Battlefield 1942 Mods, Modding Tutorials & Forums

just about to start this but thought id get some thoughts from you guys.

I am going to add some armour plates to a car.. these will just be on sides, front and back with the idea being to have intentionl gaps in between where you can damage the car 'more'

is this just a case of assigning 'armour' to the car but 'heavy armour' to the plating on the matid's of the respective collision meshes..? or is there more to it?

Well yes there's more to it. The LightAmour and HeavyAmour setting only defines what type of vehicle the game see's it as. It also tells bots what kind of vehicle it is and what weapons to use against it.

For what you want to do, you will need to add panels with a matID that a heavyAmour vehicle like a M1A1 uses (typically mat ID 53 thru 56). The collision meshes for your armour plate objects would need to be set to a higher mat ID then the host vhehicle. How much damage a vehicle takes from a projectile is determined by the material ID on it's collision mesh. The vehicle "type" has no impact on this. Mat IDs 60 and higher are usually used by aircraft and using those will result in the vehicle taking much more damage then before.

Also note that using the ObjectTemplate.material command won't be enough. You will need to modify the mesh file so the collision mesh for the panels has the new mat ID too.