Ultimate Dominion Mod III - Beta Info

[mrpp]

Heres a bug I found not sure if it has been mentioned. On federation if you go to database and click on surveyor 2 it will crash. By the way excellent work I am very impressed with the deph and detail that has gone into this.

I found that when I started on Tech Level 2, when I upgraded from Surveyor to Surveyor II it disappeared until I built the Utopia Planitia yards.
For some strange reason it also made the colony ship disappear.
I'm gonna try the new exe and see if it still happens.

[Nevernamed69]

Its interesting that it crashes randomly when going through the database of ships for Fed. I guess its caused by the fact you added more ships...

[thunderchero]

Heres a bug I found not sure if it has been mentioned. On federation if you go to database and click on surveyor 2 it will crash. By the way excellent work I am very impressed with the deph and detail that has gone into this.

I found that when I started on Tech Level 2, when I upgraded from Surveyor to Surveyor II it disappeared until I built the Utopia Planitia yards.
For some strange reason it also made the colony ship disappear.
I'm gonna try the new exe and see if it still happens.

Its interesting that it crashes randomly when going through the database of ships for Fed. I guess its caused by the fact you added more ships....

Please download new EXE from my 4shared folder or siggi's 4shared folder or download section. This was due to unknown error that we had to reassign special ships also new exe will fix monster crash problem.

thunderchero

[mrpp]

Thanx

I've downloaded the new exe and I'll give it a go.

Love the mod by the way.

[Nevernamed69]

Does it fix evade crash? im on turn 118 without random and the most annoying thing that I have run into is game crashing in battle when I believe the comp must give evade command to its cap ships. I could be wrong...

[thunderchero]

there is nothing we can do about evade crash that is a BOTF crash not UDMIII the only thing I could tell you don't use evade. And I don't think AI uses evade.

also new exe will not work right with old saves.

thunderchero

[count23]

quick question for you lads, these models you make for BOTF... before they're exported to HOB, what program do you make them with? Over on trekmania.net RedAdmiral mentions lightwave, is that the program of choice? If it is, how do you convert to and from LWO to HOB?

[thunderchero]

quick question for you lads,

This is not a quick question.

these models you make for BOTF... before they're exported to HOB, what program do you make them with?

That depends, each person I have talked to about what they uses have been differant. I will use just about all of them depending on what I am tring to do. programs I use mainly is; Ultimate Unwrap3D, MultiGen-Paradigm Creator, NewTek LightWave 3D 9.2 Modeler, 3ds max 5, 3ds max 7, Polygon Cruncher 7.23, flt2hob All of these programs have different uses and no one uses them the same way.

Over on trekmania.net RedAdmiral mentions lightwave, is that the program of choice?

I use this program a lot but siggi does not use it hardly at all if any.

how do you convert to and from LWO to HOB?

first off I do not know of any way to convert from lwo file to hob. file must be saved in 3ds file and use MultiGen-Paradigm Creator to convert to flt file then use flt2hob to convert to hot file and finaly hob file. this process can take as little as an hour or as long as weeks depending on how comlicated the model is.

Also just an example during (slicing) with MultiGen-Paradigm Creator I have a way I do it that siggi does not understand, and siggi way of slicing I don't understand. we both end up with very nice looking ships using 2 complete different methods.

Just a note the way I slice I have been told it should not work but for me it does and I have tried to expain how I do it but no one has been able to duplicate my way of slicing.

so to summerize it is all trial and error, So good luck

thunderchero

[siggi]

Most of the new models are not made from scratch, but were originally done by other authors. To get them to work with BotF, however, these models are then subjected to a very drastic conversion process, which changes just about everything from model geometry, polygon count, texture mapping, layout and appliance up to the rendering and shading. When done, the new model will not have much in common with its originator, save the overall appearance of the mesh when rendered solid with no textures applied (basically, they only still look the same, that's it ;-))

Converting a pre-existing model is almost as much work as doing one from scratch, though.

As thunderchero said, most of it was and is trial-and-error and requires hours and hours of effort sometimes not only bordering on painful.

Note: Despite all this, the process of converting a model for BotF, once commenced, is highly addictive and has proven numerous times to be very distracting from real-life obligations ;-).

Programs I use are Milkshape 3D (for conversion from and to different file formats), Creator 3.0 (virtually all work related to model geometry and mesh, including scratch-building meshes), Ultimate Unwrap 3D for texturing and flt2hob for conversion from Creator's flt format to hob. I also use Photoshop CS3 for any related 2D work like composing textures or creating ship icons.

Remember that BotF was never ever intended to be moddable (in contrast to most modern games). Thus, all this required years of work and research and trial-and-error and exploring dead-ends beyond count, which was done by those who long ascended into the pantheon of BotF-Modding yet still walk among us mere mortals:

Joker, Jigalypuff, Dafedz, DCER, AFC and many, many others who escape me now. All that we are doing is playing on the grounds they have broken.

Cheers,
Siggi

[thunderchero]

Hi everyone,

I was just wondering, We did a lot of work in last set of updates on scaling. Does anyone see any ships that look the wrong size?

thunderchero

[Army40]

Hi everyone,

I was just wondering, We did a lot of work in last set of updates on scaling. Does anyone see any ships that look the wrong size?

thunderchero

The Romulan Valdore WarBird is way too huge almost the size of the Cardies Dreadnought.....and it's funny to see the Federation Don't remember the name (the ship that separates in 3 sections) ship that looks like not being bigger than the Defiant.

[thunderchero]

The Romulan Valdore WarBird is way too huge almost the size of the Cardies Dreadnought.....and it's funny to see the Federation Don't remember the name (the ship that separates in 3 sections) ship that looks like not being bigger than the Defiant.

the valdore is about the same size as galaxy class and we made the Cardassian Dreadnought about twice their size.

here is picture of the 3 ships;


NOTE; galaxy is below valdore

here is the specs I found;
galaxy class; 614 meters long
valdore class; 603 meters long
no specs for Cardassian Dreadnought

so the valdore might need to scale it back just a little but not much

the Prometheus is a little small but not by much this will be addressed too.

here are the specs for ships below;

galaxy class; 614 meters long
Prometheus class; 415 meters long
defiant class; 170 meters long

as it sits in this picture it is about 275-300 meters so 1/4 increase would be about right.



thanks for pointing that out.

thunderchero

[Army40]

thunderchero: tks for the clarification...the Prometheus seems to be the lenght of the Galaxy saucer section in the picture above. The only time I've compared the Prometheus was with Heavy Destroyer and the Miranda Class and was expecting it to be bigger....altho bigger doesn't mean to be better....noticed that the Cardassian Dreadnought can hardly move because of it's size...mostly uses it's sides thrusters to turn around and fight smaller faster vessels like the Defiant and the Constellation.

[Army40]

I enjoy going on the Battle screen...the graphic quality of the ships is so high that it's a delight just to look at them before, during and after the battles...one thing I should start doing is to use the "solo" group option and see how it works when going into battles....since I started playing the different mods I noticed that it doesn't happen much that ships can fight solo and I keep forgetting about it

[Turner]

I am interested in the way how the ships size can be changed. Is there a multiplicator you can change (like in Armada II) or do you have to edit the entire shipmodel?