Strat Wars - Scenario Editing

This panel focuses on how your ship and cockpit appear in the screensaver.

You can tell the Ship Editor what type of unit you're most comfortable working with here, meters or feet. These units are used by the Nudge button, allowing you to immediate have some feel for what amounts you need to nudge. All other values used in the screensaver are "Strat Wars units". Having a number in a human-understandable number helps you visualize the actual amount of nudge better.

If you have imported a texture map, it's Ship Editor converted name is displayed in the Texture file field. It is possible to change the name of your texture file (if you need to match the ship's name or whatever). The best way to do this is to change the texture's name in the finder first, then change the name in the Ship Editor. You must have a texture map attached to your .3ds model to use these options. You'll notice that this field is unselectable without a texture, keeping you from adding one. (C'mon, you got to have your model mapped to it anyway!)

The best part of this feature is that it allows you to quickly make ships with alternate textures, such as squadron-specific markings. Remember that textures must be in either .jpg, .bmp or .png format. You can edit these textures outside of the Ship Editor, so long as they've been imported with the Ship Editor in the construction of your ship. Once Ship Editor has saved them (when you save the .shp file), further modifications to the textures do not require the Ship Editor (as long as you don't change the texture name).

The Save with external model file and Save with external texture file options are now depreciated and will be removed in future releases of the Ship Editor.

Sometimes (most of the time in my case), your ship model will come in with its nose not pointing in the +X direction (the direction the red axis is pointing). In these cases, unless you want your ship flying sideways, you'll need to make the model point in the right direction. The simplest way to correct this is to look at the axes and decide what axes should be swapped, then press the corresponding Swap Axis button.

Now if you're saying "WHA?!?" right now, it's because the swapping action swaps polygon faces in most cases making the model look like it's inside out. That's allright. Continue swapping and flipping axes until your model is right-side up (the top is pointing in the direction of the blue arrow and is pointing forward (in the direction of the red arrow). If, after all of your transformations the model still looks inside out, press the Reverse polygon order button. This will flip all of the polygons in the model and your model should look solid again.

Once you have the model pointed in the right direction, you will want to tell the screensaver where the center of the model is. This is especially important for realistic flight. Model centers that are way off will make the ship look more like it is being thrown around than actually flying. Some models, like the Cylon Raider, look fine with the center in the center of the model. Other ships, especially those that look more traditionally like conventional jets, such as the Colonial Viper, obtain a more realistic flight by pushing the center towards the rear of the ship. You basically just need to envision how the ship should fly in your head, pinpointing the pivot of its turns, and then put the origin of the axes at that point on your ship.

Nudging will allow you to literally nudge your model around until it is positioned where you want it. The three fields correspond to the the X, Y and Z axes. If you put a 1 in the X axis field and press the Nudge button, the model will move 1 unit in the +X direction. I like to start with a value of 1 and nudge until I overshoot, then start going back the other way in increments. For instance I might say 1 in the X field until I overshoot, then do a couple of -0.2 nudges until I overshoot, then one or two 0.05 nudges until I have the ship's model in the exact place I want it. (I just use arbitrary values. As you nudge you should get a good feel for distance and will be able to guesstimate better.) It is recommended, at least until you get used to the Nudge button, to only nudge one axis at a time.

Nudging is also used to position the cockpit model. You will want to make sure the cockpit model is in front of any model surfaces as the two are blended together to make the cockpit view. This has its advantages and its drawbacks. The advantages are that the existing external model can take a bunch of cockpit modeling off your hands. If you have (again as an example) a traditional jet, like a F-16, the nose of the external model will of course need to be seen in the cockpit model. Using the external model, in conjunction with the cockpit model, allows you to only have to make the cockpit frame itself (the cockpit bubble with holes where the glass should be).

The drawbacks to this are sometimes the model's nose appears with a hole in it, especially if your cockpit view is from slightly inside the closed external model. Also, again with the F-16 model, the nose might appear to slice well into the cockpit area, making it appear that there actually is *no* cockpit - just a cage placed on a nose. This can get kind of tricky!

One solution is, if there is no part of the external model that should be visible, place the cockpit model and its corresponding view (we'll get to this in the next panel) farther in front of the external model than it should be. The guns and turrets will appear to fire from the same relative location and the external model will not interfere with the cockpit view.

The other solution is to build a cockpit "well" - the part in which the pilot is actually sitting - and blend that with the external model view. Again, any part of the external model that comes too close to the cockpit view plane or any external model plane that we are effectively looking at the "back" of due to the cockpit view will not appear. You can use this to your advantage. It's just kinda tricky.

The last two options determine how the screensaver treats your model in relation to the light source (sun). Reverse lighting normals should be used when the lighting appears odd in the screensaver. Sometimes the ships can look like they are being lit backwards in relation to the sun (faces away from the sun are lit, while those near is are not). Selecting this option corrects that.

The Don't compute per vertex shading information option is provided as a faster way to save files while you are working on them.Per vertex shading is used by the screensaver to smooth shade the mode, giving the appearance that the model is more rounded than the actual polygons state. If left unchecked, the Ship Editor will calculate all of the polygon faces for the screensaver which can be a very time-consuming process depending on the complexity of your ship (some of the most complex models might actually appear to hang the Ship Editor on saves with this turned on - again, it can dramatically increase save times). In general, it's faster to check this box while you're working on the ship for speedier saves. Just remember after you're done to save the model with this option checked for proper lighting within the screensaver.

If your model is composed mostly of flat surfaces, it would be better to never enable per vertex shading. Models without the shading tend to have a more paneled look and if that's what you want, it will actually be faster in every respect to leave per vertex shading off. Sometimes models may have flickering parts or other weird artifacts. Disabling per vertex shading can fix those too. As poly counts of models increase, per vertex shading becomes less and less necessary (and more and more time consuming!). The Deep Space Nine station pictured in the screenshots of the homepage took a little over an hour to compute with per vertex shading turned on and just under seven seconds with it off (and ended up looking a lot better due to its complexity).