Zephyr Net

Well I was doing some experimenting with the MiG-29.SH file, the one that constantly drives me nuts with intermittent CTDs when...

I noticed some of the polygons are very "stretched" from contact points on the sourrounding polygons...

So I did some testing and found out on this shape, and hawke's original F-35 shape, that when a simgle polygon is stretched to far from its orignal vertex point where it connects to the surrouding poyygons and that makes a very long or sudden and sharp angle, the shape will CTD after a few sweeps around the shape...

I did some experimenting with some new shapes I built, stretching the polygon on purpose, and reproduced the CTD, then decreased the angle by decreasing the angle of the stretched polygons by reshaping the surrounding polygons to share the load of the new angle in the shape and the CTDs all went away...

Thought this might be helpful to those using Hawke's new tool to build shapes...

I have not tested this in his tool because frankly I am to old a dog to learn new tricks, its actually easier for me to hex edit the origianl shapes directly in the hex editor instead of using his tool, since I have to change the skin layouts and the visibility factors of the polygons manually with the hex editor anyway...

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Thanks for this info, I'll try it out. I also would suggest doing incremental modifications, and making backups of stable shape incarnations until the final result is achieved.

Yes I have doing that for years! You should see the number of shapes in my shape file!

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FA Futures/FA-2 is Still Being Worked On and Will Be Released...

I did a little work on reshape SU35B to SU27
However, I got CTD like always. Can you detail more your finding to help me out the hell of CTD?

By the way, do you know every particular structure of shape means?
such as F6 structure, and others? (they are mentioned by hotfrog in here viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1048&hilit=shape+format)
If you know these information, that will be great help to reshape.

As I said to you before, please be patient! lol...

I dont know what the F6 are for. I do know where the visibility of the polygons is controlled and how to remap the skin, but unfortunately its different on many of the shape files as they came from different games...

And I dont know where the landing gear animation is on the shapes and I very much wish I did. Perhaps that is what the F6 section is about, but I doubt it as it has color coding. I have guestimated it is for the shading of the specific polygons when the graphics are at max with all shading turned on... But I never had the time to sit down to try to solve it...

I will be VERY happy to work with you on this so we can improve our work, but its going to have to wait until I get FAF released. That has to take precendence as its been 5 long years since the initial beta that showed all the problems that I have been working to solve...

Plus many simmers have been waiting even longer to fly it so I have absolutely have to apply all my efforts to get it finished out...

And I could really use you help on getting that completed, if you can give me the time and effort involved.

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"FAF Shape Meister"
FAF/FA-2 Design team
TSH Member/Developer
VNFAWING.com Forum Administrator

VNFAWING Forums
VNFAWING Website

FA Futures/FA-2 is Still Being Worked On and Will Be Released...