Hi rollin, You have been busy.

As far as RS/BSP calculators are concerned, there is one unique case that pops up very often and I am not sure if you have allowed for it, so it is worth mentioning.
One can have a situation where more than one polygon sits on the same 3D plane. In this situation, it does not matter what polygon is placed infront/behind what other polygon (RS/BSP wise) for these. It may be worthwhile to have a routine to check for this particular case.
Good luck with your testing.

Regards Syddy

BINGO !!!!

it does work..

it seams my calc is as strict as Gurneys.. but mine does tell you where the problem lies

so now I have to finalize the hardpoint stuff

and something more.. you have the possibility to mark faces as bulkheads and the exporter will convert them to 255 automatically.

the only thing my exporter will not handle are piggybacks .. this is something you have to do by hand or in 3dz studio


edit: hey sydbod, my calculator atm simply puts all polys sitting on the same 3d plane into on of the rs-tree-branches .. maybe it would be better to put an even number into both branches but normally you don't have too many polys on the same plane (if you know how to make good models) so I think it does not make a big difference anyway.. but this is something testing will bring up I guess

Hold on Rolin!

A couple of thongs.

To get a correct result for a hardpoint you need firstly have to have a element which covers the area of the model where the joint will be. Getting your calculator to do that would be a bit difficult, unless you can select which elements must be covered by the hardpoint.

Secondly, automatically deleting bulkheads is all well and good, but it gives you no way back. That is why, I leave them in until I'm 100% sure I'm finished, and then just manually delete the ones which are no longer needed. Once again, some bulkheads are needed as the stump of a torn off wing, or cockpit interior.

What would be great, as you mentioned, is an error report, showing where the RS goes wrong. we have a text dump of Gurney's RS calc, but the readout you get, although does help pin down the error, it's result leave most people completely lost.

hi gibbon,

I'll add a checkbox where you can decide if you want the bulkheads to be removed or not
and of course you don't have to mark them with the "I'm a bulkhead" marker.

And about hardpoints.. why does the element have to cover the whole model? the hardpoint itself does not save more then one vertex/point and the RS-tree can only say (in front of / behind)

so .. does the game use some kind of z-sort for attaching models via hardpoints ?

I'll do some tests anyway.. but thx for the warning

Hi rolin.

Here is an example.



The two elements shown, carry the hardpoints for the joint between fuselage and inner wing, and the inner wing to outer wing. The actual hardpoint position is 0,0,0, not in the middle of the elements, as you might think.

you don't even have to delete those elements. I've had good success with just assigning them an action code that won't show up in game. I use 146 / 4. That's the code to switch the pilot from living, to dead, to bailed out. The game only uses 146 /0-1-2.

hey cool info rotten50,

but that's no problem .. you can assign the action code to the bulkhead elements in max and simply disable the "delete bulkhead" function on export

so everyone can do like he wishes