Can you suggest any design for the Cardassian transports or colony ships? I think his may have been one of theirs from the original game.

Yeah, that looks like the ship from BOTF...although it's at a wierd angle.

Anyways, I can' think of a specific design at the moment, but as it's a Cardassian design, there are some general principles that would 'fit' a Cardassian troop transport:

Make it big and imposing - bigger ships mean more troops, more troops mean a stronger iron fist over your enemies.
Make it look sluggish and slow but with massive impulse engines.
Give it the classical Cardassian 'spade blade' look from the front, with small, prong-like Nacelles at the back.
Make it yellowy-orange, brown, or grey in colour.
Give it a boxy or modular design so it looks as though it has been undergoing constant refits for decades, rather than being retired from service. (Why would the Cardassians want to spend resources on making their troops more comfortable, when those resources could instead be spent on making the ship bigger to accomodate more troops?)
Make it look like it is capable of landing on a planet, with a large, flat underside or something. (It was designed for invasion!)

Hope that helps.

Well I made a D2 class, dunno if it fits in anywhere.
I've been super busy as of late (stupid finals) but time is going to free up soon enough.
This ship is about...hmm....1700 polies? not that much but bump maps help make her look good.

Looks really close to the schematics, plus low poly and bump map, excellent

Thanks for the nice work. We can work it in. Good luck with finals.

Today I spent a few hours working out why a model wouldn't load its textures in a program I'm making in XNA. After I got it working, I understood much better how the process of loading models works and I've rewritten my code to account for it.

The model that gave me grief was the Sovereign model, whoever built this model built it with multiple sub-object materials, it lets you assign different materials at the sub-object level, which explains how 1 mesh object can have 14 materials, and why my code cried at the sight of it.

Anyway, I've examined my code and realised how it can be changed to handle these sub-object materials, so soon I'll have a working 3D viewer for the BOTF2 project's ships, it will also allow you to reset its scale and orientation, and save these adjustments to a file, so the ship sizes can be tweaked now as the actual engine is being built. it's a good first step towards a combat engine if it can load in the viewer then it should appear in game.

And it can even be adapted for other things like as a rotating 3D viewport at the build ship screen or as part of an editor for placing weapon hard points onto ships. Progress!

It sounds great. When you say 14 materials, do you mean as in seperate texture files? or bump, specular, glow that kind of stuff?
Sounds good it looks like you guys have made a tonne of progress here!

Fire, can you .rar up the model and attach it here? I see where your model will fit in the Shiplist. Do you have access to SharePoint to put it online there?

Will do asap, i'm going to make a few adjustments (some stuff i'm not totally satisfied with).
The top dome'ish thingy has some stretching here and there and I wanan fix that up.
Dont think I have access to sharepoint (do you need an account or just the link to the site)

I can upload to a site called sendspace for you to download and send you a pm of the link if you'd like?

no, but like you I thought at first that they might be the bump specular etc but turns out they were all diffuse textures. What happened was that I think the creator used a multi/sub object material like this one in 3ds max (See pic). Before I did not account for them (I did not know they existed, the bit of model loading code was from the defiant game and so before I did any work on models) So anyway, I've got it fixed and hopefully I'll have the viewer ready by the end of the week.

Nice

Fire@ Mike Strobel can give you access to SharePoint to upload. Send a PM. Until then a file share or just attach it to this thread. There is an Upload Attachment option down below.

I do not like what is in the SURVEYOR III slot right now for the Klingon. Your D2 ship would look nice as a Surveyor I. We can move the III to an "extra" model and bump the current Surveyor I and II up by one each. In Shared Documents, 3D Models, Ships and.., Klingon, we can add a D2 folder. I will do the moving around to Surveyor folders later.

@Strings Looking forward to developments on the engine. We can call it String Theory.

And so it was that String theory was born. And it was goooood.

...

Fireball, if you don't have a sharepoint account, do as Kenneth says and ask the other Mike - the Strobel one - for an account. Until then though, I would recommend you use Mediafire to host files - that site is unbelieveably fast and i've only seen it go down once - and that was because they were adding extra servers to speed the service up even more.

This one is for MOE. He pointed out that we did not have the K7 station in our Federation lineup. The Outpost II was never textured. I put the K7 in at the Outpost I and moved the old Outpost I up to II.

Hola guys.

Hey, you've been doing some nice work so far


Hm..that Outpost 1... that's my model right? Did someone texture it finally? I got lazy and bought a new PC and got involved in a lot of work ( http://www.kerberos-productions.com/for ... 45&start=0 )and by the time I set up the New PC I forgot to check in here.

That said, I just browsed over the shiplist, and some pics are just plain wrong..

Kenith i did a K7 station so please remove the above from the list.

Errr...I said we didn't have a K7?
I don't remember ever saying that, and I know Skeet made a K7 model anyways. In fact i've got pics of it on my computer right now...

Did you get my PM Skeetir? Did you see my post asking for your models? I would love to have all your models on SharePoint. It will be a lot easier keeping track if models are no SharePoint and not just your PC please.

When we got the two Fed outpost by Trashman MOE had asked about putting in the K7. Trashman built and originally uploaded two Fed outposts and two Fed Starbases. Where should we put the K7? Outpost I or II or Starbase I or II? Should we replace one of Trashman's models or move them around?



This is in the Cardassian Colonyship I slot until we can do better.

It would be an outpost 1 or 2, which i beleive was decided awhile ago during moes shiplist. And i will upload when i think its needed thanks, as im very busy.

When you have the time. I would say K7 as outpost I because the model in the outpost II slot showed up in Voyager as a Fed science station. It would seam more like the time line unless we get an outpost from Enterprise. MOE's list currently shows both of Trashman's outposts. They were basically the same models. This will look better.

A simpler version of the Cardassian Starbase looking earlier than DS9 I hope.

For now it is in the Cardassian Starbase I slot. It can be improved on if there is time later. For now I am trying to fill in the holes.

Good stuff, keep it going guys, we're covering ground quickly!

Federation Shipyard III for now. Feel free to work on it.

Hey,

Can someone convert this .MOD file to .3DS for me? It's a NX-01 and I want to try re-texturing it. I think MOD files are Starfleet Command model files, and you can convert them with Ultimate Unwrap.

Strings.

Yeah, .mod files are in the models folder of my SFC2 installation. I've noticed that every model also has a file called xxx_brk.mod, (Where xxx is replaced by the name of the model) as well as the xxx.mod file. Not sure what this _brk.mod file is though.

If anyone wants me to send all my SFC2 models then just say so. There's some good models in there. SFC2 has models for the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, the Hydran Kingdoms, the Gorn Hegemony, the Lyrans, the Mirak Star League, the Interstellar Concordion, the Orion Pirates, Space Monsters, Asteroids, Planets, Blackholes, Anomalies, and Wormholes. I've also downloaded a few models such as the Coeur De Lion and the Defiant from Battleclinic. My entire models folder is 187mb unzipped.

@Strings, your file is attached. The NX01_brk.mod file crashed my Milkshape but the NX01.mod was converted and added into the rar

@MOE, is there a file share site we can use, like say SharePoint? I would like to look through the models. We are still in need of all kinds of stations and colonyships and transport ships.

The Sharepoint NX01 model could be downloaded if you want to look at what we have so far

Eek...it'll be difficult finding a site that can handle such a large amount of files, even if I zip it. I'm zipping them at the mo and i'll check if Sharepoint can take it, but if it can't i'll see what my ISP can do for me - I know they had a large file transfer system when I first signed up 3 years ago but i've never used it before and do not know if they still have it. Even if they do have it i'm not sure how it works so it might be a while.

*Edit - hehe 186mb of files went down to 74.1mb after zipping. That's easier to upload to free file sharers. I'll add the download link soon as I can.

use zip splitting (and renaming afterwards if necessary for upload), should help getting it on sharepoint though max "no-timeout"-filesize for each split component file is 7mb with my 128kbit/s upload..

Err...wouldn't that mean uploading a million-and-one files? The timeout on Sharepoint is annoying though. The number of times i've tried to upload stuff only to be told the page cannot be displayed...

Anyways, Mediafire worked for me (As always ) Download (74.18mb)

Thanks. I am downloading it. Model work has been slow with the holidays. I will be back to it soon. There is a break coming up again early in January though. I am going out to LA. I have signed up to work as an extra in a film. No, not THAT one. I will be one of the guys in the background for Eagle Eye. It is an action summer movie due out around August of 08. There are four days of shooting the scene I will be in so you may even be able to see me. The other film shooting now, the one I really want to be in, is referred to as the U/T PP on the casting boards. (Un-titled Paramount Project) Don't I wish. More on that later. Thanks a million for the models.