent map, but I honestly just don't know yet and could easily be wrong.  I'll have to try figuring it out later when I stop being lazy about working on textures.

With the fire stuff you want for those lasers (which I think actually look pretty nice off the thing as it stands in that picture), you'll honestly have to play with the particle forge for that.  I'm no help on that one, can't make heads or tails of it yet myself.

I'm curious what the problem is exactly with the ConvertData though.  I guess it depends on just what you're trying to convert which way.  If it's the .mesh files to/from text/binary, it really shouldn't have any problems.  But, without knowing exactly what you're doing with that one, I'm not sure what to suggest.

you are using the 1.1 version of the export tool right? the 1.2 is really flawed and since there is no updates. i use 3ds max 9 with 1.1 and it only takes a few min at max.

It's a shame that this game has such poor modding support anymore especially in regards to anything that isn't editing text files. With proper modding support for the industry standard this wouldn't have been a problem and we wouldn't have to resort to using year-old tools. Offer still stands but I understand totally that that's not a viable option for anything more than like one ship because exporting is often.