News

24th July 2005 :
Added some notes to the OPTs Guide emphasise the importance of checking for if XWA crashes when an OPT is shot and that this can occur if a mesh has too many faces, even if a low-detail version has not (yet) been assigned.
Removed the preview rendered shots of the Dominator Interdictor from the XWA OPTs Download page.
Edited the XWA OPTs Download page to show the Dominator Interdictor, with all its shading problems, is now available for download.

22nd July 2005 :
Changed the Work-in-Progress shots of the Dominator Interdictor on the XWA OPTs Download page to rendered shots since I have finally managed to get the last texture done and applied. Renders are actually of my picture-version where I applied smoothing, some lightmaps, and defined some self-illumination. It was rather tempting to tell the light to cast shadows, and thus highlight the model details, but since XWA doesn't do that I decided not to.

11th June 2005 :
Modified the OPTs Guide to add a page with the information on a possible method of getting models from gMAX to OPTech to XWA. This text will mostly be familiar to people as most of it is cut-and-paste from the 3DS texturing page (since the methods of setting up texture mapping are the same) and the OBJ texturing page (since you may have to redefine what texture goes where on some meshes).
Modified the OPTs Guide, as suggested by Mateus Borges, to add the information on maximum number of Engine Glows (15) and that textures cannot be both self-illuminated and transparent.

8th April 2005 :
Modified the OPTs Guide to place different sections on separate pages. This will reduce the amount of scrolling and since the advice on 3DS, OBJ, and DXF texturing is now on separate pages would allow the two unwanted sections to be ignored more easily.
Added some Work-in-Progress shots of the Dominator Interdictor to the XWA OPTs Download page.
Added a page for my old XWA mission-set which I was reminded of and decided to release as it is so unlikely I'd ever do the the expanded version.

6th April 2005 :
Darksaber reminded me that his website address had changed and pointed out that although I had altered the links page I did still have links to his old URL on various pages.

4th April 2005 :
Modified the OPTs Guide to mention the information contributed by Mateus Borges on the maximum number of guns an OPT can have. Also added another extra note on fiddling around with texture gizmos in 3DS MAX.
Modified the Campaign Download page to have the links to the Cutscenes hosted at http://www.xvtedicion.es.tt by Jefe Picaro.

2nd April 2005 :
Added another extra note to the OPTs Guide to mention that (for me at least) if I have more than one material using the same texture (which can happen with multi-part textures) then in OPTech this texture is listed more than once in the Transparency / Self-Illumination editor.
Added a download page for my XvT: Balance of Power campaigns which have been sitting on a Zip disc for a few years. I considered putting these up for download when I did the site revamp but did not have room for the cutscenes and didn't think anyone would be interested.

26th March 2005 :
Added an extra note to the OPTs Guide to mention that (for me at least) the material editor settings in MAX do not translate when exporting as OBJ and loading this into OPTech (or when exporting as 3DS, converting with 3DSOPZ, and loading the resultant OPZ into OPTech) which is why I use texture-gizmo settings to achieve the same result (even if it can be more complicated than if I could use material editor cropping).

18th March 2005 :
Having upgraded my BT Internet Account I now definitely have enough room to make available all the OPTs I want to make available. Reorganised the OPTs Download page to put available OPTs in one table and those which need to be redone / are being redone in another.

15th March 2005 :
Did a little rewriting on the OPTs Guide to rephrase things slightly.

13th March 2005 :
Edited the OPTs Download page to reflect status of the Passenger Liner.
Made some changes to the OPTs Guide to add more advice on textures.

4th September 2004 :
Added a little bit of extra information to the OPTs Guide on mesh facecount limits and combining low and high detail models (LODs).
Edited the OPTs Download page to reflect status of the Modified Action Transport.

19th July 2004 :
Added information contributed by Corwyn Kalenda to the Problems with 3DS Export page on how to avoid problems with exporting from MAX.

8th June 2004 :
Added information contributed by Marcos Edson to the OPTs Guide on how to avoid the problem with turrets rotating 180-degrees away from the target.

2nd May 2004 :
Added some extra links to the Links page.

27th March 2004 :
Edited the OPTs Guide for a correction to the advice on splitting meshes, on scaling models, and on solving shading problems.
Decided the Dominator Interdictor Notes were getting ridiculous with all the postscripts and decided to rewrite them to summarise the later parts.
Added a couple of extra definitions to the Glossary page.

11th March 2004 :
Edited the OPTs Guide to reflect the solution to the shading problems suggested by KarmaQ3 and the updated 3DSOPZ from Isildur.
Edited the Dominator Interdictor Notes with a Post-post-post-Postscript for the revised plans.
Added a couple of extra definitions to the Glossary page.

29th February 2004 :
Managed to get things done before the end of February...because it is a leap year.
Finished writing the OPTs Guide which went smoother than expected as so much of the remaining text was things that I knew quite well rather than needing to try to work out.
Did a lot of cut-and-paste work from old website for the Missions Guide as I realised that (unlike with the OPTs where methods and software had changed) I couldn't think any real difference to how I would do things now from then. Added a few extra tips and if I ever get back into mission editing I will probably need to do some more revisions there.

22nd February 2004 :
Modified the Dominator Interdictor Notes yet more after yet more fiddling about with the damned thing. Added ingame shots of a OPT with a plain grey texture to illustrate the blasted shading problems.

19th February 2004 :
Modified the Dominator Interdictor Notes even more after fiddling with a test OPT to see which of the options previously listed for trying to solve excess shading would work best for each area and simplifying the model as it seems the only sure way to eliminate XWA adding extra shading along the edges of coplanar faces is to eliminate the edges between them by using fewer faces.
Added the very old (nearly four years old) Sienar Fleet Systems Construction Yard OPT to the Downloads page.

18th February 2004 :
Modified the Dominator Interdictor Notes some more as I spent more time fiddling with the model to see how bad the excess shading was and found that neither of the solutions that had seemed to work before worked now.

17th February 2004 :
Modified the Dominator Interdictor Notes to reflect feedback from the thread at XWAU and experimentation with another method of solving the problem with meshes being displaced when saving as a 3DS file from 3DS MAX 2. Also added renders of model with material ID setup to show why redefining that would be rather fiddly.
Modified the 3DS Export Sidenote page for the same reason with more details of the fourth solution to the problems of obsolete (but still useable and comfortably familiar) software.
Added a few more definitions to the Glossary page.

14th February 2004 :
Added a page with a Glossary of Terms. This took some time in modifying and creating graphics and I then found I had rather fewer ideas for entries than I had thought when I decided to add the page.
Modified Cutscenes page to mention that XWA can be used to produce moving as well as still pictures.
Added TIE Fighter Total Conversion to links page.

3rd February 2004 :
Modified OPT Download page to make it clearer which category models under "Abandoned or Semi-Abandoned" fell under. Also edited entries for MC-80s under "Future Releases" to reflect revision plans and added Passenger Liner and Modified Action Transport to that section.
Added information on Miscellaneous page from OI Monk on maximum length of e-mails being twelve lines due to lack of scroll bars on screen in family quarters.

1st February 2004 :
Uploaded this revised website having decided that this had gone on long enough and that it would be better to upload a version minus mission and OPT making guides than to leave the old site up with outdated advice any longer.
Reorganised OPT Downloads page to be more of a complete list of past, present, and future projects. Ended up, due to most of the satisfactory OPTs being available at either the XWAU or as part of Darksabers Ultimate Craft Patch, having only two available. Hopefully the numbers will increase, though would not be that soon since the next projects on my list are XWAU.
Revised Cutscenes section to reflect Isildurs excellent utilities which in XCR finally gave me success in adding a new cutscene (rather than copying one of TGs) as well as replacing various of the snm format animations in the XWA Frontend and in OPT3DS gives a way to get ships formerly only available as OPTs into a 3D modelling.animation package for these cutscenes.
After looking at the rather attractive Imperial Concourse I did rather a lot of experimenting with trying to edit every aspect of the look of XWA and aside from the family awards which still puzzle me managed to have enough success, and spend enough time on it, that the information was lengthy enough to warrant being placed in a new Frontend rather than remaining part of Miscellaneous.
Reorganised the Miscellaneous section a little.
Reorganised the Links page to split links by type and reflect more what sites I visit these days.