Osmic's 3D Models

[Hatsjoe]

I suppose the person who wrote the program to convert your objects to .pie should know. I suppose that 1max unit equals 1pie unit. But does 1 pie unit equal one warzone tile? And what if you change standard units in max ?
Let's say the converter converts 1 inch in max to 1 pie unit
will it correctly convert 1cm or not ?
After conversion, the files can be easily scaled to fit the correct size. But I remember when i used Pie Slicer that scaling sometimes ruined a model because of the low precision of the pie format. Not sure whether that's still a problem though.

[doom3r]

If we knew what is a pie unit equal to, it would be easy to convert the current Max unit to the one which fits better

[Hatsjoe]

If I remember correctly, a wz tile consists of 10 pie units. And accuracy of vertices in pie slicer (and probably the pie format) was adjustable to 0.1 unit. This makes it possible to adjust each "point" in a model 100 different positions in each direction (X,Y,Z) per tile. And 1 tile is about the size of a heavy tank (???). Assuming that 1 unit in max gets converted to 1 pie unit, don't put more detail in the models than 0.1 of a unit.

But, this is all based on my aging knowledge of the pie format and so should be confirmed before taken for granted !!!

[doom3r]

don't put more detail in the models than 0.1 of a unit.

And it looks like not every Osmic's model was made with this idea in mind. If it wasnt ok right now, think if you put 2-3 of them in the same tile...

[Hatsjoe]

And it looks like not every Osmic's model was made with this idea in mind. If it wasnt ok right now, think if you put 2-3 of them in the same tile...

It might be ok. If all i was saying is correct, the pie file will have slightly shifted some vertices but since it are plants, deviations from perfect are very normal. Geometric models could be more troublesome. That's the reason why using Pie slicer or the new pie editor, works best. No need to worry about such things (as long as you start with the right scale in mind)

[Per]

I think a tile is 128x128 units, not 10.

[Osmic]

The double turret base in Per's in-game screenshots looks like it didn't round any decimals or I was very lucky when I made it since it looks exactly like in the renders.

Knowing what one Max unit equals in real life would prevent me from making e.g. a door for mice or in another case one that a oil tanker can fit through.

Well, maybe when the pie to 3ds converter is done (and the texture coordinates stay correct) it can be measured from the existing building models.

[Hatsjoe]

I think a tile is 128x128 units, not 10.

I've been looking in to it. Opened up a pie file in notepad and there are no decimals in it. Meaning a tile could very well be 128units. that's only a little bit more than the 100 i thought. But I m completely stuck now. who wrote the converter that was used to create the pie file of the hardpoint from the beginning of this thread ? He has all the answers here :p

[Per]

who wrote the converter that was used to create the pie file of the hardpoint from the beginning of this thread

I did.

[Hatsjoe]

Well then, how are max units converted to pie units? 

[kage]

if you're passing the model through the blender scripts (any version), you go to the "3D view", then menu "view -> view properties", and set under the grid section:
spacing = 0.51
lines = 6
divisions = 10

then you've got a pretty good reference by which you can wing it.

with the following settings, you can see that in the first image, it's not perfect, but it's close enough (blender uses a smaller float type to store grid spacing than the point coordinate data, so this is as close as it'll get)

as can be seen in the second image (hard to see maybe), blender is drawing grid lines on top of the pie object. the grid you just set up displays up to and only up to 3x3 warzone-sized tiles. i illustrate this in the third:

• red: inner-most 4x4 area represents a single warzone tile, used for editing units and defenses
• violet: inner-most 8x8 area represents 2x2 tiles, used for editing most structures
• blue: entire grid (16x16 area) represents 3x3 tiles, and can be used to edit the largest structures in stock warzone, which are the factories.

obviously it's a bit annoying to have to save these settings each time, so it works well to set up this grid fresh from blender start and then "save default settings", which can be done with ctrl+u.

[doom3r]

Nice explanation, Kage

[DevUrandom]

Using the 3DS 2 PIE converter, I imported your models into Warzone 2100. (It doesn't use the alpha-mask, since WZ currently doesn't support that. You could use an alpha channel directly in the texture though.)

See the screenshots for how it looks in-game.
In case you wonder why you can't get as near to the ground: I decreased the minimum zoom to make these shots.
Since they are still very small, I can't really tell if there were any conversion errors or whether that look is just normal at this size.

I used Grim's mod as a template, and replaced the walls with your grass for now. Result is also attached. (To test rename *.pie to blwallh.pie, for example.)

[DevUrandom]

Here is a screenshot how that merge would look like (shadows disabled, since it interacts badly with transparent textures...).
And of course the modified texture...

[kage]

i think they look out of place on their own -- perhaps putting the same model into a group of them, and adding a little more desert greenery around so that it's really a grove, or at least a "patch" of these plants would shut me up