Vega Strike Forums

There are some tasks which, while likely not fundamentally challenging, are certain to be tedious, and that we (the developers) would still like done before the release but would rather not have to allocate much personal time to.

In particular, one such task is converting some of the submitted art assets that exist in the masters repository, but that no one has yet converted and tested in-game.

In particular, the following vessels are known to be present in obj/max form, but need to be converted to BFXM:
Cultivator
Entourage
H496
MacGyver
Regret
Shenzong
Shizong
Vigilance
Watson (Fendorin re-imagining)

If members of the community were to assist us in readying the above art for deployment, we would be most appreciative. If anyone is feeling particularly masochistic, one is welcome to try to come up with a list of coordinates for spinal mounts and good turret locations on the larger vessels, but all that is really needed is that the meshes and associated textures be ready for in-game use.

Thank you.

are there hints in the wiki or something. I have the spare computing power and some time but no real experience with artwork. Also, how do we submit the converted images. besides those two, I guess count me in (unless there is a windows specific utility I need, only ubuntu or mac).

@bgaskey the utility to use is mesher and how to use it is in the wiki http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTo:Add_Ships windows users can find mesher in the bin folder while *nix types will find it if they make all or just make as make all is the default mesher is strictly a cmd line tool so brush up on your terminal skills

Enjoy the Choice

Yeah I was just checking out those wiki articles and I guess I can do it. my limited command line skillz should hold up. Not tonight tho [yawns]. i guess I'll have to checkout the masters repo tomorrow that will take a while then I can get to work

I could probably do this as well. But where are the obj files?

guess that answers the question . . . bgaskey

I think we're gonna have to svn checkout the masters repository. same as the others but with masters at the end of the url. the wiki page is actually fairly complete. I'll pm you about which ships I am done/doing. I'll probly start tomorrow

In the masters module of our svn repository where all original art is now stored it holds the master file that are used to create the in-game objects.

Enjoy the Choice

How big does masters happen to be? My internal drive is rapidly dwindling and I need to know if I should switch to my external Hoping its not too much bigger than data.

n that case it might be more productive to just use the web browser interface and get each file individually.

Enjoy the Choice

you can svn checkout single directories.
Go to
http://vegastrike.svn.sourceforge.net/v ... ers/units/

Then if you find the folder you want go and do a
svn checkout http://vegastrike.svn.sourceforge.net/s ... foldername (i.e. replace "viewvc" with "svnroot" in the URL)

well...that would have been a good call, but I have a bunch done already so I'll just let it finish. my drive has like another 20 gigs I'm willing to use so I should be fine. Its not my main comp either...in fact...I only run VS and StarCraft on it

entourage has a bunch of different textures. how is this handled ingame. should I just use the default one or one for each faction?

Also should the shield mesh remain in a separate bfxm file?

one last gripe...what is the difference between a diffuse mesh and a glow mesh...and which one should I use. I'll use the glow but the diffuse must be in there for something...but no mention in wiki and I don't know if its another option in the mtl file or not besides that, its going well

All of them is it has a particular texture it uses it check the mtl file that details the textures used.

Enjoy the Choice

I'm adding the files to the MTL file checking it isn't really gonna help

Finished ships (bfxm's with all finished maps included):

Cultivator
MacGyver
Regret
Shenzong
Vigilance

Ships Meshed but without shields done:

Entourage
H496

Ships not completed:

Shizong (no .mtl files just a .max that isn't converted)

Fendorin's Watson:

mesher segfaults... There's the gdb bt full. I'll try some other stuff tomorrow and hopefully get the shields done so all are ready for inclusion. Gotta start homework now

bgaskey wrote:entourage has a bunch of different textures. how is this handled ingame. should I just use the default one or one for each faction?

If you look at the admonisher or vendetta or dostoevsky directories, you'll see that VS uses a suffix naming scheme to determine which texture to load. The BFXM file should be told to use a filename with no factional suffix.

Glow maps are for things like city-lights. Diffuse is the base texture. Specular and Normal maps define reaction to lighting conditions.

Shield meshes need to be separate BFXMs.

Crashing in fseek looks to me like it's some stupid code that passes in a null FILE* without checking if the file actually could be opened.

Check to make sure those files exist or that you have write permission.

seems like it must be a problem with the files. I'll refresh them in case of corruption but it may be a problem with the object files themselves (renaming and moving to different directories does not fix the problem nor does the shield, which has no dependencies mesh)

Entourage and H496 now have shield meshes as well. all but shizong and watson ready for game time

Unfortunate about the watson - it's a really good looking model :-/

When you get the chance, send the files for the models that are game-ready to my VS gmail account (ministerofinformation) and I'll check in the files.