Sneaky Upgrade Editor Edition: Unofficial patches for T3Ed and friends

Judith on 31/12/2014 at 17:36

Quote Posted by snobel

You're welcome to give me something to think about. :p What's the simplest possible tool (as a starting point) that would be useful? Would file conversion be enough to allow you to skip the Max 5.1 step? Where does the DX8 bugginess come in?

Is there any information to be found about the .mlb and .tim file formats? I tried searching briefly but didn't find much (except there's apparently an attorney named Tim Mesh :)).

Ok, here's a short guide to IonShader options. It probably should have more screenshots, e.g. for Emissive and Alpha testing options, but I wanted to make it as fast as I could:

(https://www.dropbox.com/s/8oeyfy06lwad4i7/IonShaderGuide.docx?dl=1)

You'll find some of the answers there, mostly about bugginess ;)

IMO the most simple tool we need is an interface with those options. Some of them are broken or buggy, so it would be up to you to decide whether to include them or not (or to repair/improve them, if you know how).

Most important thing is, that it should allow creating the .mlb file from scratch. In current workflow you need to save your material library with Max in a .mat file, and then use the Import/Export plugin to convert it to .mlb.

Files for 3dsmax included with T3Editor (Utility/Max) will probably be a good starting point.

If this is doable, next most important thing will be a preview window, standard plane, cube and cylinder meshes with an option to use custom mesh (e.g. for unwrapped textures) in specified format. Is .obj common enough for everyone? Maybe some Blender format as well.

As for the model import/export: there's nothing about .tim format in 3dsmax 5.1 help, so I assume this one is also somewhere in Utility/Max folder. Actually it's called StaticMesh4 (.tim), but I didn't find anything useful on such format. I guess this one would be fully functional even without a viewer. The menu would need one path for the actual model and the another one for collision mesh, if someone doesn't want to rely on Exact option in T3Ed Mesh Browser (useful e.g. for the stairs). Right now you can make your own collision mesh in Max 5.1, adding the "HKConvex_" prefix to it in the Name field. If your model is "Stairs01", you name your collision mesh "HKConvex_Stairs01", and .tim format recognizes this automatically during export.

Oh, and last but not least, I actually have one suggestion on the editor. Can we have option below turned on in viewports by default? It's really useful while setting up lightning, and it resets every time you restart the editor.

Inline Image:

http://s4.postimg.org/53ecyzq1p/image.jpg

snobel on 1/1/2015 at 13:39

Thanks - I'll go over it during the weekend.

bikerdude on 1/1/2015 at 23:01

When I see T3 related thread like this it make me think, hmm how hard is T3ED/T3 compared to Darkradiant/TDM....

Judith on 2/1/2015 at 06:57

I think that working on level design alone is easier than in Radiant. It's the Unreal Editor 2.x interface anyway, so it's pretty user-friendly. Custom content is quite problematic though. The stock stuff looks outdated and a bit boring. IMO getting rid of 3dsmax 5.1 as mandatory import/export tool for meshes and materials might be like a second wind for FM authors. I think T3Ed really needs new sets of hi-res tiling textures and static meshes, theme packages of some sort (mansion, tenment etc.).

snobel on 4/1/2015 at 13:45

OK, I've had a look at the above... I'm afraid the knowledge delta is too large, both my own lack of mapping insight and the amount of reverse engineering needed - sorry. :(

I wouldn't mind having a go at the GUI but when native .mlb support is the most important feature then figuring out that format should be the first stop. Apparently Shadowspawn (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=96152) got somewhere reverse engineering the .tim format but I don't know if he ever got started on .mlb. Anyway, the very first thing to do would be to contact Shadowspawn and get as much info and code as possible.

The "Radii View" thing should be doable at least, but I'll need a small map to test if it's working. (Tried it on one of the orig maps but saw no effect.)

Judith on 5/1/2015 at 10:26

Yeah, I thought it would be a huge amount of work. Still, the results will be worth it. I haven't seen any posts by Shadowspawn recently, but his profile says he's active, so contacting him shouldn't be a problem.

As for the Radii View, you don't need a map, create a builder brush, use Subtract to get an empty room, rebuild map, and Add light from the right click menu. Light radius should be visible when you select the light.

Judith on 6/1/2015 at 17:57

I might have an idea for another feature, if it's not too dificult to implement. How about an option or a command that would force T3Ed to reload textures? Some textures don't need a material, like projection textures for lights, and some materials don't even appear in texture browser, like materials without diffuse texture. Every time I substitute a texture with its updated version, I have to either launch a game mode or restart T3Ed, to see any changes. Or maybe we already have something like that in place, and I just didn't find it? ;)

snobel on 7/1/2015 at 10:20

Without source code, unless there's an existing function which does exactly what you want, and which could then be executed in a different context, then it's probably not doable. (When working in binary only small isolated changes are feasible, in general.)

Judith on 7/1/2015 at 11:06

Sorry for asking you about something that requires source code. Tbh, I have no idea which issues belong to which category.

In Texture browser you can reload visible materials, then you have to rebuild the map - this option works fine, although I noticed no change when I was tweaking normals. At some point while changing a normal map, the material stopped using it in the editor view after using Reload. It worked in the game though. Any changes to cubemaps, materials without _D texture or _P textures used by FFL Light function require launching the game mode or restarting the editor. It's not that big of am issue, but I thought it might be worth a shot. I just went through the list of console commands from the Fleshworks Wiki, but didn't find anything useful.

Judith on 12/1/2015 at 17:24

Alright, another idea: loading screens always are in 4:3 ratio, is it possible to change that? I tried making something for 16:9 and it was squashed on the sides anyway. Second thought: is it possible to have videos instead of screens during loading, like the looping background video in main menu?