General Ship Design Questions and my Works In Progress.

[Woof]

Hi there,
I've recently returned to the world of CFS2 and FSDS and have been playing around with building modern/future Royal Navy ships. A Gallery of some of my works in progress can be found here and I have recently uploaded a few ships (Type 45, Type 26 and Visby Corvette) to Simviation.com. Whilst I have been puzzling out many things on my own (including getting FSDS3 models back into FSDS2 to produce them in CFS2 format) but I also have an ever expanding list of questions.

I'll start with the two fairly basic ones.

1: Those of you building ships for CFS2, what sort of poly count are you aiming for? My models so far tend to come in at ~1200 to 2000 polys. I know the answer may be largely dependant on PC spec and is certainly less of an issue than it once was, but wondered if anyone has an upper limit they work to? The ships in the file library seem to vary form basic shapes to fairly intricate detail.

2: Is there a simple way of creating rotating radars for CFS2 ship models? Most of my searching has turned up various posts and articles on using the rotate# or AnimateTimed part names or the Tick_18 BGL variable, however nothing I have attempted has yet worked. Is there a simple solution out there I can try?

Cheers,

Woof

[Collin]

1/ Under 20,000.

2/ animated time within the rotate, but watch out for the axis on the rotating item. Try having the rotating part as a child and attached to a simple parent part (a cylinder). The child axis HAS to be within the cylinder or the circle it journeys on will be governed by the axis placement in which case you can find the part sometimes 10 feet from where its supposed to be then 5.

See previous thread on tracking guns about the axis
http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum...-ships-in-CFS2

Collin

[yeppers]

Those look great, keep up the good work!

Glad to see you included some of the RFA ships as well. Almost impossible to find modern auxiliaries for CFS2 these days!

[yeppers]

Hey Woof -

Quick question for ya about the Type 26 & Type 45. I've downloaded both (and the T45 update) but when I go to insert them into mission builder, I get the same "cant find the model in the library" error message.

I've done just about all the normal tweaks and tricks to the DP, CFG and CDP files I can think of but still cant get them to operate properly. I've also downloaded your Visby and RFA Cardigan Bay and both of those work fine, so I'm a little stumped as to why the Destroyers are causing an issue.

Thanks for any advice!

Yeppers

[Collin]

Hey Woof -

Quick question for ya about the Type 26 & Type 45. I've downloaded both (and the T45 update) but when I go to insert them into mission builder, I get the same "cant find the model in the library" error message.

I've done just about all the normal tweaks and tricks to the DP, CFG and CDP files I can think of but still cant get them to operate properly. I've also downloaded your Visby and RFA Cardigan Bay and both of those work fine, so I'm a little stumped as to why the Destroyers are causing an issue.

Thanks for any advice!

Yeppers

Check that the folder and files have the same name precisely as in the Model.cfg file(found in the model folder), and ditch the cdp file, this file is automatically regenerated when the model is used.

regards Collin

[Woof]

Yeppers,
What Colin said! CFS2 mission builder doesn't seem to like ships where the main folder, ship.cfg and ##.mdl have different names. However this usually only leads to the model not being visible in mission builder only. You can still position the ships and use them as targets/airbases for aircraft waypoints and they will still show up in the mission when flown in CFS2. I didn't realise this was the case as edited the sample missions in notepad not mission builder, something I will bear in mind in future.

I have a Wave class oiler on the way now too- few pics on my photobucket (link in 1st post).

[yeppers]

Thanks gents, that did the trick!