.mat - Some help with ship textures needed.

[Dragan]

Hello! I, once again, seek advice from discovery.

I once was playing a game called Air Rivals / Ace Online; basically a weirdo asian grindy, space-dog-fight game. Anyway, today I was trying to import a model from that game into Freelancer. Fiddling myself through various guides, a ton of programs and so on, I eventually managed to import the model into Milkshape, exporting it into cmp and mat, adding hardpoints, making a .sur and so on and so on ... However, while I have little to no difficulties to get a ship running, as long as models and textures are there and working, I can't really seem to get this one working.

I have added the texture in milkshape, all to the one group which is the model itself. (Excluding the hardpoints) in Hard CMP, Milkshape and even Blender the model seems to be working fine, and I can see the texture. However, in the game the ship has textures, but only blank, white ones. It's not invisible, but it's not the right texture either. Everything else seems to be working as intended.

I'm clueless at this point what could be the issue. The model has the right size, all hardpoints are there and working. The material and cmp is added correctly in the shiparch.ini - I even tried different LOD ranges.

Does anyone perhaps know what I'm doing wrong? I've packed the .cmp, the .mat and the .sur in a rar and uploaded it, perhaps this helps to pinpoint my issue.
I can provide the parts of the shiparch.ini as well, if needed.

Thanks in advance!

The model, mat and sur. Click me.

[Sombs]

Are the textures saved as .dds or .tga format? Hardpoint CMP does show ships with any kind of texture format, while Freelancer only shows textures in the fitting tga or dds version. Gimp can save files in DDS format, while IrfanView can save files in the correct TGA format.

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[Dragan]

Are the textures saved as .dds or .tga format? Hardpoint CMP does show ships with any kind of texture format, while Freelancer only shows textures in the fitting tga or dds version. Gimp can save files in DDS format, while IrfanView can save files in the correct TGA format.

Uhm ... It's a .jpg, actually. But doesn't the .mat exporter for Milkshape change it into a .tga? I'll try to convert it with irfanview before creating the mat, thanks for the hint.

Edit: I just tried it - it worked! Thanks a lot man, you saved me!

(This is kinda embarassing, lol.)

[Sombs]

I sadly can't tell, as I only to retexturing, but it is either that or you have a transparency setting on the surfaces. For example, you won't be able to apply new textures to a nomad ship without transparency active - it will just be a white shiny thing, which might look cool with the bloom mod, but that's not the idea behind it. ;3

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Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

Alternative Soundtracks

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[Dragan]

I sadly can't tell, as I only to retexturing, but it is either that or you have a transparency setting on the surfaces. For example, you won't be able to apply new textures to a nomad ship without transparency active - it will just be a white shiny thing, which might look cool with the bloom mod, but that's not the idea behind it. ;3

Yeah, apparently the .mat exporter does not really convert the base texture, but only renames it. Converting it to .tga before exporting it from milkshape did work - partially. I could see the textures, but they were disorted. But I had read somewhere earlier that the textures have to be vertically flipped so I did that and ... et voilá! It works! Thank you so much. :3

I started to try and learn making a completely own ship from scratch today, when a friend suddenly threw that model onto my feet. It literally HAD to figure how to get it into FL.

It's nothing special, but here it is:

Screenshot.

[Sombs]

Awesome. Glad I could help you.

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Uncharted System Stories: 18 | 32 | 34 | 37 | 38 | 85

Templates: Character | Transmissions

Alternative Soundtracks

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