#43

I totally understand where BitVenom is coming from. They dont want you to use the raw assets for the same reasons any mod teams modeler, and texture artists do not want you to use their work without any kind of permissions. To do so is effectively “stealing” their work. The point GBX is making is quite clear. Don’t use the remastered files for kitbashing. They gave us examples. Use them, and Learn from them.

The Classic HW1, and 2 files are out there already converted into any format you need. Just google them up. As far as PDS, and other Stat mods it “should” be nothing more than simple text edits. If you want to “Re-Remaster” the game then you will have to do so from scratch. Its not rocket science. If you chose to ignore GBX policy then i dont know what to tell you.

Some IP’s have a usage policy. As long as you do not “sell”, or profit from said usage (this includes donations), and add disclaimers, and proper credits then they are cool with it. They consider it “free advertising”. This is why you see Star Wars, Star Trek, and BSG mods.

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#44

Yeah, I’d be perfectly fine with that. Open release of models is customary in the Freespace Open community, and I’d say the community is healthier for it. There’s a big library of fan-made ships available for anyone who wants to make a mod.

Model creation is the most time consuming aspect of making a mod, and a lot of them die because it takes so long that progress bogs down and people lose interest. The more ships are available for modders, the easier mod-making becomes. Blue Planet would have never been made without openly released ships, which would be a shame because it has one of the finest stories I’ve ever seen from a game.

And I’d argue that if exclusive ships are what makes your mod special, your mod was never very remarkable in the first place. Complex and PDS weren’t good mods because they had models no one else had. They were good mods because they did something interesting with those models.

#45

edit: Hey Major_Stress, I’m not replying to you, I pushed the wrong “reply” button, sorry.

Hi everyone,

I’m reading a repetition of arguments in many posts with different words, which I think is time consuming and unproductive. We are dealing here with 2 different things happening at the same time:
1 - We’re starting a new culture of modding, having to work more closer to the producer;
2 - We have a shift in the mindset and we have to adapt.

Besides property care, GBX seems to want more quality for HWRE modding than before. The bar is higher now. Also, the assets now behave like a monster unified database.

So we have a steep learning curve ahead of us. But the game is not out like 1 or 2 years ago. It has around 10 days of life, GBX is working fixing things, because the project is huge and many changes (probably) must be tested and documented and the team to do that is small.

Let’s be patient and understand GBX better. This is not blind obedience, but realizing that at this point no one will get anything good in an easy way. We have to wait, download tools being enabled and exchange experience, here or privately.

2 Likes
#46

Yes I am replying to myself. I went out for food (Mmmmm Chicken Parmesan Poutine!) and had a moment of clarity. I’ve said this elsewhere, but much less directly: One major thing that a ship patching system will help with is mods like PDS that are lots of FX and weapons tweaks, new build mechanics, upgrade paths, etc - but not much ‘art’ overall - they can patch a ton of ships for very, very little space. If you had to edit every remastered ship to change a dozen markers (so say ~1k of data per ship) - the Mod would be fragile (almost any update we did would break it), and huge (every ship with that 1k edit being an average of 50MB or more). 2-3GB, minimum? PDS could be 200MB. The difference is big for management/interactions (uploading, revisions, just generally working on loose files with a group before publishing) - and for users (less to download is really always good).

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#47

Indeed modding RE is not going to be easy. I am already confused with what little i have seen of HODER, but i can do command line. That is nothing new to me. I can import the example DAE’s, and study them (BTW i though you guys said you were NOT using mesh lod’s? Why are there mesh lods?). Putting in a new model doesn’t help me a bit if i don’t know the art pipeline, or file structure of RE. For example you have the mesh with all of the mesh points, and textures hooked up. You make a Hod with HODER… OK what do you do with the ship now??

#48

Generally the LODs are there because the were and cleaning them was just not important. The ship file itself can cause them to be ignored - as can HODOR if told to ignore them. If we had wanted to put them in for some reason later - they’d have been there in some form to kickstart that.

Well, are you talking about a new Ship? I need a bit more context. Have you looked at the structure of the in-game .bigs? I don’t want to sound patronizing or like I am talking down, but I can’t entire determine your frame of reference…

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Example ships hardpoints
#49

Understood. I should have been more specific. Yes, A new ship. I never imported a ship into HW2 before. So i would need to be “walked through” the entire process. As probably would many other people that have never done this before.

I admit it. I AM totally clueless when it comes to HW2 modding, because I have never modded HW2 before (even classic). Back when HW2 was released the modding process had a ridiculously high learning curve, and it turned off many modders. Including me. All of my experience comes through other games like HW1 Classic, Starfleet Command, Bridge Commander, Nexus the Jupiter Incident, and Sins of a Solar Empire. All of them have different art pipelines, and file structures. I cant extract the RE big files. So i have no clue how the file structures are set up, or what else i need to do, or add. Besides creating the ship HOD itself. You obviously cant drop a hod into the mods folder, and hope for the best. Therefore despite my modding experience with other games. HW-RE is a totally new experience in which i am learning things from scratch.

If RE is identical to modding HW2. Then point me in the right directions, and ill do my own research.

Perhaps a sticky topic to where people can find tutorials on how to import ships. Editing Lua’s, and such is in order.

#50

At this point, unless you have 3DS Max, you’re going to have to wait; some of us who understand the modding process are still working on getting things up and running.

A layman’s tutorial introduction to modding is going to take a while. But feel free to jump into the water with us! :smile:

#51

I do have 3dsmax. and i can make a ship HOD with what was provided so far. Modeling, and Texturing for me is not the problem. Its getting the new ship in game, and working that is the problem.

Eville Jedi has made some progress, and from what i gather the import process is “mostly” similar to HW2, and the Import process is what i need to learn.

#52

Actually, the Classic HW2 modding was incredibly easy to get into at the time when the tutorials and CfHodEd were around. I was clueless, but I’ve made my first kitbash ship the very next day I jumped into it. And every day after that I felt like my understanding has doubled.

Here’s the thing about the CfHodEd though: I completelly understand all the reasons BitVenom says it no longer makes sense -single source, no copying, and afterall 3Ds Max is the most user friendly GUI for the native Max user.
Which luckily I am. And I know HW2 modding. And I make new ships from scratch.

But when you’re new to this, the first time you opened a ship in CfHodEd, it was very illustrative, very clear. You saw the whole thing packed into one file with an interactive 3D preview, it doesn’t get better than that. I feel the HODOR and the ship examples are a little bit on the abstract side for a newcomer.
Back then you saw the end result you could disect, gradually replace one piece and another, tweak here and there. What you have instead is an instruction of a package that you’re supposed to build first, before you take that blind step.

Or maybe it’s just my perception. Opening a DAE in Max or HOD in CfHodEd probably aren’t that far from each other.
Although I’m still glad I have my previous experience and I use Max. If I neither knew Max or haven’t seen insides of the old HOD files, I would be a bit intimidated. The CfHodEd allowed to start with tiny babysteps.

EDIT:
This was just a thought, it wasn’t targeted to make any change, I’m perfectly happy about the way it works now. The only thing that I miss is the ability to study the game models. I’d just really like to see their meshes to see where you’ve put the details and how much of them. Could we please in the next examples get the Vaygr or the Hiigaran Battlecruiser? And a Destroyer and a Frigate. You know, the two important things: Something from HW2 and something across the whole range of classes/sizes.

#53

You have to understand CFHODED was not around for a while after HW2 was released. I tried the RDN method. Needless to say i needed a new monitor after the frustration of failure. If CFHODED came out a little sooner i probably would have stuck it out, but I lost interest, and moved on to other games.

HW-RE brought me back, and i am learning in your so called “baby steps”. I now know the file structures. I can make ships, and i can use the tools provided. So its only a matter of time now.

#54

Btw guys working on a GUI to HODOR I’m calling HODOREST. It’ll just be a nice mask to the commandline and make life easier for anyone doing TCs with dozens of ships to HOD-ify.

I just give you browse buttons for everything, let you make a list to queue up multiple DAEs, and then I build a script for each file and run them all in a row with a nice progress bar for you.

Don’t have any UI elements to take care of HODOR’s option flags but it’ll at least let you pick your HW directory, name the ship, pick a DAE, and pick and output. From there it’s a copy and paste of the example script.

But so far it works :stuck_out_tongue:

4 Likes
#55

Hey, do your thing man - but HODOR does ‘batch’ stuff too - I just didn’t document it - and it actually have some pretty powerful tools for pathing and auto-naming, etc.

HODOR is literally like…95% of our pipeline outside of Max/Photoshop/etc.

#56

Um… yeah… Just a heads up, about what was said earlier about the underground mod community… The folks at Relicnews forums already updated CFHodEd to import the HWR models. It’s still a beta version with some bugs, it will crash HWR if you use it to edit ship HODs, but It can export HWR ship meshes as OBJ. So i guess Kitbashing did/may/will come back with a vengeance if people kitbash the models in max/blender and add the extra things/nodes/helpers and export the model with HODOR by accordingly following the example ships.

And on a side note… i am very eager to see what you cook up in the future with ship patching. What i’m mostly curious… is: if we’d mod say, Kadeshi swarmers to be in squadrons of 3, could we also tweak Fuel Pods to refit squadrons? Cuz from a math point of view it doesn’t quite compute in my head. I.E. 3 Squad Swarmer fights, 2 Swarmers blow up, the surviving Swarmer docks with Fuel Pod, Fuel Pod “magically” produces 2 Swarmers and refits entire squadron.

#57

I’m well aware of the developments. HODOR makes HODs that HW:RM loads. It will continue to do so.

Every edit done to a ship in other tools risks having to be re-done, by hand, in those same tools later (after the author figures out what isn’t working), if things change. The addition of a few bug fixes (so so many bugs!) - and ‘ship patching’ will create many places where these changes occur.

Equally risky in terms of wasted work would be trying to dump existing HW:RM art to DAE, rebuilding it for HODOR (a smart path besides) - because again every edit on top of that base will need to be re-done should the base assets change. I really want to get ‘ship patching’ working so that people can make edits safely on top of existing assets without copying them nearly raw (and feeling like they have to expend the time to do so) - not only are the results less brittle (and make for much smaller mods) - they don’t require uploads of assets people didn’t author, and don’t have control over.

1 Like
#58

And i assume this also goes for custom/completely new ship models people make right? Needing to be rebuilt with HODOR upon such changes take effect in the engine after a major patch. Or is it solely for existing vanilla assets? Just asking for future reference, so I’ll know when my ship models will stop working :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#59

I assume he’s talking about, let’s say Corvettes with updated smoothing groups or a Destroyer with salvage points on slightly different places. These updates would obviously not transfer to your DAE. It doesn’t mean our mod ships made of scratch will cease to work.

#60

Almost universally if we release an update that benefits (maybe not even requires, just faster/better/cleaner, whatever) - from a ‘re-HODOR’ - we’ll put it in the release notes, and make sure a new HODOR is either there at the same time, or ready very soon after.

The key thing is that people working in a mirror of our Tool-chain will have little to do; and with some people making HODOR GUI wrappers, maybe even a single button press to update…

Ditto for an ideal version of ship-patching - new ships/format from us? No problem, may not even dent the function of your mod - may ‘just work’. It’s data added to what we release.

Alternatively - new ships/format from us - but a hacked HOD or bash? Re-do it. Hope the tools get updated to support the changes. I can honestly understand the thinking back when the devs were done with HW2 in 2003, when there weren’t updates in the decade since - and the only tools were created by (talented, dedicated) hackers/enthusiasts. But that’s not today, next week, next month.

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#61

@Pouk, I forgot to ask, how’s your missile cruiser going?

#62

In this thread? I’m working on it right now. It has all the weapons, I’m about to add markers for a steam particle effect the old version used to have and edit the event file (I have no idea what that “visual mesh” part of the markers is for, but ok). Next I would like to look at engine glow, engine shader and flaps.
I still haven’t figured out the animations and opaque innateSS shader, but I didn’t touch that since the last time.
And in the meantime I’m finishing the texture. (I updated the OP of the MBC thread with a current picture).

…You know even it sounds like I haven’t done much, there are all these little things, like putting the ship into classdef file, making it buildable, checks its attack order is in correct order, make sure it has subsystem icons…
And the retexturing takes time. Damn my brain refusing anything less than pixel perfect alligments.