Problems with Actors

JXMcKie · Post by **JXMcKie** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 9:50 am

I am new to RF, but have recently started toying with this engine. However I experience problems when I try to create and view .act files.
I would be very gratefull if someone could help me with this problem.....

I use Milkshape to create a model and export the model to .bdy file. Then I use Actor Studio in RF to create an .act files. So far so good...no problems...I can view the untextured actor i created in ActView but when I try to load the actor in Viewer MFC the Application crashes, every single time, and yes I remember to scale the Bmp images that I use for textures to power of 2. Converting f.ex. Halflife models to act files produces the same result....a crash. Also if I extract and decompile the act files from techdemo.vfs I get nice bdy and mot files, but when I try to import those into Milkshape they causes Milkshape to crash. Could anyone please tell me what I am doing wrong (its most likely something very basic or simple - and yes I have read parts of the manual about this procedure, but apparently without results).

JXMcKie

Post by **Jay** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 10:59 am

About Viewer: I am sorry to tell this, but Viewer.exe has a few bugs. Doesn't matter if Viewer.exe does crash, RF won't, as long as you can view your actor in ActView.exe. So often it is better to use ActView. To see if the actors really work, just use them in a level via StaticMesh-Entity.

Milkshape importing: You're not doing anything wrong. Sometimes Milksahpe crashes sometimes not. Try to import you *.bdy file as the first thing you do after opening Milkshape. Then (when succesful) you save it as a Milkshape3d file and after that there shouldn't be any problem.

JXMckie · Post by **JXMckie** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 2:39 pm

Thank for your response Jay ! Fine to know that I am not totally inept

I will use Actview in the future, but is it possible to see the textured model in Actview or is that only possible when loading the actor into RF ?

Post by **AndyCR** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 2:51 pm

you should be able to see the textured actor in actview.

JXMcKie · Post by **JXMcKie** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 3:54 pm

<you should be able to see the textured actor in actview>

Thank you for letting me know

I´m still learning. I know realize that my actor files are very small compared to those who appears textured in Actviewer which of course means that I do not manage to get my textures build with the actor ! I think I will return to the manual to see what I am doing wrong, but if somebody has a quick suggestion it will be appreciated (I am placing the textures in the same folder as the bdy file before the build - that is the correct procedure ???).

Spyrewolf · Post by **Spyrewolf** » Tue Jan 03, 2006 7:58 pm

the best way to test to see if your actors are texturing is make a simple cube,

use the ActView.exe rather than the Viewer.exe, as suggested above,

also remember for actors the textures must be bitmap files with square dimensions to the power of 8.

(i.e) 128x128, 256x256, 1024x1024, ect.....

hope this helps you out.

Post by **AndyCR** » Wed Jan 04, 2006 12:42 am

just as a minor correction, its actually powers of two. powers of 8 work too, but youd pretty much be limited to 64 and 512, practically speaking.