Creating the Landkreuzer P. 1500 Monster

[Skull Kid]

So... I'm about to re-create these two behemoth's for Battlefield 1942... the problem is... I would really really REALLY need someone who is experienced on modding with Battlefield 1942. Someone here, on the forums, will be a GREAT help!

First off, I'm starting with the Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte (more accurate than the one in FHSW). Is it true that I should model piece by piece? (e.g. should I model the hull, turret, gun etc. and export from .3ds to .sm in different models? If so, how do I make them placed correctly in-game?

[Swaffy]

I've never understood how people made vehicles for the game while positioning the parts correctly. So I'm going to watch this thread in case I can learn something too.

[Apache Thunder]

The trick I've used when building vehicles in BF1942 is to save the info for all the parts in 3DS Max which is what I use to view/create the meshes for the vehicles. As long as you preserve the correct center of mass for all the child objects of a vehicle, you can position them all in max and record their position/rotation info in the Max scene.

Just know that the Max has it ordered "XYZ" (Z being vertical position and Y being front/back position) and the game has it XZY. So you'll need to switch those around. You may also need to do the same with the rotational settings.

The correct scale in Max need to be set to 0.1 meters for the position information to be translated to BF1942 without having to mess with the position of the decimal point in all the numbers. Using 3DS Max you can have a visual representation for all the parts of your vehicle so that you can know where they will end up once you got the vehicle ingame.

If you want to alter an existing vehicle like move a turret or something and need to see where it will end up. You can use the MDT tools Vehicle Importer function to import the vehicle which will import all the meshes and child objects. It will even include the dummy objects like seats and cameras. Just make sure you NEVER save any changes using the vehicle importer/export tools in MDT directly since it will 99.9% chance of it seriously borking the coding structure and will most certainly brake the vehicle and perhaps the whole mod. It's best only to use it to view the vehicle. You can then use the position settings in the max scene to manually edit the code for the vehicle with notepad and such and repacking it into the RFA your self.

[Senshi]

I usually just create all the individual .sm files, then create the vehicle code, addtemplating all the children to random positions or 0/0/0. After that, I pack it as .rfa, fire up 3ds Max7, load the vehicle using the "Vehicle" tab in the MDT, happily alter all positions as needed and save again. Voila, perfect positions stored in the .rfa . As this usually is a one-time job this method works best for me.

If you still are interested into looking at the FHSW Ratte, long ago I ported that one over to my vanilla mod. As the FHSW Ratte is a huge object with more than 12 children PCOs that are simply attached with "holdobject" (turrets...), the code is absolutely immense. Trying to recreate that from scratch without good modding knowledge is difficult. I strongly suggest you'd rather try porting it in first, because you can learn a lot from the way that object has been created, a lot of interesting and unique stuff in there. At least I learned a lot from it.

[Skull Kid]

I usually just create all the individual .sm files, then create the vehicle code, addtemplating all the children to random positions or 0/0/0. After that, I pack it as .rfa, fire up 3ds Max7, load the vehicle using the "Vehicle" tab in the MDT, happily alter all positions as needed and save again. Voila, perfect positions stored in the .rfa . As this usually is a one-time job this method works best for me.

If you still are interested into looking at the FHSW Ratte, long ago I ported that one over to my vanilla mod. As the FHSW Ratte is a huge object with more than 12 children PCOs that are simply attached with "holdobject" (turrets...), the code is absolutely immense. Trying to recreate that from scratch without good modding knowledge is difficult. I strongly suggest you'd rather try porting it in first, because you can learn a lot from the way that object has been created, a lot of interesting and unique stuff in there. At least I learned a lot from it.

A lot of veterans have replied here... and I have HUGE respect for you all =)

The thing is it seems the objects.rfa is compressed in some weird way... in FHSW...

[Senshi]

Not sure, haven'T fiddled with the new FHSW mod. Kinda curious what they did, because the objects.rfa usually always gotta be fairly straightforward...

Anyway, you always could just grab an older version of FHSW to retrieve the Ratte from. If you want, I could also upload my modjob for you, though it also is an amalgamation of various other mods, fitted together mostly to improve the looks and sounds of vanilla BF42 without making crucial gameplay alterations (or more precise: The whole developement was community-driven, e.g. everyone hated the "wobbly" tanks that wiggled after every shot and things like that). You could take a look at how the Ratte is implemented there, which should be fairly similar to most other mod implementations.

[Skull Kid]

Not sure, haven'T fiddled with the new FHSW mod. Kinda curious what they did, because the objects.rfa usually always gotta be fairly straightforward...

Anyway, you always could just grab an older version of FHSW to retrieve the Ratte from. If you want, I could also upload my modjob for you, though it also is an amalgamation of various other mods, fitted together mostly to improve the looks and sounds of vanilla BF42 without making crucial gameplay alterations (or more precise: The whole developement was community-driven, e.g. everyone hated the "wobbly" tanks that wiggled after every shot and things like that). You could take a look at how the Ratte is implemented there, which should be fairly similar to most other mod implementations.

Sounds good to me =) I would definitely want to take a look at the existing Ratte, in the Vehicle Importer.

[Swaffy]

The thing is it seems the objects.rfa is compressed in some weird way... in FHSW...

Try using a different RFA tool to extract the Objects.rfa files. I had a lot of problems when using Col. Cruachan's RFA Editor way back when I began modding, and was pretty much forced to get used to WinRFA due to issues extracting some RFA files. BGA should work well too. I haven't seen the layout/setup for FHSW's Objects.rfa file, but it is usually basic because of the text-based file types inside of it.

[Skull Kid]

Dear community,

I have indeed started to build the Ratte from scratch. As the one that exist doesn't remind me of the original plans. But don't worry, I still like the original, but I will make a model as equal to the plans as possible. Anyway, here's the first render in 3ds Max 2013.

[Senshi]

Thing is, there were indeed several different designs for both projects. As the entire project got scrapped very early, there wasn't even made a decision on the design yet. So pretty much every model is fair game, considering that most of them are actually just artists' renditions.

But sure, best of luck with your endeavour. It will certainly propel your modding experience forward . It's always good to have a sort of project to work and learn on.