Disappearing Meshes in Entrenchment 1.05 Solution

kyogre12

Join Date 07/2008

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Disappearing Meshes in Entrenchment 1.05 Solution

I'm just putting this out there as an fyi for everyone running into this problem with trying to run 1.041 mods on 1.05. If the mod you want to play loads successfully, but none of the ships, planets, buildings, etc show up in game, this should solve the problem.

1. Find where you installed the mod.

2. Open the PipelineEffect folder for the mod.

4. Delete the following files from the PipelineEffect folder:

GS_Asteroid.fx
GS_Planet.fx
GS_Ship.fx
GS_ShipBuilding.fx
GS_ShipPhasedOut.fx

Delete those and the meshes should show up, and the mod will work correctly, although you will get a couple of StringNotFound errors.

I've tested this with my mod, Sins of the 13th Tribe, as well as Star Wars Requiem, which has the same problem.

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There is nothing else on the screen, this is at the start of the game.

It looks like the shader is just insanely light sensitive. I have to have the base texture almost completely black for it to show up.

Which is very unfortunate because this nullifies the bloom effect because the bloom map thinks it's really dark when it isn't ingame.

I was hoping to have them both, they're intended to function together.

I wonder if the shader can be edited?

I messed with the shaders for a bit to no avail. I'm simply not a programmer, I can't understand what's going on. But I'm certain that the noise effect can somehow be grafted into the ship shader and pasted over the star shader (I'm more than willing to sacrifice the stars, I'll be changing them anyways).

I want the big fella, which is using the Star shader, to look like the little fella - but with the distortion. Currently that is not possible.

And the big guy's diffuse is nearly pitch black, which is why the bloom isn't working.

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If its in the ship shader wont it be like that on all ships? Also that could be hard to add the to the ship shader, there seems to be a limit of instructions basically of 64, which the comments seem to suggest them ran into anyway.

I have no idea how to really program shaders but shader 3 or 4 already looks more appealing lol.

Okay so I tried it, commented out lots of colour stuff so everything looks BAAAD.

AND since there is no access to the time var in this shader its static (defeating the point).

ALSO, it looks REALLAH BAD!

Im gonna go actually read the code now...

Back: So im not exactly good at this but im currently thinking it creates the random 3D texture once. (3 values per element, rather than two like a normal texture). I.e. it is a repeating texture but its a long stare to see it lol.

It uses the time value to choose WHICH 3rd value for that particular point. It uses the standard mapping coords for the other two. So as time moves on it choose a linear (it uses lerp to get the time scale) increase in the 3rd value. This means it goes up through the values over time which it uses to shift the real XY coordinates a little bit.

Note: This was just a ship shader test. Im not really following what you did. Is that large ship a particle with a star shader on?

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Your images aren't showing up for me.

The large ship is being spawned through a particle, just like the B5 Omega's rotating section. Except this is the entire mesh; the ship itself is just a square (which I'd make a sizable oval if I could get this to work since a tiny square lacks the necessary colision to click on the ship up close). The particle is being set to the star shader.

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There was no image... I guess I shuld put one in for hallarity. - Added one.

Also as an aside (I can't remember where I mentioned this first, so here will do), I tried exporting a 35k (tri) mesh with my tool, this was the output:

Setup took 4437 miliseconds
Element seperation took 6081500 miliseconds
Building material Data took 16 miliseconds
Building Mesh data took 82734 miliseconds
Triangle calculation took 49328 miliseconds
Vertex calculation took 8466766 miliseconds
Calculating took 8516094 miliseconds
Total number of verts: 22725
Swapping Coords took 328 miliseconds
Surface count: 49
Vertex count: 22725
Triangle count: 35216
Material count: 1
Exporting took 26 seconds
Processing took 14713 seconds

Original vert count was 18k.

Thats 4 hours it ran... I think it needs to be optimised (or you know.. have someone who is good at programming do the element seperation)

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4 hours? Really? My Knight, which totalled about 48k tri, took about 5 seconds to convert using the XSI converter. What CPU are you running?

(/e unless you're referring to the max tool or something you made yourself... the max tool took upwards of 12-13 hours for the simplest of models for us)

Also, in that screenshot you posted, did you have to mess with the illumination or anything? Does the bloom channel for the ship/station/space goat still work? If so, then all we'd need is for it to animate. Undead ships are basically black with a kind of a shimmer, I can give them a very faint texture in addition to the existing bump map, and they produce a lot of glow, like ghosts/phantoms (see the small ship in my screenshot). If I can get the bloom to work with the distortion, it doesn't matter how "bad" the texture looks - they don't have plating or anything, anyway.

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Quoting IskatuMesk,

reply 24

Then there's the particle mesh, which is the actual body of the ship.

I spawned it with a particle.

It spawns perfectly, it's oriented fine, ect.

But it's bright white. I can't see anything going on at all, much less nice shiny distortion.

I tried setting the particle mesh to just use the diffuse texture and no spec/bump, but it makes no difference. I tried loading the B5 Omega's da/nm textures on it and it makes no difference.
...

Sorry for the delay but i have not a lot of free time for try resolve problem now...

Let's begin by the end... if you use the star shader, only a RGB cl is used... no da and no nm...

Edit : maybe you can try a other fx... edit your particule effect, change the GS_Star.fx by GS_ShipPhasedOut.fx ... these last have moving texture too along with teamcolor, normal and selfillumination...

Now, for the model being bright white, it can be related to your .mesh used with the particule effect ... usually, for ship, you have in the .mesh :

Diffuse ffffffff
  Ambient ffffffff
  Specular ffffffff
  Emissive ffffffff
  Glossiness 50.000000

but for the star shader, you need a .mesh with :

Diffuse ffffffff
  Ambient ffffffff
  Specular ffe5e5e5
  Emissive ff000000
  Glossiness 16.000000

like your can see, specular, emissive and glossiness value are lowered in case of star...

There is some other problems to resolve but soon of later, i will have the effect that i wish !!!

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The phasedout shader does have time, noisemap and deafult transparancy. If that works on a particle you could use the main mesh as the ship again (because particles are not reliable) and have a shimmering transparent effect on top with a copy of the mesh. Maybe.

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