Leopard 2A5 / Strv. 122

[Xipe]

I've started making a detailed model of the Leopard 2A5, and then do the modifications of the swedish Strv. 122.

I'll be making this in Lightwave 3D; what kind of tools exist to import models into OpFlashpoint? And if someone who has done some models could find the time to answer some questions I have, I'd appreciate it. (Like, should I make sure to separate body, turret, cannon and tracks? How many polygons approx. should each LOD contain?)

Another question for you designers: The values of a tank, i.e. how much punishment it can take before blowing up, speed, turret traverse rate, cannon penetration, etc. - does everybody just whinge it, or has anyone come up with some _real_ data to base it on?

It seems to me that alot of that which is released doesn't work very well in context with the vehicles that are already in the game - and this goes for most vehicles, not only the tanks (I found some off-road motorcycle, 250cc, which went something like 280 kph in top speed, wtf?)

As for the tanks, which I am most interested in, I've downloaded all tanks that have been released 3rd party, and many simply don't work well in the game - they very much seem like the author liked his creation so much that he assigned the vehicle values that simply don't correspond to reality - and overmodeled it (with the exception of the Canadian Leopard 2's which seem undermodeled).

Is there a discussion going on about this, because in my eyes it's a problem - if a model doesn't seem to correspond to BiS's vehicles, nor to reality, I'll delete it immediatly (it destroys balance and game world credibility) - and my trust in new mods will also suffer...

Wouldn't OFPEC be a good place to have an "official" 3rd party release list on?

[DeLiltMon]

Not sure about importing from Lightwave, there a a few posts on importing from Gmax, if you can get the model into 3ds format you should be Ok.
As for the rest:
1 Yes the turret, tracks, hatches and gun have to be seperate from the rest of the model otherwise they'll deform the model when they move, best advice I can give is to dbo a tank addon or the demo models and have a look at how they are done.
2 Polys, there used to be some guidelines somewhere on the forum, if I remember rightly it was somewhere in the region of 4000-5000 for the highest detailed LOD, I'm sure someone will confirm this.
3 You right there is no consistancy in the power of the guns or damage taken, I think the WW2 Editing Centre are trying to come up with some guidelines for this and I think they've got a formular for converting real world figures to something useable for a config, although you'll have to bear in mind that the BIS tanks may not be accurate either so a bit of adjustment may be needed so that it fits in with them too, which I think is what you want to do.
Hope this is of some help, good luck with it  

[Xipe]

Thanks.

I'll probably have to export to dxf and then import into 3DSMax or something.

Anyways, coming up with "close to real" values, and then making sure all vehicles (including BiS's if they need changing) adhere to them, would be great.

Do you know where can I find 3ds/dxf models of the tanks in the game?

I'm hoping to be a bit ambitious here, and continue by making tanks like Strv. S, Centurion, LeClerc and Merkava. But time will tell.

[DeLiltMon]

You'll only get them in p3d format as used by Oxygen, the setting up of selection names and applying textures can only be done in O2.
If you open the models in O2 and have a look at how they're modeled you can model the same way in Lightwave then import them and set up the selections etc in O2