wheeled vehicle placeholder

edited for new screenies.....changed link for the new download also(1/10/09)

so many projects....

well I know I've talked about a castle and compound pack and explosions, and other stuff, but
with so many cool things you sometimes get sidetracked..

which happened again.....I am still working on the historic castle pack , but I have two other projects that will be most likely done first.

first of all I've been working on some vehicles for a while...started modeling in maya, but that was so that I could learnit.....I got impatient and wanted to see how hard it was to get one in game first...
so I went and downloaded a few.... found one I liked and went through the docs and worked on getting it in game.... first thing I learned was that don't use anyone else's transforms...the .mb file I was using had y as being up instead of z , so although I got the car in game it bobbed up and down through the terrain...
after a day and a half of fighting with that, I figured it out....open a blank project..set everything for torque..
and then import the file.....then select all polygons...group them..and remove all transforms...then you can rotate the model.
then put in your nodes, collision mesh, bounds,etc.... exported fine...except one problem..
looked fine in showtool, but crashed the engine on start up every time....
wish maya had a spellchecker in it...
collision is the way it should be spelled and colission is how I spelled it....
that was problem 1. next was that I had it in the hierarchy in the wrong place....didnt realize it had to be a child of start01....
the learning process is fun isn't it...
well anyway I got it in game finally and you can all use it for a placeholder vehicle if you want....I've even included a basic script for it....I'll be fine tuning that later. along with adding some placeholder textures...I can't include the original textures, because the original artist didn't give permission to use commercially...it was just listed as free, and I don't want to assume anything....

http://www.mapvault.com/xoops/uploads/buick2.zip
here is the screenie and yes those are the buggy tires....
I've included nodes for a passenger, 2weapons, 4 lights, 4 smoke particles, and 2 jets along with the standard set....there are no nodes for los yet, but who knows....and it's right hand drive...in a mid 70's buick with a custom front spoiler...( I know I didn't model it, but...it's still a cool car for something different)

I'm also going to release a starter file for maya for all the nodes and basic structure so all you have to do is move them where you want, and delete those that you don't want....I figure that would have helped me out, but if I had that I wouldn't have all this nice yellow and black coloring on my forehead.... need to remember to tell my friend thanks for that "bang head here" mat he gave me for those really frustrating moments....

anyway I'm also working on several vehicles to add to a content pack, and about 150 textures for for a little pack there too.... hopefully should have most ready in the next few days

after edit--
hope you like the new texture...will get it included in the download later today...