Time for the requesite history lession:
In the "good olde days", the model pointer was not checked / confirmed. People could have 200 model folders if they wanted...
Well, there's one catch. Plasma, maybe drones too, calculate travel distance/range from the hardpoint (launch point), while everything else calculates from centerpoint of model to centerpoint of model.
People flew plasma starship models that took up 10-20k space
on their computer, with the plasma launchers right at the front of that 10k size.
This is what each player saw:
Big ship - target at 11k. Fire plasma when enemy was 1k away. Plasma came from front of ship, spent a second on screen, impacted target. Launching player's computer sent DAC rolls and big internals count.
Little ship - Sees small model firing plasma at range 11. After the plasma travels 2-5k, they disappear and the player takes the massive plasma strike. Due to time for the 2 PCs to sync back up, and the player turning off, the plasma hit often occurs on a different shield than the one now presented to the plasma.
For the longest time this was discounted as just plain old game lag, someone figured it out and complained on the old Taldren forums.
The fix was to add the "model.siz" file, which scales whatever model is in that folder to the given (identical) size. The giant ships were shrunk down to the "proper" size for the hull-type, while the rare puny ship was jacked up to the larger size... This file is checked as part of your Dyna login.
To make sure nobody still took advantage of that cheat (by bypassing the "stock" folder and pointing to their giant model in a different folder), the model column of the shiplist was also added to the check, so that now everybody gets the same "set" of folders and whatever ship is in each folder is scaled to the exact same size.
One of these years (when we all have 500gb hard drives...
) someone will make a shiplist where every different line has each own unique model. Might take 3 minutes to process just the model checks / scaling, but someday we'll have that shiplist....
Topic: Altering ship models in shiplists and dynaverse compatibility (Read 1882 times)