[HELP] Guidelines/tuto on tweaking / completing vehicle after export from Max

[temexter]

Gents, for starters i must confess that my knowlegde of PR vehicles is quite poor. I have made some placeholders for FDF by cloning an existing vehicle and then tweaked code, fixed the bundlemesh and changed the textures to quick'n'dirty re-skins made by myself, e.g. GWagon, MTLB, Leo2A6 and Mi-8

As i have wandered through the deep and dark forest of community modding forums, tutos and threads, even bf2editor forums with no luck, i would kindly ask for a heads up or "primer" on what are the steps and actions needed for a vehicle after export?

I suppose something can be done with BF2Editor, which is a shitpile i'm not gonna touch until the utmost last resort (although i do have a working pr_edit for FDF assets and i have used it with weapons and vehicles that i have already tweaked and are now ingame).

I also have got the impression, that most or all of coding to make a working vehicle can be done by just editing the code. And using a similar vehicle as a reference. Especially if parts - like they definitely should - in export are named similarly.

ATM i have only a .con file. No .tweak. Do i create a .tweak from certain code in .con or should it be output of export or BF2Editor? Can i add the weapon system in BF2Editor or is it easier and leaner to just edit the code?

I most likely can end up with some kind of "working" vehicle, but as i have some history in software industry, i wouldn't like to spend time in doing things in wrong way and without guidelines which most likely do exist. Although not published publicly.

As we have many weapons and vehicles needing export and final coding, solving this would vastly help FDF faction to reach the state required for some ingame testing and OFC we'd like to see that happen in very near furure

Cheers,

Temexter

[Kovanaama]

Need answers still.

[Rhino]

How you go about coding a vehicle depends really on what vehicle it is, so it would help if you told us

But to start off with, get the BF2 Editor to make you a really basic .tweak file of your object. The best way to do this is to open up the editor and edit some of the basic settings for the vehicle like its col materials (Step 7: Coding - Materials, although this tut is for a static object rather than a vehicle, the coding method is the same just the materials you use is different, would also finalise material numbers though hand coding comparing to a similar vehicle), its cull distances and the lod distances (note as per the tut the editor may not save the lod distances correctly so you may need to hand edit them in after), then save it though the editor and it will create a .tweak. From there I would only do coding by hand, using the editor as a ref to visualise your code changes with also setting the editor up to load modified .con and .tweak files.

[temexter]

Cheers Rhino, that's about all i needed to know.

Now back to the grind