Viewing ships

You need galciv writer to do that.

Galciv writer does not give you the option of viewing the ships graphics. im sorry but i dont know of any way to view the files. they are all .mdl format from what i can see.

~SDC~

There is now way to view the ship graphics that I know of. GalCiv Writer won't and I have not heard of any software created to view the files. You might, if you have not already, check GalCiv fan sites for a view of the ships like they would look in game. I have found a site that shows a view from the top right side of the ships. Just go to the site at the bottom of this post and click on any ship on the right list. They are not exactly what they will look like in the game but they are close.

http://webpages.charter.net/trevorpowdrell/Starbase.htm

Mmmm I can't believe so much knowledge has been lost in the three months I was away from galciv modding .

There is an editor for mdl files, it's called mutil. It's the tool they used to make the game graphics. IMHO, using it should be classified as a form of medieval torture. If you don't have much knowledge of graphic programming using it is a pain since most concepts in it will be alien to you.

I completed file format for 8bit encoded images for what it's worth, I just never got around to update the file format I released back then to include the pixel decoding code. I suppose writting a viewer or an editor would be fairly trivial with it but I'm not too sure I feel like doing it, so if anyone is interested, say so .

I'm happy to chime in as interested in an editor.

In particular, something that allowed you to not only view the .mdl files, but pull them apart and rebuild them with imported graphics, would be awesome. I'll sit here patiently and prepare to be impressed...

Btw, I'm thinking of more than just ship graphics here. Ideally, such a utility would work with any .mdl file, but I don't know if they're all structured the same way or not. Graphics programming is definitely NOT my area of expertise, so I haven't even looked at them much...

Yes, MDL files are all built the same way. So are 90% of all binary files in your galciv directory. I reverse engineered a lot of the binary file formats when galciv came out and modding was actualy very active : http://visualta.tauniverse.com/HTML/GalCivFormats.html

I've found out quite a bit more about the sprite format and the other formats but I never bothered to update the doc because of general lack of interest

I suppose that such an util would be neat but would there be people using it? I mean seriously Galciv mod making isn't very impressive considering what you can do. I mean you could do a civilization mod most probably, with land and cities. I suppose that having about 5 people in the community understanding the technology doesn't help and I'm not too sure if any of these other 5 people are still active.

On and on another note, what really irritated me was making the interface. That's basicly why I didn't make the tool. I've got decoding routines written already and they work, encoding wouldn't be too hard.

Well, if it irritates you, then it's probably worth doing just for the practice... or to build character...

As for the limited modding possibilities, I can see your point. I've been working on a major mod, and running into all sorts of little... oddities... in the way things are set up, but it could be a lot worse.

I personally am interested in having a .mdl editor so that I can import new graphics for things like anomalies, ships, etc., instead of having to reuse the ones from the basic game.

Of course, I can't really expect you to create a utility if I'm the only one interested in it. I will check out your link though, thanks.

With some time you can try to use mutil. I believe the link to it is a sticky called "New stuff for you".

I'll look into making it work but don't hold your breath

Heh... fair enough. I'll keep an eye out.