Topic: Modding assistance

[Mayall]

Greetings   

 I was quite surprised to see this site still up and running when so many others have fallen by the wayside. I for one am very grateful for that.

I installed SFC II OP and SFC III the other day, and was enjoying them so much decided that I wanted to give modding another shot, in particular adding some ships and stations of my own design. I have found some of the things I need.. I still have an old copy of 3ds Max 5 and GMAX. The problem I was having was finding live links to the modelling tools. Thankfully, Battleclinic has everything i need in its archives.

If there is interest I will happily share the completed models with the community and place them in Battleclinic probably.

First ship:



USS DISCOVERY

Slightly bigger than the NOVA but smaller than INTREPID, original design is not mine i found an image online and played with it.

Is 1024 good for a texture size and do we really still need to worry about poly limits?

[intermech]

Most of my ships range from 500 to 3000 polygons. Someone here did a study on polygons vs. textures and found that higher polygons with smaller textures does better. It makes sense to have them all in the same file.

[intermech]

Hey Captain Adam, you'll find this old thread interesting:

http://www.dynaverse.net/forum/index.php/topic,163367836.msg1122718212/topicseen.html#msg1122718212

[intermech]

Captain Adam, I'm thinking LODs are not so necessary these days. I am not sure how you make them, I never have. I suspect LODs are created using the same grouping feature as in creating break models. The distance at which they appear is controlled qualitatively in the games settings.  That is, where you change the game detail level. SFC3 does not use LODs, but instead uses a dynamic DirectX feature that reduces the polycount at greater distances.

[markyd]

Yeah, if memory serves for SFC, SFC II and SFC II OP. you required 3 x .mod's and three sets of textures for the LOD's to work correctly. In SFC III however the LOD's were controlled by the engine itself so the separate LOD's or textures were not required.

I think on today's PC's even the average basic laptop would not require the game to use LOD's.

[markyd]

I would say do not bother... The SFCII engine is old, but in comparison to the systems we run today the output would be in excess of what the engine expects greatly... The game engine was written prior to MULTI CORE hardware, so beyond what we already know we would need a Taldren coder to tell us how it was coded to be sure. But for a comfort blanket, the game was coded during the 2 GB Ram Dual Core ERA but was the engine written to accept higher hardware.. The MODDING MANUAL does not suggest so....

So stick with a max of 2048's for textures, less that 10k triangles for your models and even on today's modern ultra books SFC will mod great