Rob Hicks on 11/7/2005 at 08:56
NV,
I have no objection to including my models in your enhancement pack, but it's not all that easy...
I've been building up Dark Metal for nearly 3 years now, and its all rather complicated in the obj/mesh folders. Let's take the 'rusts' texture. I enhanced it to improve the pipes. Via a cascade effect, the new rusts texture altered about 20 other models, some of them inappropriately (d'oh!). Thus, to fix the problem, all of those models were reskinned with new textures. Then, to make it all the more complicated, Vigil releases his lovely pipe textures, which simply had to be used, making the original reskinning of the pipes redundant. Now, imagine the same thing happening to nearly half of the original models and textures. Then I went back and reskinned mosy of them again to make them graphically consistent. The result - whilst everything looks great with Dark Metal installed, it's nigh on impossible to pull out individual models and skins for use in 'normal' Dromed.
Secondly, with Dark Metal nearing completion (and your solution to the unfrobby contains models brings the day a little nearer!), it's probably much easier to add the enhancement pack to DM.
Rob
ZylonBane on 11/7/2005 at 14:14
Quote Posted by Vigil
That basketball looks like a good mapping, all it really needs is some indentation on the black lines and a subtle bumpmap.
Although, it would be sort of cool to have a Triop logo on it in the same style as Spalding ;)
Unfortunately, a 256x256 texture doesn't give enough resolution to represent a basketball's bumps as anything more than a subtle noise pattern. So I gave the texture a subtle noise pattern. ;) I did try slapping a TriOp logo on it once, but the distortion from the sphere mapping made it impossible to get looking right.
On a more relevant note-- that little basketball model has almost FIVE HUNDRED polys (I believe it started life as the skysphere in Oracle of the Prophecies), and yet I can have
dozens of them onscreen at once with negligible slowdown. You guys making these updated models need to realize that Dark, in spite of all its other shortcomings, really can handle objects with modern poly counts. So don't hold back!
TF on 11/7/2005 at 15:03
That's what I've always been saying. I made a crappo spring gizmo once which was 1500 polys. It only started slowing down my machine after I started going over 20. That's 30.000 object polys right there. As a 1.6ghz/Radeon 9550, it's a fairly mediocre system.
R Soul on 13/7/2005 at 23:20
New crates, barrels etc need new flinders....
Speesh on 14/7/2005 at 15:10
Someone may have answered this, but can you install it over an already existant gamesystem or does that part of the installation work like Dedx?
Nameless_Voice on 15/7/2005 at 00:28
Quote Posted by R Soul
New crates, barrels etc need new flinders....
I thought I had included the flinders for the basic crate; might have forgotten those objects.
However, by default all Thief crates/barrels use the same crate flinders.
I actually have some explosive barrel flinders that I made for my own mission, but since they need to be set up in the gamesys I didn't include them.
Nameless_Voice on 15/7/2005 at 22:22
Another two objects in urgent need of an overhaul are the necklace and the tiara. I haven't had much luck trying to find good textures for a replacement, though.
I'm not sure if we should be aiming for a tiara or a crown for the tiara model, but the current model, being more a mix between the two, looks like neither.
Quote Posted by Rob Hicks
I have no objection to including my models in your enhancement pack, but it's not all that easy...
Well, the inconsistencies would be for me to sort out, I guess. It's easy enough to find out what texture files a particular model needs (just open the .bin it in a hex editor) - and if you still have the original .3ds file, 3ds2bin has a Package function to automatically build the object and copy the model and all required textures to a specific location (I must admit that I never use this feature myself, but it seems to work okay.)
But, if everything is really as messy as you make out, you have bigger problems. For the most part, I've been trying to keep the texture names and mappings as close to the originals as possible because - as Eshaktaar pointed out near the start of this thread - models using different textures and mapping will play havoc with custom resources used in FMs. Dark Metal is supposed to be able to run not only its own FMs, but also those for Thief 1, Thief Gold, and Thief 2, right?
A theoretical example:
Suppose you changed the picture frame texture to give it a nice pattern of gold interlace, and as a result you had to remap all the models, too. But, a lot of FMs have picture frames models with custom textures on them, still using the default frame texture. In this case, all those FMs would have wrong-looking picture frames.
Now, you probably haven't done that with picture frames, but it illustrates the point.
The other example is an FM with a custom texture for a certain object without using a different model name. If the new Dark Metal model has different UV mapping from the old model, then the new texture won't map right.
I can already see this being a pain for me, even though I've been keeping it in mind. But if you haven't been planning around this problem, you're in for an incredible amount of work.
I've been considering asking Potterr to add a feature to GarrettLoader that would allow it to work around this problem...
In any case, the gold chair, armiore and bafford's chair don't (or at least, didn't) use any textures that are used on other models, so they should be easy enough to extract if you're willing - those are some of the worst eyesores in Lord Bafford's Manor. The 'ornate chair' would be easily isolated, too, but you didn't mention having done that one.
Eshaktaar on 15/7/2005 at 23:18
Good points there, NV. If a texture directly replaces an old one, it needs to be not only a faithful remake, it has to be nearly identical (except for higher resolution, better quality). Any prominent feature (rivets, seams, holes, etc.) needs to be at the same place and of the same size (relative to texture dimensions) as its original counterpart, otherwise custom objects using original textures won't work.
ZylonBane on 15/7/2005 at 23:29
A useful tactic I've found when improving textures that happen to be shared, is to un-share them. Just point the model to an all-new texture name. That gives you the freedom to make model-specific optimizations.
