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I am making a vehicle in XSI for the first time, and I just have a quick concern: where do I place the hardpoints? The vehicle has two lazers, and that is it. It's not going to have animations or anything like that, but it would be nice to have smoke (if its not too difficult). Any help would be appreciated, especially what the names are and where they go. Thanks!

You need a pilot hard point(tells the game where to put the pilot), two hard points in front of the laser barrels (to tell the game where to make the lasers), and put some wherever you want smoke. They have to be named, the pilot is hp_active, the two lasers are hp_fire_1 and hp_fire_2 (these can be different, its just however you call them in the .odf for your vehicle). The smoke ones are generally hp_damage_(number here). For some reason we don't have a vehicle setup guide like we do for flyers and turrets, we probably sure...

Thanks. I read in the, "door in wall and rocketship" tutorial that I have to place an hp_active somewhere. Where does this go?

I was wrong, there is no hp_pilot, it is the hp_active null, I'll edit my original post

i too have a question about vehicles and it is as follows: does a vehicle (in my case a flyer without animations) have to have a setup hierarchy or can it be one big polymsh with hardpoints, lowrez, and collision as one big shape?

As far as I know, you do not need a hierarchy, but if you are exporting with MeshEx, you will have to have a null named "dummy_root" as the parent of EVERYTHING in your scene

i thought one should not export vehicles via meshex because it would have problems if too many hardpoints are used?

no, meshex only has problem if you have multiple textureclusters per object.
you should use nulls as hardpoints and you dont need a hp_pilot/hp_active(you can name it however you want) if you dont want a visible pilot. for unanimated objects in battlefront you dont need a hierrarchy, everything - hardpoints, models, collision, shadowvolume and lowrez - simply go under the dummyroot whih should also be a null.

thnx sorry but what do u mean by "multiple texture clusters per object"? because that could be the answer to these texture problems that have forever made modeling a pain for me

you can check if you have multiple texture projection cluster these two ways:

there should be only one entry under "texture coordinates auto".

thanks this really helps