Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

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Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by Draconisaurus »

Name: Draco Astreus
Position: Team Leader, 3D modeller, event scripter, sound design, level design, texture design
Occupation: Aspiring Game Designer, Boyfriend, Restaurant Front Worker
Age: 20
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For today's update, it's basically going to be catchup since the previous updates, nothing too major has happened since the last one but enough cool/important things have been done that I think it's time for another one.

Firstly, the retail foliage. You've probably noticed at some point that JPDS~testing used modified textures for some of its retail trees. These were cool and all, way better looking IMO than the retail ones, but still quite similar and clashing at times with the TC_Isle foliage. Recently while Nem was working on the level and I was figuring out which out-of-level objective I should take care of next, I decided it was a good time to bring the old retail-based textures up to speed.
The "willow" trees had actually been modified since JPDS~testing's release (you can see this version in Nem's update) but were not quite satisfactory and too uh.. saturated. I took fresh versions of the textures and modified them such that the tree would no longer seem so happy and colorful.. the result surprised me quite a bit.
Image

Moving on to the other ones... I decided 100% new textures were in order. I dove into my self-generated photo texture archive and dug out the best bark examples for the trees I was looking for. They ended up being absolutely brilliant, dark, and fitting in seemlessly with the TC_Isle tree textures. The only original elements of their textures remaining are the leaf opacities and the more willow-like leaf textures (darkened/desaturated). The main leaf texture seen by us all a million times got a make-over with a certain photograph of mine and it works great.. biggest differece is that it has more variance and not just this or that color. Anyway here are the pics.
Image Image
Image Image

Btw, I had to actually modify the UVW for all the bark so it tiled properly (and the retail trees use tons of different textures, now there's only 2 for each bark type), which meant importing them into Max, spending time welding all the right vertices (yes, the import script fails even for retail models), map ID management, UV and UV unwrap.
There was one interesting case.. a tree model that turned out to be 100% identical to another except that it was internally rotated by a certain degree. I figured out that this was to give it a different texture set which accurately cast shadows onto the bark based on its canopy. Tricky little devs.. guess that means they were not intended to ever be rotated ingame. Ooops! :P Well so, since I didn't have another bark texture ready and didn't want it to be identical (I, for one, am not going to render shadowed maps), I just gave it the old-tree bark from TC_Isle.
Image

Went on to create new rock textures to replace those ugly things on the climbable rocks..
Image

Matt and I rather liked them but Nem pointed out that they looked too clean. So, I made a new set, which we all agree looks much better than either previous (starting image photographed by Matt).
Image


Next fun thing I did was attempt to run Trespasser in triple buffer, since Matt indicated it was apparently what gave him such immensely superior framerates. In the initial test, changing the value in the INI file, I had this fun error where the lower 2/3rds of the screen were light blue, occasionally flickering with the actual display, making navigation through the menu and through the level quite difficult. Apparently these flickers are known as "thunders", heh. FPS did seem improved to me at the time.. Matt showed me how to accommodate for this by altering some graphics card settings. In the end, this did work but FPS seems mostly unaffected. :? I could run JPDS in 1024x768 and I'm not sure if it was related to triple-buffer or not, but ultimately I deactivated TB because much of the time it caused a black screen while playing the opening cutscene.

K what else.. well there are some things we can't mention of course. There was this fun pic I snapped and turned into the new JPDS~testing loading screen, my fav. to date..
Image

Then.. I was.. well I wasn't bored, I think I was just up late and in one of those moods. :yum: Made some cool images in photoshop..
ImageImageImageImage

Well.. here's a little peak at some of the other things I've been doing. ;)
Image

And now.. in closing, I'm actually going to discuss our latest problem. First off, earlier this week I painfully went through all the JPDS1 textures and put many of them into one of a select few palettes I had open in photoshop. Many of the retail ones I just didn't bother with, since they are generally more optimized like that and there are just so goddamn many of them. I did make sure to do all the rocks and wood, though, but the biggest thing was getting all the TC_Isle textures to use existing retail palettes. Now so, when I finished this, I went to update a blank JPDS1 SWP with these textures. The problem was that GeomAdd began telling me there wasn't enough space in the SWP file. I was like, WTF, these are the same ones that were just in there... Of course, the 24-bit'ers were overlapping each other in many cases. I spent many, many hours last night consulting with Slugger and attempting to make it all fit into the SWP file like I wanted. Here are my conclusions:
  • The blank SWP files given to me by Rebel, prior to any being publicly released, did indeed have more specified SWP space than any of the released blank SWP (or is it in PID?) files currently available to the community. He said they had an especially high texture size limit because they were the TC_Isle backups and the 24-bit maps in that level were cause for considerable additional space to be used. The ones generated by Rebel's new level generator seemed to be the smallest, while the XX files were somewhere between that and TC_Isle's backups. I could never tell for sure because GeomAdd won't display the "mb used out of" limit data when entries from the PID file were missing.
  • When dealing with 24-bit textures in a SWP file, the order of import can mean everything. A small test level with only models that included 24-bit maps (and the player) was made, and in some combinations of SWP updating, even just those few caused GeomAdd to announce that the firstPacker had run out of space. This probably (IMHO) means that 24-bit texture arrangement by GeomAdd is highly inefficient, or that the format usable by the SWP just isn't great for 24-bit maps anyway and is one reason why we don't see 24-bit windows in the game. Strangely enough, there was a way I found to get them all into the test level.. I forget exactly now, but I repeated the process with JPDS1 and then imported the REST of the textures - the result was a SWP file that cut short many MBs away from the total original size, meaning that there is no truly optimum import method that will let the rest of the textures fit in. The reason TC_Isle could do it is because it did not actually have as many normal (8 bit) textures as JPDS does (that is one good design element to congratulate the ops for, they only made as many textures as they needed to), JPDS relying heavily on retail textures.
  • From what I can see (though it's not yet conclusive, really), the rectangular shape of some new 24-bit bmps is responsible for most of the overlap you get when importing new textures. I had hoped that by changing my rectangular window textures into squares, I could optimize the arrengement such that they would fit better into the SWP, but ultimately it only seemed to reduce the number of additional (8 bit) BMPs that could be imported, meaning that it is conclusively not a solution to the problem.
And with that.. I'm going to ask if anyone who can edit hex values of the PID/SWP files would like to do so for me - For whoever wants to do this, I'll need to send my own blank PID/SWP (or just one?), since it appears to have the highest limit and thus should be used to figure out how much higher it ought to be pushed.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by machf »

Nice trees.

Regarding textures... well, we know that RGB textures aren't properly imported by GeomAdd, but this particular problem happens not because of that, but because GeomAdd imports the RGB bitmaps without mipmaps, and you'll run into the same problem with 8-bit images with mimpmaps set to false; particularly, when there is a non-square one among them. The method GeomAdd uses to accomodate textures (and mipmaps) inside the SWP file seems to be buggy, and under some circumstances you'll get that error because it's trying to place the textures next to each other and fails... you see, inside the SWP file, textures are arranged in blocks of 512x512 pixels. When you have textures that are all 256x256 pixels, there's no problem, but when you import among them one that is for example 128x256... and then it adds another that is 256x256, it arrives at column 384, which still isn't 512, then it tries to add another that is 256x256 and... bang! When the textures have mimpmaps, they "fill in the gaps" and that problem doesn't happen, apparently.

Regarding the hex editing... well, anybody who can use a hex editor can do it, so why don't you just do it yourself?
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by Draconisaurus »

Niiiice, thanks for the detailed explanation, that helps a lot to visualize what was going on the whole time.. What I disliked was that changing the non-square window textures into squares didn't help my filled SWP problem at all, guess it's actually unrelated more or less..
machf wrote:Regarding the hex editing... well, anybody who can use a hex editor can do it, so why don't you just do it yourself?
I would.... but, Slash is perfectly capable of hex editing, as is Slugger, and neither of them could figure out what was supposed to be modified. I'm betting neither of them was calling up the display correctly, but I really don't think I'm going to have any better luck. It might be sufficient to let us know how to properly modify it, with a basic knowledge in hex editing a given (that's all they should need)..
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by machf »

From the Trespasser File Formats doc, about the PID file:

Code: Select all

HEADER
0x00 	Version (always 0x130)
0x04 	10 00 00 00
0x08 	Offset to first PID ENTRY
0x0C 	Number of PID ENTRYs
0x10 	20 00 00 00 (length of this header?)
0x14 	Number of PALETTE BLOCKs
0x18 	Offset in SWP to swapable data (Always 0x600000 in the Trespasser data files, but can be changed)
0x1c 	Offset in SWP of end of non-swapable data. Must be less than this.0x18. (Between about 0x170000 and 0x400000 for the Trespasser levels)
0x20 	Beginning of PALETTE BLOCKs
Must be the values in positions 0x18 and 0x1C, most likely just the first one. Of course, after you edit that value, you must move everything in the SWP file from the old position to the new one (meaning, insert lots of "filler" zeroes in between). Foe xample, if it was 0x600000 and you increase it to 0x800000, you need to insert 0x200000 (that's 32x 65536, or 2MB) zeroes right before the old 0x600000 position.

Oh, and BTW, when I said textures were stored as 512x512 blocks... I meant that for 8-bit ones, since RGB textures are stored as 16-bit ones, a single 256x256 pixel image will be twice as wide as an 8-bit one and can only fit by itself in a "row" of data, the next one will have to start underneath it.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by Draconisaurus »

Oye.. hopefully Slug can make proper sense of that, I'm doubting Rebel is reading this (though he already knows how to lol). Or you could just be nice and do it to an empty one for us.. :yum: It could then be released as an available greater-sized PID file for users to use when they max the others out. Wish I had time to mess with this and figure it out, but I don't..
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by RexHunter99 »

GeomAdd is terrible... I hate this problem, I've ran into it myself a few times too.
and GeomAdd makes terrible MipMaps, or stores them incorrectly somehow, maybe I should look into the SWP/PID formats in more depth. Who knows, maybe I'll make an Importer/Exporter/Editor that works.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by Nick3069 »

That would be great! Will you also fix the problem when importing 24-bit bmps?

Nice bark, Draco. 8)
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by THEL1NK1N2 »

Nice. :wink:
Draconisaurus wrote:
Listening to: (keeping music off for system resources)
Hehe, been there. :wink:

Nice loading screen and Photoshop pics. First one the best IMO.
Draconisaurus wrote:Matt and I rather liked them but Nem pointed out that they looked too clean. So, I made a new set, which we all agree looks much better than either previous (starting image photographed by Matt).
Like the rocks. Looks a bit like the boulders at a beach. Strewn with seeweed.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by Draconisaurus »

Thanks :D
RexHunter99 wrote:GeomAdd is terrible... I hate this problem, I've ran into it myself a few times too.
and GeomAdd makes terrible MipMaps, or stores them incorrectly somehow,
Hmm, just curious, are you refering to the blue mipmap errors? I noticed that when Mickey imported a new rock into JPDS, it had such mipmap problems (also Slugger when he made a test stargate level), but the rock problem was fixed when I updated the SWP.. and I've never had the problem myself. I have this hunch that, like TresEd, an old version is floating around here at TresCom. My GeomAdd is:
************************************
* GeomAdd Technology Preview v0.17 *
************************************
Date: 2003-09-15


What about yours?
Oh and, the TresCom TresEd is version TresEd_2003-09-15.exe while the latest is in fact TresEd_2003-11-21.exe. Newer one has a number of improvements including trigger backfaces and a separate terrain menu (also, the old version of TresEd had difficulty working with JPDS1's terrain for Mickey since the terrain file is not called JPDS1.wtd).
maybe I should look into the SWP/PID formats in more depth. Who knows, maybe I'll make an Importer/Exporter/Editor that works.
That would be pretty cool, but I fear it will be like your other WIP Tres modding apps currently collecting dust.. understanding the Tres file format isn't a simple job, I'm sure you could do it ultimately if you spent enough time but the question is if and when you'll have that time.
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Draconisaurus wrote:
Listening to: (keeping music off for system resources)
Hehe, been there. :wink:
:lol: Yeah, and when I do play music, it's with WMP classic.. I really need a new comp by November or so lol.
Nice loading screen and Photoshop pics. First one the best IMO.
Thankies, yesh I quite like that one as well.. it was a fluke incident with the three dinos, they're not even supposed to be in that area of the level, and it just provided some great shots.
Like the rocks. Looks a bit like the boulders at a beach. Strewn with seeweed.
Ah yeah? Coolness.. I'll keep that in mind. 8)


Oh and Rex, I may kidnap you soon to have a crack at the Hex stuff...
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by enigma »

That information on how the texture files are stored is pretty useful, I use some number or odd dimension textures, one for 24-bit texture, optimising it 256 equal would be best then. Always try to make the texture as small as I can but keep detail for engine optimisation, always did it for source.


Hex editing, I got my texture space up to 90MB, even up to 6000MB, but can't pinpoint many other values besides those. So settled on 90.4 MB, big enough. Never really messes with hex.
At the end of the topic rebel gives a bit of info. http://www.trescom.3dactionplanet.games ... ture+space


Your using the retail tree's too, that's I decided to do as well now, just for the leaves mainly, though am thinking about scattering a leaf texture onto branches in max and rendering a texture.


Those rocks in the second pic do look better, if only bumpmapping was functional.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by Draconisaurus »

enigma wrote:That information on how the texture files are stored is pretty useful, I use some number or odd dimension textures, one for 24-bit texture, optimising it 256 equal would be best then. Always try to make the texture as small as I can but keep detail for engine optimisation, always did it for source.
Hmmm.. yeah. In theory it should also be just as fine to do sizes of 128x128 if you don't mind the detail loss (assuming there is any compared to the original).

Hex editing, I got my texture space up to 90MB, even up to 6000MB, but can't pinpoint many other values besides those. So settled on 90.4 MB, big enough. Never really messes with hex.
At the end of the topic rebel gives a bit of info. http://www.trescom.3dactionplanet.games ... ture+space
Hmm, sounds slightly useful, but again I don't even have a basic understanding of hex..

Your using the retail tree's too, that's I decided to do as well now, just for the leaves mainly, though am thinking about scattering a leaf texture onto branches in max and rendering a texture.
Well, there are a lot of new trees that I've given only limited glances of. ;) But yeah, retexturing the retail ones works quite well. Good luck with your own new foliage, too bad the one you sent me had too many overlapping opacities.. it was a nice model.

Those rocks in the second pic do look better, if only bumpmapping was functional.
:D Well you know.. over time I've come to be not that impressed with Trespasser's "bumpmapping" :lol: As we know it's really a form of what's called "normal mapping" and whenever I see it in retail levels, it looks more like a color brightness difference than actual "bumps" coming out of the model like real bumpmapping is supposed to do.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by machf »

Uh... normal mapping is more advanced than bumpmapping. Bumpmapping is just meant to displace things at a perpendicular angle to the surface. Like a greyscale heightmap, but applied over a model's flat surface. The bumps are still flat. At most, they'll look like those level curves used in terrain maps. Normal mapping, instead, can change the normals of any point of the surface to point in any direction, given the impression that the surface is curved at different angles. IF trespasser could do the normal mapping in hardware, you'd appreciate it better. But back then, they programmed it to render in software, and the graphics accelerators that had just started to appear couldn't do normal mapping yet, so even though they gave Trespasser hardware rendering support, the normal maps had still to be done in software.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by Draconisaurus »

Hmmm... I'm betting you're right about that, big reason I dislike normal mapping is because of its pixelated form.. you just can't see very well what's being done to the map. The best example I found was the barrels in IT.. when you push 'em around the top's shininess changes etc. Hardware would let it look a lot better, I'm sure. What games have done such normal mapping?
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by machf »

Lots from the last 5 years or so... first one I can think of is DooM 3.
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Re: Draco - Saturday, 30 August 2008

Post by RexHunter99 »

Most games that have recently come out use normalmaps.

Hmm, Im fine with kidnapping. Oh and if I do make a new GeomAdd, it will be done it anything but GameMaker, lol. C++ most likely. I'm looking into .NET or whatever that is, maybe it would work better for a GUI.

I have a 2008 version of TresED, that I kinda HexEdited (Blushes) I fixed some stuff such as Fog, which seems to take only R and G values... I wonder why he did that?
Also I heard that the clip distance doesnt work, when its modified from the TresEd.ini file, thats not true, it gets restricted at a certain distance but it can be raised or lowered a considerable amount from its default value.

I meant that GeomAdd somehow Blurs the MipMaps horribly, you notice this with a retail level object when its exported from the retail level then imported into your level.

Yeah MachF is right, its all done in software (pity) oddly enough just like Carnivores Opacity flagged traingles...
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