A 3rd party model is any model which is NOT built by myself, or another member of the SoA 2 team. We use models made mostly for Starfleet Command, and Bridge Commander mods. The majority of the Dominion faction came from the original SoA mod. As did the Nebula, The Negh Var, Kvort, etc. Who made which model "should" be on that particular models texture sheet. If it says "Trekmods" then it came from the original SoA mod.
I built the Excelsior (and all of its variants), The Fed fighter, All of the Federation stations except for the starbase, and Jupiter station. The Ambassador, Part of the Galaxy, The Constellation. Plus I had a hand in most of the Original SoA work.
Myself, and the SFC, BC, and Homeworld mod community built these models based on the Standards of Homeworld, BC, and Starfleet Command modding at the time. "Open" meshes with many intersecting polys, and other cheats to get away with the best looking ships for as few polys as possible. "Taste great-Less filling" is how i call the method.
Even though Bridge Commander said "closed" meshes were the best method for that particular game. We modeled them open anyway. It worked. There were no mesh issues. 4000 tri's in 2002-2003 was considered a ridiculous amount at the time. It still is ridiculous for an RTS game with hundreds of units on the map at once at any given time like Sins.
The main issue is ConvertXSI will sometimes corrupt "open" meshes. You will lose all tangent info, or tangent info gets screwed up to where you have a single poly brightly lit while the rest of the mesh is dark, and in some cases faces will flip to where it looks like the mesh is missing faces.
for example. You model a half sphere, and place it over a "solid" cube to hide the area that is missing faces. That is considered an "open" mesh. The cube itself will convert just fine, but the open half sphere will corrupt.
This is why the models have to be re-meshed, because most if not all of them are "open" meshes. A closed mesh with no intersecting polys, and no open areas is called a "solid" mesh. Basically the way Bridge Commander wants its meshes is the way we "should" be meshing Sins models. You can get away with "some" open areas but it is a dice roll to see if it will come out corrupt, or not.
I thought the issue was ConvertXSI itself, but it seems it is the meshes themselves that are the issue.
I hope you all get this bit of tech talk.
The models that need the most love are the models that are the worst offenders in the "mesh corruption" aspect. Kvort, Excelsior, Negh Var, Kron, The Galaxy, The Defiant, ALL of the Dominion. Pretty much every model in game as far as i am concerned.
It is kind of funny 10 years ago i was fighting "texture corruption" in the Homeworld mods. Now it is the opposite, and i am fighting "mesh corruption".
We have yet to make any pirate ships.
Ask Jay, and crew about the AI, and Gameplay. I just want to build models.
