Zephyr Net

Hotfrog, I tested your new SU-30 shape...

I have to say you did a great job! Probably the best I have seen of a shape edit... all stages of the shape have no canards! You are at least a full generation of what I have been able to accomplish...

However, unfortunately, the shape is unusable as it is unstable...

If you use the F10 view and rotate around the aircraft you CTD after the second turn every time. The shape is still unstable...

However your work shows great promise! What I dont undertand though, is why you decided to shorten the name of the skin pic file, and thus shorten the entire shape file by 1 segment...

This makes this shape uncolorable even with cracking... When you overwrite the hex color code to the new color and use the shape it immediately crashes the game to desktop much worse then the standard color....

I have a possible solution in mind, though, once you have stabilized your SU-30 shape to no more CTDs.. I could send you the all grey and the all blue SU35B.sh files that I have created and you could edit them to no canards and that way we would have 3 seperate color versions for the new SU-30....

Let me know if you are interested and please KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

I have faith you can stabilize the shape for future use...

CAG out...

Man we have a problem 'cause I can make it CTD but usually takes a lot of weird rotations while in F10 view. For sure I have invalid polygon(s), hence the CTD, but it is gonna be difficult to find...What kind of computer are you using? Specifically how much memory do you have? I'm running a lot of RAM, so my theory is that the renderer is finding this invalid polys, starts allocating a lot of memory (recursive calls and running out of stack??) so in a low end computer with little RAM crashes faster than in a machine with more RAM...But dont worry I'll figure it out, right now I can export the shape to 3D Studio to take a good look at, so Im gonna analize all the points that I moved and see what is the problem...

Here is a LIB with the new SU-30MKK shape and a quick SU-30MKK.PT (based on the orignal SU-35) so everyone can try it...Watch out for CTD and report back so I can prove the theory of more RAM vs Less RAM...

http://www.sharemation.com/hotfrog/SU30MKK.LIB

hotfrog

I am getting CTDs everytime when viewing from roughly the 2:30 and 9:30 positions around the aircraft, and when looking directly horizontal to the aircraft. Interestingly, the first time I loaded up the shape I flew for about 10 min with no problems, then exited, re-entered the game and had CTDs.

Zephyr

I have a 1.8 Ghz AMD with 1GB of ram and a Voodoo5 video card running Win 98, plus it also CTDs on my 2Ghz Intel with 1GB ram funning XP Pro...

The CTDs happened immediately for me, unfortunately...

However that aircraft looks great... but why did you shorten the pic file name and alter the layout (shorten)of the edit locations within the shape file? Did htat have to do with the folded in polygon?

Again its a beautiful job, and I have faith you will get it stable... Once you do we can talk about altering other shapes...

Did you see my Private Message to you here at Zephyrnet?

Also we could sure use your knowledge and skills in the VNFAWING EGroup...

CAG out...

Ok guys this is a test, I basically started from scratch the modification and I think it is more stable now, but cant really validate it 'cause it takes a lot of time to get CTD in my machine (I only have 512MB of RAM so there goes my theory). Anyways in this LIB there is only modifications to LOD0.The other LODs, 1, 2 and the damaged meshes are NOT modified. Before I continue I need to validate LOD0, so download, test and report back...This time I deleted the polygons that form the canards instead of playing with the coordinates, then moved the coordinates to smooth the neck of the plane....

http://www.sharemation.com/hotfrog/SU30MKK.LIB

hotfrog

Great! I will test it tonight!... If its stable can I send you the all grey and all blue SU35B shapes from FA Futures for you to alter? They can remain open source after your conversion...

CAG out...

I just got through testing it. A2G A2A no probs at all. Did a quick mission 3 on 1 all of us flying the new shape again no probs at all. Got my brains blowed out by guns and missles no probs, not even when I ejected( which I suspected might have caused a prob, but didnt)

Looks like LOD-0 is ok

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Fighting for justice with brains of steel

Let your anger be like the monkey which hides inside the piniata.

Was no lower than 20 thousand feet going full aft, I then was flying in F9 view, I broke down and towards the camera and it crashed the game.

The flanker was taking up a good portion of the screen too because by the time I had broke away from level flight I had aimed my nose towards the camera at such a high speed, therefore the shape was a little more zoomed in than usual. Either way, yeah it crashed on me heh. It was working so well too.

Jimbo

I have tried it all day today without a single glitch... all views, zoomed in and out...


AND THEN.... HEH!! I used Hotfrogs alterations and applied them to the my all blue and all grey SU35b type shapes and now I have all grey and all blue SU-27 shapes without canards and they are colred in all three stages of the shape... And they are stable...

The only problem I have is the grey shape still has the invisible polygon on the belly under the cockpit that makes the shape look weird when rolled over on its back, but that is one of my errors, not Hotfrogs...


Actually I tried getting the SU-27 colored shapes from both directions... altering the polygon of the exisitng recolored shapes, and then recoloring hotfrogs shape itself...

Both process worked, but it was much easier to change the precolored shape to erase the polygons, alot less steps involved...

I will release the shapes for genral use right after FAF Korea is released in a few days. I want to be certain they are stable first...

Here is the new SU-27 All Blue shape.... (FAF Korea Summer and Winter)



Here is the new SU-30 All Grey Shape (FAF Korea Winter Only)



I hope you like what you see!

Thanks again so VERY MUCH To Hotfrog for making this a possibility...

CAG out...

PS - The combination of the reduced polygon and the new coloring to all stages has caused a slight 'stretching' of the wing skins and I dont know why... Hotfrog you may want to check into this when I send you your copies of the new colored shapes. And yes it happened to both versions I made, based on the previously colored FAF shape and on the recolored Hotfrog shape, so I am lost on this one, (but its easy to overcome as you can see on the screenshots it is not hard to alter the skins to cover this up)...

My first request for a specific shape change...

Horfrog, would it be possible for you to flatten the nose of the Q-5 to turn it into a MiG-19 Farmer with a nose inlet for the jet engines?

If you could flatten the nose and remove the side intakes we would have a nice MiG-19 model...

Is this within your capabilities?

Also, I have seen how you managed to alter the shape and what you did to the polygons... Plus i have managed to do some ploygon stretching, We could work together on this and perhaps make a U-2 out of the ATF F-104 Model (it doesnt have wingtip tanks) ...

I look forward to yoru response...

CAG out...

Hotfrog, could you please outline what your using and how to change the vertex coordinates of a shape file. Also, how are the vertex coordinates arranged. XYZ, ZXY.... Are they from the center of the model or a different pivot point?

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I was going to make something creative but then I started playing FA.

Wow that is a NICE shape!

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Centurian

Well I'm done with testing, in total I got it to crash the game twice. If you fly it hard enough and in the F9 view it does crash, however trying to repeat what I did 3 times? Couldn't be done and who flys the F9 view that often anyway? It seems to be like I found 2 needles in a haystack type of deal heh. Considering you ultimately want to go forward with creating completley new shapes in due time CAG? I'd say use it and just hope you don't get a FA vet such as myself who knows how to fly these planes to crash the game lol. Good luck.

Jimbo

Those shapes + skins are indeed beautiful!!!

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I'd like to know a couple of things:

1: How do u extract the shape files from a lib file?

2: how does the actual editing work, I didnt recognise anything which looked like coordinates when opening the Su30 shape in a hex editor.

If hotfrog or CAG can answer this question, maybe Cent can use it in his manual or on his page.

CAG, would you be so nice and email me the reponse to my email address if you or hotfrog reply as I'll be without internet for a week again (you know why)?

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