Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

[BEEX]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

yaar!...i better fill me belly full of rum and find me ole sea legs..yaar!.
.
looking brilliant BFP team,cant wait!
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stupid engine...cant walk on moving boats..a step backward in engine dev!..lol

[Sikpanzer]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

hurry up hurry up hurry up!
i want to play it now lol
ill even change my name to Sikpirate.
:p

nice work guys, keep it comin :)

[-=4th=-1/2Hawk]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

You can walk on our decks while the ships are moving and not die - we fixed that one. Still cant climb ladders on moving vehicles though... major bummer right there.

About the lightmaps, man are these two ships ever giving me grief. Even doing them via Max. I think its something about using the MSO textures because the shadows looks like they get stacked on one another. In game theres no time to even look at stuff like that with cannon fire blasting and skeletons raining down from the rigging above.

[imported_Rhino]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

your lightmaps may be due to the fact that bf2 and max doesn't lightmap alpha channels? only thing I think u could do then is split the models up into diffrent sections and make really high poly versions and lightmap them bit by bit but that would take a hell of alot of work.

or if you really wanted a challenge you could try and photoshop the lightmaps to make them look right

[[FH2]Mr_Cheese]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

It'd be a shame if you couldn't get them to work, the decks look a bit too "clean" otherwise, imo... Still, it looks great and I can't wait to play it!

[*FMJ*Power]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

those ships look absolutely amazing!

[Lobo[FH]]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

Hawk, explain us the details of the issue, maybe we can figure out the problem, those ships lightmapped would be the bomb

[imported_Rhino]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

yar! post the issue on the BFeditor forums when they are back up and I'm sure we can help you find you berried treasure!

[-=4th=-1/2Hawk]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

Well.. no use of alphas on this guy so thats not the issue. The original model was some 300,000 polys, so I spent a lot of time cleaning it down to around 160,000. Like... a LOT of time. *sigh* Even at that level, the exporter wouldnt handle it because of some limitation on the max amount of vertex data it can work with - so its already broken into two pieces, upper and lower halves. (I imagine this is what happened with the US carrier).

Knowing this is a still a very heavy polycount, I figured it would be prudent to be skimpy with the textures. (Also put this on a 256 sized map with very little overgrowth, other statics and vehicles, etc). Some of the texture tiles are just 256x512 even. Didnt go with the pallets because that would mean breaking up the larger decks and sails into smaller strips to fit meaning even more polys.

So to retain the freedom to tile X and Y on the smaller textures, to keep polys low and to make unwrapping this guy wicked easier - I went across the entire ship and organized the various faces into a handfull of material groups. I made a Multi/Sub-Object texture loaded with BF2StaticMesh2 materials for each unique material group. Selected groups by mat id, did a poly select and uv unwrapped each group stand alone. Unorthodox maybe but it did get a skin on it just fine. It was only later that I realized this is a *@$% way to go about it if you want a lightmap because the 1:map, 2:map contains all those mat unwraps overlaid on top of each other. I was kinda hoping the exporter would rearrange all the polys on 9 or something and work - but the samples dont work right from the editor and the max produced lightmaps are all garbled as well.

So - I could snag the mat ids and break them out into individual pieces to Stamp Align on the map, but my god what a mess sorting thru the LODs and cols that go with em. Im thinking the thing to do is go with a custom dirt texture - half grey, half white. Take the shady sided polys and put them on the grey side and vice versa... no need to preserve the scaling right. Maybe do a few choice cuts along the decks where the masts would cast shadows...

Oh wait, you know I could carry all the cols on only one of the pieces on behalf of all of em... there's an idea...

[Lobo[FH]]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

Two posible errors, we had similar lightmapping problems in a huge building complex:

1) you have faces with a matID's without applied material somewhere (so check all matID's of the model)
2) Or maybe you have some of those pieces with the pivot way off, the editor doesn't like that

[imported_Rhino]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

do your lightmaps kinda look like this?



is so its probaly a UV map issue that matt.b might be able to help you guys with :)

@1/2hawk

[R-DEV]matt.b says:
2 ways to fix it
[R-DEV]matt.b says:
1. use the 'channel info' utility in max to select & delete all the unused mapping channels (eg. #5-#9)
[R-DEV]matt.b says:
2. if you've got a thin mesh structure, like a very thin box or 2-sided cloth, you can get sampling artifacts that show through on the other side, so make them say 1 inch+ thick
[R-DEV]matt.b says:
also 3. possibly try a larger lightmap sample size
[R-DEV]matt.b says:
if he cant get it working, send me the maxfile & i can fix

hope that helps :)

[-=4th=-1/2Hawk]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

Mat IDs checked out ok. The pivot position on the sails is pretty far off but its like that so I can stamp-align with the ship at the correct water level. Dont know Ive seen that cause a lightmap issue before though - just a problem with things disappearing from view here and there. Not sure that its the issue because the lower half doesnt lightmap either and has the pivot within 1/10th the bounding box.

No - doesnt like like your pic Rhino. More like one giant shape - no unique polys discernible. Dont have any extra map channels - thats of course the first thing I checked. I do indeed have thin mesh structures though. The sail faces are very close to each other back to back. Thats a very good thought. Not sure why the lower half would do that - it doesnt have the same features. Heaven forbid I bump up the lightmap sample size - the first time I tried creating one it ground my comp to a steaming blue screen after an hour of scratching its head in confusion. LOL I'd be happy to have matt.b take a peek - pop me his xfire or whatever in a PM.

Hey - can you enable dynamic shadows on a static mesh like you would for a vehicle etc? Might be a lag monster. I think I remember reading something by D_Rand about flatten mapping all polys out on 9:map yourself being careful to erase 5 - 8 and then exporting... Might try that next.

[imported_Rhino]

Re: Battlefield Pirates 2 Mod Update

if you send the max scene over xfire to me i can send it to matt, hes a hard man to get hold of some times :p

as for your stamp align prob with the pivot I can help you there thou :)

in the .con of your static u can add a anchor, like alot of the vBF2 models use but still have the main pivot in the middle.

just add the code to your .con and tweak the amount of offset you want from the pivot, then you can use that to stamp and align with, without having the sails disappearing when looking a little away from it and maybe also fixing part or all of your lightmap probs
ObjectTemplate.anchor 4.5000/3.3941/3.8162