Dan, Vulcans, Need Help.

[Iashar_Koranin]

Dan, was just wondering, do you know what might make your Vulcans not borgify when I assimilate them?? Cause they just turn white, and when the ones I bring to the collective explode, it causes massive lag. I made sure the vulcan-borg texture was in the right place, and it seems fine, so I'm not exactly sure what I did wrong...

Spoiler: My collective no likes these...

 

[Borg_Queen]

I'm not Dan, but I think I know what has happened:

The color of the ships in skirmishes like the one you have there, is determined by the team color. I see the team color for Borg is white, that's why any ships taken by them becomes white. If your team color was purple, the Vulcans would become purple then taken by you.
About the exploding; Perhaps the Vulcans had initiated a self destruct then they noticed they were loosing. That happened sometimes with the Romulans in Single player. Thus I always checked if the self destruct button on their ships had been activated as soon as I got them.

Hope this helps.

 

[Terra_Inc]

Looks more like they don't have any texture at all applied to them...
Are these borgified textures Dan's or yours?

 

[Dan1025]

You know you could've PM'd me right? Rather than make a whole thread to try and get my attention?

As long as the vulcan borg texture is in your RGB folder then the Borg textures should work. As far as I know there's no reason they should go blank like that unless the texture is missing or named incorrectly, have you renamed the file or edited it in any way?

Other than that I've no idea what could cause it, maybe someone else here knows of an error than can cause this besides the texture file being missing/incorrectly named.

 

[CABAL]

If you edited the textures, make sure you didn't use the compressed version of the TGA format since the Armada engine doesn't support it.

 

[Terra_Inc]

If you edited the textures, make sure you didn't use the compressed version of the TGA format since the Armada engine doesn't support it.

Oh, right. This is often the standard setting, and needs to be changed before exporting to TGA.

 

[Iashar_Koranin]

No, I didn't edit or change its name, and I've never once had an AI self destruct on me, that would be cool.
It just seems to go from being red vulcany ship to White SOD ship...
I'll go recheck it all to see if there may be some entry I forgot to make...
And as for PMs, I couldn't post a screenshot, and I'm not sure how well those work.

Spoiler: sheesh...

 

[Dominus_Noctis]

The explody FPS drop is due to how the A2 engine processes explosions - it uses a software render for a lot of things, and explosions of certain meshes will cause that.

 

[thunderfoot]

There is no Borg joint/node/hardpoint installed in the meshes themselves. Without a way to tell the game engine to use an alternate set of textures when the ship is assimilated, the game engine will simply reset itself to show only the mesh and no textures at all. The first picture below is a Stock fgalaxy. Look at the list of hardpoints. All of the ones which are named and not numbered are the ones which make the game use the special functions of the emitters, adjust the crew and so on. These are almost always located at or near the center of the mesh. Which is why on larger meshes, weapons fire seems to penetrate the mesh before it does anything to the ship. Nearly every modeling app I know will always place these critical nodes at the top of the list of hardpoints. The second picture is Dan's vvreenak, which I believe is the one you've showed in your screenies so far. As you can see in the hardpoint list, there is no Borg joint/node/hardpoint. This is why your Vulcan ships go blank when assimilated. As to why they explode, I do not know.

Not every modeler adds all of the features available in the game to every mesh. This is a personal choice by the mesh maker for many more reasons than we have time to discuss here. Deemon's Norway acts this same way for both Borg and damage textures. Happily this state of not having Borg textures on Dan's Vulcans has an easy fix. You can add a Borg joint/node/hardpoint using 3DSMax or MS3D. Or you can use a hexeditor to do the same thing. Hexediting is far faster but far more prone to fatal errors which can give your game a CTD event. If you've got Borg textures made already, then you're good to go once you add the node. I hope this helped.

 

[Iashar_Koranin]

Thanks for the analysis on them, TF, never knew that stuff.
But as I have no knowledge of hex editing, and I have no way to edit the
"nodes", 3Ds max or otherwise, I've got no clue how I could fix the issue.
As for the Borg texture, Dans looks like it would work great, if said node were there.
And the reason my ships were exploding is cause they were assimilated a split
second before the hull ran to 0% and it was shot by the enemy.

Edit: Forgot to add this; I assimilated one of their construction ships at one
point a while back, and I built the entire race up from there as Borg, as is my
mandate, but they must all be missing assimilation "node" cause I got the exact
same issue with their structures and every ship built.
Also, the only explosions that make me lag are the ones from the un-textured
ships for some reason that remains unclear to me.

 

[thunderfoot]

Please do not make me out to be some sort of modding guru. Because I am not. The only reason I could identify your problem was because it has happened to me a time or two. lol

 

[Iashar_Koranin]

Heh, Guru or not, you still shared knowledge, and that deserves respect IMHO.
If you could share about hexediting as well, or share in some form, how to learn
or use it, I'd love to convert them for borg use.

On another note, for Dan, your mod rocks, was just wondered if this is a bug or
if you meant it to be that way, or maybe just overlooked it?

The Borg collective appreciates additions!

 

[Dan1025]

Actually I'm not sure that it's related to the borg hardpoint node; since as far as I know that hardpoint is only used to make alterations to the model itself once the ship has been assimilated (see the borg mesh parts in FleetOps, or the rather blocky borg parts added to assimilated ships in stock, or a lot of the ships FahreS has released).

I've never bothered with the borg hardpoint on any of the models I've released and it's never caused this problem in my own install, nor has anyone else made me aware of it, so I doubt that's the cause.

It's most certainly a bug, one which never cropped up in the beta testing of the Vulcan mod, and no one else has ever reported it to me, so I'm assuming it's something unique to your install Iashar, though what would cause it I really don't know

 

[Iashar_Koranin]

Actually, I remember looking into your mod on A2ff, and one other person had
the same issue...but there was no resolution to the problem in that thread.