Changing player ship meshes

[TraderDan]

I'm working on a model to replace the Starmaster frame which according to the modding instructions is index 50, I named my mesh frame50.obj and it seems to work in the model viewer utility but placing the .obj file into the games media/ships directory doesn't seem to be recognized by the game - any insight on what I might be doing wrong?

[TraderDan]

Nevermind I figured it out, the utility sees the star master as ID 50 but in game it's ID 49 but ancillary files like textures and shipspecs are 49+1 (50)

I seem to remember Vice mentioning this previously.

[Marvin]

Since mods extend across all profiles, you might want to look into JSGME, which allows a player to quickly swap mods in and out without messing up either the mods or the default frames and textures. If you haven't heard about JSGME, this might be a good place to start:

[Marvin]

Last I heard, Jones is no longer working on the program. Consequently, you'll probably need to go to a 3rd party website to download one of the numerous versions of JSGME. I've been using this version for a very long time.

JSGME version.png

[TraderDan]

Oh yeah when I first started playing around with Evochron Legacy I downloaded a few of those installers primarily because I was looking for the old star Trek hud mod that seemed lost to time but I ended up finding it buried in the EvoTwealk installer.exe

The issue I found was that some of the utilities were not compatible with Vice's newest builds so I had to extract and modify some of the assets myself to make them work. I've never made an installer or mod manager but I suppose one could modify the existing ones without too much difficulty.

[TraderDan]

I think I'm rolling with version 2.408 of EL will the Generic Mod Enabler work on that version?

[TraderDan]

(also I hear Vice has a 2.411 he's working on but I think you need lvl5 clearance at the pentagon to get lol)

[Vice]

(also I hear Vice has a 2.411 he's working on but I think you need lvl5 clearance at the pentagon to get lol)

Nah, just an e-mail and/or as part of a feature request of something I'm working on for one or more players. The test build lines are up to 415 in preparation for an official update rollout after some final testing and reports. I'm hoping to roll out the next update soon.

[TraderDan]

Sounds exciting, can't wait

[TraderDan]

The ship model seems to be working fine, using frame49.obj in game and frame50.obj in the thruster utility. Textures seem to work using hull2.png file name in the thruster utility however I want them only to apply to the Starmaster frame in game. Using frame50-low,medium,high,veryigh png's don't seem to appear in game and using filenames frame49-low,medium,high,veryhigh crash the game when trying load.

[Vice]

Image index 49 would indeed be needed as the image/texture set for the StarMaster frame type in-game. The utility program should only be using the 'hull2' image set globally for any test meshes as it doesn't have a separate import mechanism for 'frame' filename prefixes for index specific image sets. If there is an error message associated with the crash, it may provide a clue as to a possible cause. Also, if you want to zip the files and e-mail them to me or upload them to Google drive, I can check into it directly to determine what may be happening.

[Marvin]

I think I'm rolling with version 2.408 of EL will the Generic Mod Enabler work on that version?

I shied away from JSGME (Generic Mod Enabler), even though Denny swore by it, until I started creating my own mods and found that swapping in and out, while testing, was unwieldy. So I read the instructions, discovered that it didn't overwrite any of the original files (it stores them) and installed the program. Since then, I've used it with all the incarnations of Starwraith games and mods for any other game where internal mod-swaps don't exit.

Note: In some of the older games, you might see the phrase "JSGME compatible" or something similar. Since mods in JSGME must be placed in a specific folder (to afford swapping without overwriting), some modders would prepare the folder with the mods, zip it, and offer the package as a download.

[TraderDan]

Maybe when I'm all done nodding EL I'll do a master mod installer

It sounds like I named the files correctly then, I'll post them up so you guys to check out when I get to the computer next.

[TraderDan]

Here's a zip of my progress so far:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1866YWp ... sp=sharing

I planned on changing the Starmaster frame to the USS Raven model from Star Trek Voyager series.

This is the error message:

[Vice]

Looks like your media set is just lacking the normal, specular (shader), and emissive (lights) textures. So it expectedly produces an image error. Once I included some filler images in those required indexes, it loaded and worked fine. It did take a long time to load though as that is a massive mesh file (over 108,000 vertices), so I'd recommend keeping an eye on video memory used and performance if you apply this with other resource heavy custom mesh and texture files. Depending on available resources and desired performance, some models might benefit from reducing poly/vertex count.

[TraderDan]

Thanks for checking it out for me, I thought about placing some dummy files for the normal, shader and specular maps too but when testing the capital ships it would just use the games internal assets by default if they weren't present so it seems that ship frame modifications behave differently. I noticed it took a bit longer to load also and was considering culling more of the model detail like I did with a few of the capital ships.

[Vice]

Ship specific image frame indexes are indeed handled differently. The global image set is preloaded and actively held in memory, so if any individual image is missing, the default one can be applied automatically. The frame specific image groups are kept in their own reserved indexes and are loaded on demand (including their own additional video memory blocks, if loaded), rather than sharing from the global set. So if any frame-specific image sets are imported, they'll need the entire set of 4 images for each custom ship index.