I have my ship now, well at least i have a model and its uv map layed out properly,

Textures:
1. What is the advisable size of the texture to be used?
(I normally use 2048x2048, but thats for static renders or animation renders, not for games so i realize this might be too much for FL? but with some of the crazy stuff Ive seen in some of the mods out there like that starwars one, i still wonder.

2. How do i also do transparency?
i only know that PNG has transparency as part of it?

3. What is the file type i need to use?
(from the software package, i assume it needs some crazy conversion into another freelancer only file type? everything else seems to need this )

The model is small light fighter class, 1100 polys, it has lots of round surfaces so the count might be a little higher than i wanted, but.. again im not sure of the "norm" poly counts per ship. or if there is a maximum poly count or even a minimum?

for transparency you can use dds or tga. but tga is best for this type of texture. However if it is a glass texture i would recommend looking at the vanilla ships, as they do not use textures at all for glass, but procedural materials for glass.

other than that just to agree with fagu about the textures, 512x512 is recommended for best look and performance. however you can go up to 1024x1024.

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1100 poly's, now is that four or more point based polygons? or is that tripled geometry? of that is tripled then you still have tons of room for mesh based details which would reduce the amount of texture based details needed, thus reducing overall workload to get the model into a 'done' state. You fairly safe up to about 5000 triangles on a mesh for smaller vessels. and upto ~approx 10-12K for a larger vessel such as a battleship and even starbases. Athough, the less the better. But the room is there.

Im receiving conflicting information from various people. some people saying that UV maps don't work properly in freelancer? and that you have to use Tile textures for your models

I have my UV map here.



is this a bad UV map? im so confused with all this. somebody just help me set the facts right.

can i use this 1 UV map to texture my plane model and put it freelancer? or is there a certain method for doing this?

Well i'm with the UV map brigade myself. 1 texture, 512x512 or 1024x1024, doesn't need to be bigger, coverted to a SQUARE dds texture (saved as DXT1 no alpha) . Best way to go.

TGA textures are old school, you have to flip them for a start and consume way too much memory, a complete waste of time and effort. Only thing they are useful for is making icons.

perfect sence.. I use the texture map that Gnomon use.




heres the model with just the above map.



UV'ing isnt a problem, i just wanted to know if they can be used because some people are saying otherwise.. and its confusing... anyway, enough people here have said they will work so i will go with that for now.




looks a little blured with a 512 texture. but oh well, it will do for me for now.

My next questions are

How do i save as a DDS file?

And

I have saved the plane as an OBJ file, a mtl file came with it, it seems.

what is the next step to get the model ready for in game use? and what is the mtl file and do i need it?

Most of Freeworlds' textures are 1024 and above. Many are multiple 2048 textures even. The game can cope with it just fine, I don't see why you people are restricting yourselves to crappy 5125x512 textures. There's a reason why the game uses those: it's almost a decade old. GPUs back then had 128mb of VRAM, current ones start at 1gb.

Just make sure to save them as DDS with no mipmaps (FL handles them very poorly, which can often explain blurry maps) and for best results turn on anisotropic filtering in your GPU's control panel.

There are 4 ways to do transparency in FL:

• In the Texture - Opacity built right in, using (TGA) or (DXT Xbits +X alpha). For this just start with your background transparent.


• In the Material :
  
  
  
  1. Non transparent background TGA / DXT as your Dt node, along with a gray scale Opacity map in an Ot node (Type: DcDtOt)
  
  
  2. Non transparent background TGA / DXT as your Dt node, along with an Oc node adjusting the opacity for the entire texture -0.0 for full see-through, 1.0 for solid as a brick wall.
  
  
  3. Purely a DcOc with Glass in the name -check vanilla LF, HF, VHF models for examples.
  
  
  
  

For using an opacity map, or creating a Dc/Glass mat, you'll need a copy of UTF editor -the more current, the better.
Where to look: in the .mat file named like your *shipname, or the material library section within your CMP / 3DB when you choose to include materials directly into the model when exporting.

*many vanilla models use a texture archive approach, referencing textures from one or more common .mat (or .txm for planets etc) files. This can be easy to spot if you have no texture library, and or material library node. Take Liberty ships for example, no mat files in each ship directory, no texture library or material library entries within the ship's cmp, but in the \SHIPS\LIBERTY\ directory we have li_playerships.mat

Most common mat file entries:
Dc - diffuse color
Dt - diffuse texture
Oc - opacity color (grayscale 0 to 1)
Ot - opacity texture (grayscale texture applied to Dc and or Dt)
Et - emissive texture (glow map for lights and other purtiness)
It's a good idea to become familiar with all these, just study various vanilla examples.

For DXT conversion you have a few choices; Exporter plugin for whatever image editing prog you use. Or proprietary DXT compressors from nVidia / ATI depending on your gfx card (usually command-line, but can be nice for batches). Check their websites for those specialized tools.

Last Note: When you install Freelancer, all ini files are encoded. To edit these (to say.. change a material location for the ship) you must either decode them manually, one by one...
OR have already installed a modder's copy of them (unofficial patch by Adoxa or EOA). Check the downloads section here, if that doesn't lead you to it, search Adoxa and I believe he'll have a link with his website which has tons of FL related tools.

I think SDK 1.3 is the least buggy, weren't there some uncertainties about bugs in SDK 1.5?