Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ] Posts: 132
Want to create a sign/billboard but don't/can't use a modeling program to create a mesh to put your texture on?
There are two ways to do this. But I'll only mention the SimpleGeom class since this is practically unused in BF1942. The other method being using the Billboard system and perhaps the effect system via a sprite, but that still requires a host mesh to define the size/aspect ratio of the billboard and the effect system is a bit more complicated to explain. So for now I'll cover the easiest method. I mentioned this here, since it might prove useful for those who aren't into creating custom objects, but kinda still want's to put a sign or something to that effect in their square. Or perhaps they just want to stamp their avatar/signature and want an object/mesh to put it on.
There is a little known unused Geometry class called SimpleGeom. Example code below:
There are 3 "Types" that can be set for the shapes this geometry class creates. One is unusable and will CTD on creation. Sphere, Plane, and Box. However the "Box" type is bugged. Game will CTD saying something about not being able to create a mesh with zero vertices, so it looks like that mesh type is not available.
So the other two is Sphere and Plane. In this instance, "Plane" will most likely be the most useful as you can use this for your sign.
The tesselation command increases the poly count on the mesh. It's a vector 2. Horizontal/Vertical. For spheres, it makes them more smooth by adding polys. Using anything below 3 I think will crash if you use the Sphere type. Since the game can't create a sphere with only 2 or one polygon(s).
But for planes you won't notice much with higher numbers. But it will effect the tiling of the texture on it. So keep it to 1/1 for planes if you intend to only have the texture not repeat on the mesh more then once. Using higher numbers will "tile" the texture on the extra polygons so you get a repeating pattern of the same texture.
The scale command defines it's size. In the next example below, it's used to set it to be 2 meters wide and 4 meters tall. Since a plane mesh is 2D, the Y axis scale is probably not going to do anything.
The color command sets the color, though this may be overridden by the RS file. Haven't toyed with it very much. The "shader" command is the most important command. This tells the game what "shader" to assign to the generated mesh. When you path to the RS file, the RS file is interpreted as a folder, so you path all the way to the actual material in the RS file. In that example it was "Material0" from one of those unused RS files in the art folders for one of the tanks.
You can then just about do anything with the shader you want. But the main limitation is you can't have any alpha in the texture. Transparency doesn't work at all on this geometry class unfortunately. Also don't expect the mesh to have collision physics. As far as I can tell the game doesn't support that.
So to create a simple sign in 16_Squares, you can do this:
Then just create a RS file with notepad that looks something like this: (remember, the RS file is like a folder/container to BF1942's point of view. So path through it as if it was a folder when setting up the shader command to point to the material)
Then BAM! You got your self a mesh with a texture generated with only code! All you need is a texture to put on it. You can use various RS shader commands like "twosided" to make it double sided. But just remember that you can't have alpha in the texture. The geometry class doesn't seem to support it, so alpha gets ignored and the alpha areas will appear black/white depending on the texture used.