Ship Names

[Ravenna]

I've reflagged Sully's Armed Trawler "Excellent" as a ship of the Imperial German Navy. In the ship.cfg I changed Name to =Trawler_Excellent_Imp German Navy. Nothing else was changed. Now I find that the sim will not let me into Free Flight. Removing the ship remedies the situation.
What do I need to do to make the reflagged ship work and avoid getting an error message? My first hunch was to change the sim name in the ship.cfg and do the same to the mdl name but there should be a simpler way to add a reflagged ship. Any ideas?

[Captain Kurt]

Mike,

You need to change the nationality of the ship in the dp and you should change the ship folder name and in the cfg.

[Allen]

Back on XP I found that ships had to start with sh or something went bad.

[Ravenna]

Thanks Kurt,
I had forgotten about the nationality. I did change the folder name and the name in the ship.cfg. I seem to remember something like this happening years ago with one of Collin's ships.
Allen,
I used to follow that convention but gave it up when I saw all the ships without an sh prefix.

[Ravenna]

Something a bit odd going on here. I changed the German trawler allegiance to 2 and changed the name in the ship.cfg to HM_Excellent_Ger, then I changed the ship folder name to HM_Excellent_Trawler_Ger. When I went into MB and tried to select it as infrastructure/ ship I got two HM_Excellent trawlers. That is, both trawlers had the same name.Does MB read ship names from their DP?
The other strange thing was that both trawlers had a RN White Ensign, whereas I had changed the German bmp to show an Imperial German ensign.

[kdriver]

Hi Michael,

Yes, MB reads ships' names from their DPs.

Kevin

[PSULLYKEYS]

Michael:
Happy Holidays. That's one of my old ships. Its been a long time, but I believe the ship config must have a unique name for title, and model and texture must conform to the names in the appropriate folder. Hmm.. more complicated than that.

1 Create a different name for your "new" ship and rename the ship folder.
2 In the Model folder, the MDL name should be based on that, and open the CFG and use that same name for the normal and any other lines included.
3 The ship config must have the name for title, and model and texture must conform to the names of your folders. Please remember that the Texture will be the default folder unless in the Texture line you place something like "Texture.KMS" as a texture folder containing the new German texture. and the Texture line in the ship config reads KMS instead of being blank.
4 change the nationality to the appropriate one.

That should do it.

Before new ships appeared and I learned to build them, I would take a similar looking ship and change it to whatever I wanted and repainted the texture(s) to something that looked correct to me.

I hope that helped.

[Ravenna]

Hi Sully,
What a lovely surprise. A happy Christmas to you too!
I had thought about changing the MDL name and basing everything, including the ship folder on that name but I was a bit wary of doing that as I remember Collin's disapproval when I did that with one of his ships. Your Drifters and Trawlers are still very handy and are right on the money for WW1 coastal work.
Cheers,
Michael

[PSULLYKEYS]

Michael:

I also asked Collin if I could do the same and was refused. I made a pilotable version of one of his ships and he asked me not to post it. That was his wish and I complied.

Since my stuff is not even close to Collin's products, I never had a problem with anyone tweaking it in any way and posting it. I only asked if it was used in payware to receive written permission. Its also nice to give the developer credit for their work and most tweakers do that.

So, have at it, and a trick for you:

Lets say you want to repaint the flag in the bitmap. Use dxtbmp to open the texture - import to MSPaint (or a payware photo edit program) and repaint or import the correct flag in exactly the same position on the bitmap, save in dxtbmp to the original name (its the only one the mdl file will recognize) and place it and any other bitmaps in the original file to a new file named texture.aus or whatever nationality.

In the ship config:
[fltsim.0]title=RAN Trawler
model=RAN_Trawler
texture=aus

You Aussies had trawlers that could have been in the North Sea. But get pix and repaint her then if you want. There is also a way to make some items in the model "disappear." But if interested send me a PM, I don't want to clog the Forum.

[Shadow Wolf 07]

Hi Sully! It has been a long time... We hope you are back for good.

[Ravenna]

Michael:

I also asked Collin if I could do the same and was refused. I made a pilotable version of one of his ships and he asked me not to post it. That was his wish and I complied.

Since my stuff is not even close to Collin's products, I never had a problem with anyone tweaking it in any way and posting it. I only asked if it was used in payware to receive written permission. Its also nice to give the developer credit for their work and most tweakers do that.

So, have at it, and a trick for you:

Lets say you want to repaint the flag in the bitmap. Use dxtbmp to open the texture - import to MSPaint (or a payware photo edit program) and repaint or import the correct flag in exactly the same position on the bitmap, save in dxtbmp to the original name (its the only one the mdl file will recognize) and place it and any other bitmaps in the original file to a new file named texture.aus or whatever nationality.

In the ship config:
[fltsim.0]title=RAN Trawler
model=RAN_Trawler
texture=aus

You Aussies had trawlers that could have been in the North Sea. But get pix and repaint her then if you want. There is also a way to make some items in the model "disappear." But if interested send me a PM, I don't want to clog the Forum.

Hi Sully,
I think I've got my head around all of that. I've reflagged the BMP. I am very interested in your suggestion regarding "disappearing" items. Please enlighten me!
Happy Holiday,
Michael

[PSULLYKEYS]

Hi Shadow Wolf. No, I'm getting into FSX. Every copy of CFS2 I had is compromised as well as most if not all of my projects, which is why I never reposted them. I hope you are doing well.

Michael: Making parts of textures disappear requires use of the alpha channel and finding a unique texture on the model's bitmap for an item that will not make any other object of the model also disappear.

Open in Dxtbmp the bitmap for my crew in the trawler texture folder. Note that the alpha channel has a bitmap. Send that bitmap to your editor and make it all BLACK. Reload this altered alpha channel into the original crew bitmap and SAVE IN THE ORIGINAL FORMAT with the same name. When you place this in the texture folder of your ship, start the sim and find the ship you will see the crew has disappeared,

IF YOU WANT YOUR CREW BACK SEND $1 MILLION.......just kidding. I hope you saved copy of the original.

You can do this to any bitmap BUT IT MUST BE SAVED IN A FORMAT THAT USES AN ALPHA BITMAP.

IF you placed a white properly sized bitmap with a small black box over the location of the flag on the ship texture, no flag will be displayed, or another black box for the funnel to disappear. A completely black box will make the ship disappear. Collin taught me to use a color box on the bitmap for ease in painting objects the same color. Inspecting a bitmap will indicate that. That will make more of the model disappear than you might desire. NOTE: Framerates will not improve, the polygons for the object are still there, just invisible.

Finally, to see the uses of alpha check an aircraft that has damage textures and note the alpha channel bitmap.

I hope you don't curse me, and the day you started tweaking...its like Heroin.

I hope this helped.

[Ravenna]

Thanks Sully,
That's the best explanation of using the Alpha channel I've come across.
Cheers,
Michael