Docking issues

!?!?!?!? Good grief! I don't know what's going on. This is absolutely bizarre. I need to investigate this further.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
cartoons.sev.com.au/index.php?catid=4
.

As far as I remember the docking process never competed untill I interrupted with F5 and started F8 again.
And the TieFighter didn't make contact with the dockport of the station. The wings were too close together.
I think the ships should be bigger for that reason too.





There is no safe distance

The ship avatars have nothing to do with docking (or anything, for that matter). And collision detection for the c_hulls is apparently turned off between the two docking sims, as can be demonstrated by the fact that two ships can dock right through each other. The reason for the ships not making contact with the stations is due to inexact placement of docking nulls on the stations by PS. That's always been a pet peeve of mine; the sloppy null placements in all of the sim files. But since PS had an unbreakable ship date, they probably just started running out of time. As long as the nulls looked basically right, they didn't have to be exact.

My suggestion, is to go through whatever stations get used, and check and fix their null placements. As for the docking problems with the Rebel ships, it truly is bizarre. They use the standard rear dockport nulls set up in the Default_Sim_Setup.lws shipped with the Graphic SDK.

But I have an idea. Up until now, I've just been blindly trusting that the dockports in that file were setup right. Let me go and have a look at the default file and make sure they're set up right. This whole thing could be caused by me just repeatedly spitting out files that all have the exact same problem because the problem comes from the default setup. Remember, the X and A-wings are the only ships which use the rear dockports. This leads me to believe that the problem lies with the rear dockport orientation in the default file.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
cartoons.sev.com.au/index.php?catid=4
.

Note: the first aft docking version of the A-Wing and X-Wing, docked properly in reference to position and orientation, it was just hard to get them to dock at all. I'll roll back to that version and see if removing the rotation in that lws will help.

I kinda believe the dockports have a z-direction themselves so you have to place them pointing in the right direction in the first place. (rotation doesn't seem to work right on many models I've tried, not just the SW models)

I don't think we should blame PS for the dockport stuff on our stations. I think way back when we made the multiplayer stations for what_rocks, we may have fooled around with the dockport positions.
(thats why I asked if you could look at them)

Iwar2 Multiplayer Fan Site

I kinda believe the dockports have a z-direction themselves so you have to place them pointing in the right direction in the first place.

Yes, absolutely they do. The ships will dock aligned with the dockport. So if your dockport points the wrong way, then you end up with half your ship sticking through the other ship. It might be helpful if you could either post or send me a few pics showing the bad docking orientation. It might give me an idea of which rotation is off.

I don't think we should blame PS for the dockport stuff on our stations.

I wasn't talking about our stations specifically. I was talking about the EoC sim setups in general.

There are numerous model related problems throughout the entire game. I'm not putting PS down, quite the contrary, I was sticking up for them by pointing out that they needed to be finished by a ship date. But mistakes are mistakes, and this game has them. I just recently pointed out two major mistakes in the main 3D forum (both of which affect game balance). These were things that shouldn't be. But hey, it happens to the best of us.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
cartoons.sev.com.au/index.php?catid=4
.

<font size="5">Docking Issue Solved.</font id="size5">

The problem is 100% with the stations. After an exhaustive test of LW files and dockport switching, I have determined that the Rebel ship dockports are perfect. Using the setups I recently sent to MajorTom for the X and A-Wings (without changing anything, no rotating the dockports!), I repeatedly docked both ships to the star destroyer mock-up in under 5 seconds.

I believe that the problem is that the station dockports are actually rotated backwards. And apparently a ship will dock to a backwards port, but it'll do a lot of complaining first. Since no problems were reported with other ships, I expect that for some reason using the rear dockports somehow compounds the problem a ship has with trying to dock to a backwards port. Thus only the X and A-Wing experienced this problem.

MajorTom, let me know if you want me to send you these files again (in case you changed yours). Also, if you can tell me exactly which station files are giving you trouble docking, I'll go in and fix them.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos (on hold during SW MP mod)
cartoons.sev.com.au/index.php?catid=4
.