How dinosaurs reveal early mesh versions

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How dinosaurs reveal early mesh versions

Post by tatu »

I would like to talk about something Draco pointed out to me the other day. I'm sure some people already know about this but I can't recall a topic about it. He told me about how the Albertasaur in IJ 116 have different outlines than the mesh it uses.
As several of you who have done lots of work in TresEd knows that all the dinosaurs in the official levels are made out of "mesh instances" where the dinosaur share the same mesh and physics as the basement version through the script. This allow the dinosaur to have its own unique script and behaviour without changing it for all other ones.
What the script don't do is change the mesh itself of the dinosaur, so while the dinosaur might look like the basement one, the mesh itself could be different. This can be seen on several dinosaurs:

ImageImageImageImageImageImage

What you can see here is that the mesh is actually from an earlier version of the dinosaur. The Albertasaur one can be found in build 96. The Para is the early one seen in build 96 IT. The Stegosaurus I have not found in earlier versions (but I have not looked closely). However, the t-rexes actually uses the early "Green T-Rex" mesh as their default one. Which means we kinda had the Green T-Rex mesh all these years but not the texture ;)
I guess these could be related to the skeleton information machf talked about here: viewtopic.php?f=129&t=10937

While this doesn't give us much it can also tell us a bit about the development for the levels. For example this can tell us that the green T-rex was used in AS2 before they replaced it with the red one.
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Re: How dinosaurs reveal early mesh versions

Post by machf »

tatu wrote:Which means we kinda had the Green T-Rex mesh all these years but not the texture ;)
I did mention it a long, long, loooong time ago...

I don't remember if I had actually looked at the Albertasaur, though. I'd like to rig that one. Same fot he Stegosaurus.
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Re: How dinosaurs reveal early mesh versions

Post by tatu »

I guessed someone did. :)

That Albertasaur is present in at least AS2 in b96 as the "early" version, fully textured and not like a ghost mesh as above. The Steg I can't tell tho.
Hey, the T-Rex in LAB 96 is using the green T-Rex mesh, or at least a different one from the retail. Same goes for the T-Rex in AS1 96 :)

Could the changes be related to changes in how the skeleton work? And why the skeleton $ ones does not always fit the mesh?
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Re: How dinosaurs reveal early mesh versions

Post by Draconisaurus »

Cool stuff. Differences in meshes, I would guess, come from the tweaking which took place regarding AI as the engine was developed. Alterations to default poses and whatnot.
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