Domarius
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Posts posted by Domarius
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A lot of these quirks will dissapear if squill and I have access to the original lightwave mesh files, so we can fix any rigging issues that only show up during animation work.
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Ah squill has the right idea.
Spring let me explain what we need again, sorry if I haven't been clear yet, there are a few things I've not mentioned yet.
Basically, if the citywatch lightwave file is currently exporting to the game, you need to upload it to model_src so we can continue animating. If it's in a half finished state and you're still re-rigging it or something, then we have to wait for you to finish.
Don't worry about skeleton changes - the changes I was talking about are just some additions to squill's maya file, which have no impact on the game because IK controls aren't exported to the game.
I think it would be a bad idea for squill and I to continue animating until the citywatch is re-weighted to the rig so that the body parts are properly centered around the joints.
I don't know what the version on your HDD is like, but the currently md5mesh that's been exported to the server is the same as what's in our maya files (and I can see this now thanks to squill exporting that md5mesh for me).
The arm bones are above the arms themselves, and the leg bones are riding down the insides of the legs. Not to mention the middle finger bone is bending down while the hand is actually going straight.
This explains all the hell I went through trying to animate the hands, and why the arms and legs just don't bend the way they should - some reasonable joint positions just look much worse than they should. Not only that, it takes longer to animate because you have to experiment to get the joints to look right.
If the weighting is fixed, it also means some of the animations might have to be re-done or tweaked. That's why there's no point going ahead and doing any more animations.
All other issues aside - there shouldn't have been an update to the citywatch.md5mesh on svn without an accompanying upload of the original lightwave source file to model_src, because this means you are the only one who can make changes.
I think this is a bad idea, because most issues with the way any mesh is rigged to the skeleton will only show up during animation work, so it would be a good idea if squill and I could help out with the rigging - by having access to the lightwave files so we can adjust the weighting directly in the lightwave file.
Exporting to md5mesh and then to maya is a one-way process purely so when we animate, the mesh in maya behaves the same as the one in the game. So there won't be any issues with the maya mesh getting out of sync or anything like that.
I hope the lightwave file is in a useable state, because I think it would be ideal if you upload it so I can re-rig it and get started animating, while you continue working on the St Lucia characters.
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Yes good point - I haven't played 1650x1080 without the widescreen patch, so everything has always looked normal to me
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Okay wow I wasn't aware of the enhancement pack! This is gonna be sweet.
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Well I think it depends on your video card. For me, DDFIX only listed a small amount of resolutions, the highest one was 1200x1000 or whatever that one is exactly. Only when I ran the widescreen patch was I allowed to manually enter my native rez of 1650x1080.
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Yeah I think we need the latest source mesh (your lightwave one I gather) uploaded to models_src\citywatch_mb so I can port it into the other source files.
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Ah in that case, the citwatch mesh should be adjusted to fit the skeleton better, and not the other way around. (And the other stuff I listed, like IK controls, I can add straight away to squills rig)
Can you upload the latest source file for the mesh (your lightwave one?) to models_src/citywatch? I don't know how closely the latest version matches the skeleton but the source file definetly needs to be up there (if it isn't already - I couldn't find it is all).
If you want to work on the St Lucia characters then I'm eager to take your citywatch mesh and do the grunt work to tweak it to be centered around the skeleton bones better, because I want to get that list of things done before I start animating, and I can use lightwave.
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Yeah by "sorted out" I mean all the things I said I wanted to do. Here's what I want to do;
- Align all arm and hand joints to be the middle of the mesh that they're controling so that the joints can bend to more extreme positions without looking wierd.
- Add rotation control for the forearm
- Add IK for arms
- Finger curl custom attributes should be able to tuck them right in and also extend them backwards a little, it will help emphasise certain gestures.
Just some basic things I want to get nailed out now before I start cranking out heaps of anims. But yeah I will wait for Spring to get back.
- Align all arm and hand joints to be the middle of the mesh that they're controling so that the joints can bend to more extreme positions without looking wierd.
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You said you already have the right game version but you didn't say if you have the cracked exe or not - that's also important. If you don't, it probably will corrupt your exe by editing the wrong hex location. And make sure safetexturemanager is uncommented in USER.CFG. When I did the DDFIX I just checked "Video fix" and then clicked "Apply patch" and it worked, so other than the things I mentioned above (which you can find in the link I posted) I can't help you - I'd suggest doing some more reading starting from that link I posted.
I have an 8800 GT video card, and My OS is XP SP2.
Also, open the .bat file in notepad and add the line
pause
at the end of the file. Save it and run it again, it should come up with whatever error message it's giving and will say "Press any key to continue..." before it closes now, so you have to press a key to close it.
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Well all I did was follow the instructions. The Widescreen comes with a readme that tells you to put the files in the Thief2 game folder, run the bat file, type your desired resolution, and that's it.
The readme also tells you the requirements - you'd better read it yourself. But off the top of my head, you need the latest cracked thief.exe - version 1.18 with the copy protection removed. The requirements say the version you need and says something like "No securerom protection" which basically means the cracked exe (meaning no original cd required in the drive)
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On that page there is a link to DDFIX, which is a thread in a forum. The link to widescreen is in the same post, it is a seperate app.
@HappyCheeze - well in that link above there is a post below the first, about a guy who had to do some extra tweaking to get his to work. Also sounds like you might have a multi-core issue, which is also addressed in the first post.
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http://forums.eidosgames.com/showthread.php?t=76531
Don't know if this is old news to any of you, but there is a fix called DDFIX for the Thief2.exe to use proper colours on new video cards; no crashing, no horrible bright banding, and no dithering. And another fix called Widescreen, that runs it at super high resolutions, with support for wide screen. I got mine running at native resolution - 1650x1080
Also the other main thing for me is I found a built in colour profile on my LCD monitor "Movie", which actually looks crap in day time, but at night time, it seems to more closely resemble the richness of colour I used to get from playing my CRT in the dark. Not quite as good, but not as washed out as the default profile. Enough to make me want to get back into playing the Thief 2 FMs again
And as for Garrett's voice being too loud - edit cam.cfg, find master_volume, and replace the -1 with 1600. That fixes it.
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Acording to squill, Springheel has the latest source file on his HDD, which is why the one I exported doesn't work properly. I'll wait till he gets back.
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Yeah I meant IK, whoops.
I wanted to go ahead and get the rig sorted out before doing anymore animating - so are you saying he has the source file locally? How did it become an .lwo, did he import one of the .mb files into LightWave, and which one? Is there a thread covering the progress on this that I've missed? (I've been looking...)
Okay in the mean time, I've just collected some relevent posts about what to do once we've got Spring's original file back.
You can't export lwo as obj from lightwave. The ligtwave obj exporter is archaic and doesn't export UVs (lightwave is the oldest 3d app by a long way, it started back in '89). Use deep exploraiton to convert the lwo to obj (or just direct to mb) and import them in maya. You may have to go to window-preferences-plugins and load the object import plugin (it's either that or the obj export plugin that isn't loaded by default)I'll tell you why I'm asking. When I was making those adjustments to the citywatch to allow for those alternate skins, I found it relatively easy. With the Lightwave import/exporter, I was able to load the md5mesh directly, convert them to LW objects (the skelton is stripped away), and make any modelling changes I want to the meshes. The weightmaps were preserved, so I then only had to load up the bones from the original, save, and presto, new and improved md5mesh.But if I wanted to use Deep Exploration to convert the new and improved mesh to MB, I've been told that the weightmap will NOT be saved (and how could it, if Maya doesn't allow a weightmap with no skeleton?). Which means, making any changes to the mesh (even something minor like removing the shadow head from the builder guard) would force me to entirely repaint the weightmap. That's not worth it for all but the most major changes.
The other option, of course, is to learn how to model in Maya, so I could make the changes to the mesh there. I'm not sure this is likely to happen fast enough to be useful, as it took me a year or so to get to the stage I am with Lightwave, which is just barely enough to do what needs to be done to the AI models.
So do you know if he ended up learning Maya or went ahead and made the changes using Lightwave? I hope we can convert it...
...if not, I'll still gladly spend the time required to re-construct whatever is lost after converting over to Maya, since there's a lot of re-working I want to do to it anyway.
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The best scanners have a "game mode" you can activate, which lowers the processing by only monitoring the most system critical resources.
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@HappyCheeze - Crysis is an awesome game, the graphics are only a part of it compared to what else happens - one big reason is the stealth approach is handled really well. But that's an entirely seperate issue.
@Spar - well this XP vs Vista issue with Crysis is nothing more than Microsoft paying Crysis to force XP out of the very high detail settings so that people will buy vista. In the case of your german vs english game, I can only think they were just covering their arses in some way.
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I want to update the citywatch rig so I need to be able to export the mesh sucessfully.
I've got latest data from darkmod and model_src repositories -but when I exportModels tdm_ai_citywatch, the resulting tdm_ai_citywatch.md5mesh is completely different than the one on the server. I did a diff and the textures, vertices are all different, and numMeshes is 10 on my exported one, but 6 in the server version.
I think some local editing of the mesh surface properties in the original .mb is required to fix the textures judging by this page on the wiki, but I still don't know why the mesh is so different - that's a bit of a worry, it's unlikely to work...
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The numbers are out, and XP runs games faster than vista, and they look identical in terms of image quality, even the DX10 ones.
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html...W50aHVzaWFzdA==
As you can see, XP comes out on top EVERY TIME, and in some cases, by an offensive amount - Need For Speed Carbon runs nearly HALF the speed on Vista. FSX is in that list too, which is a DX10 game, so that dispels any hope we're seeing bad DX9 support in favor of better DX10 support.
Here are the final charts if you don't feel like reading the article and looking at the pics.
As you can see, there is one tiny exception - in World Of Warcraft, only on the 8800GT, Vista gets a few more frames. But both OSs are running the game above 90 FPS, where the human eye can't tell the difference anyway.
Crysis I can tell you about - it also claims to require DX10 to look its best, and the "Very High" detail setting is disabled if you're running XP.
However, all you have to do is edit the config files and copy all the "Very High" settings into the "High" settings, so that choosing "High" has the same effect as "Very High" - and boom - the game looks as good on XP as it does on Vista. I've done this myself, and you can see comparison shots here (mouse over image captions to flick to the vista version)
http://au.gamespot.com/features/6182140/index.html
And a funny story - When they were making Flight Simulator X, they were pushing Vista SO hard, saying "Well, yeah you CAN play it on XP if you really wanna, but you're hardly going to get the full experience. On Vista, it will be faster, and look better." Same story - XP runs it faster, no visual difference. Well I bought the game myself, and it comes with a little readme file, and it almost reads like a confession! Something like "FSX was created while Vista was still in development. For this reason, there are some tweaks you have to do to get it running", including restarting vista when a certain problem happens, and disabling the Vista Aero interface so that it looks like XP, to get the game running at all!!
You just know MS is behind it all, making them push for DX10 so we have a reason to get Vista. But all is not lost - someone is hacking up a version of DX10 to run in XP
http://www.techmixer.com/download-directx-10-for-windows-xp/
But don't pay attention to the DX9 vs DX10 comparison screenshot - those are literally photoshopped mockups that MS did for marketing purposes, those images have been thrown around the net since 2006, before a real FSX screenshot was even available. That scene exists in NO game, and no game looks like that. If you see the big version of the screenshot, you can see the fuzzy bits around the shoreline, where the real water photograph was pasted over.
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Seeing as how everyone hated that aspect of the game I'm not sure it would be a smart idea to try to replicate it. But as far as Dark Mod being able to do so, I imagine it could to some degree at least, since in Doom 3 you could go back to previous sections.
No you couldn't - whenever you saw a loading screen, it was loading a new level. The "going back" levels were entire new levels that only looked like the previous levels, but with changes.
We have talked about adding support for this, simply because it lets you create missions that are just larger than the possible maximum map size, but not for the first release.
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Bah, that page is just marketing hype - it's just an interview with the developer, not actual performance tests. You need an independant 3rd party for a reliable source.
I made a post on how XP runs games faster than Vista, but decided it should be a new thread.
http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showtopic=8089
The bottom line is - the numbers are out, and XP runs games faster than vista, and they look identical in terms of image quality, even the DX10 ones.
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YES totally - there are tutorials out there purely to show you how to dance around Windows XPs immature handling of hard drive partitions when installing multiple OSs. It's pretty lame that they hadn't got that part right by then...
I don't know if they improved on this with Vista because I've never installed it (and don't intend to very soon).
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Yep 2 sticks - it uses them in paralell, that's called dual channel.
You're right - it's always the way... I guess the developers can't afford a system high end enough to test on or something... but the good news is I heard you can map the available memory the game is allowed to have, so it doesn't crash. But I know nothing about doing this, or if it maps it in a way that still makes the game access the memory in dual channel mode (which would suck if it didn't)...
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Cool, unique visual style, and only $20. Probably released on Steam?
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This is a pretty sweet rig squill. This is the file citywatch_rig_00.mb right?
It still doesn't seem to have FK controls on the arms? I was thinking of adding them.
Now we will only have one rig - so I want to make sure it's the most awesome rig possible
This one superceeds all the previous versions, and there isn't any use for the motionbuilder version now, with the layers plugin. I want to tighten up the rigging though, the bones aren't centered inside the mesh's joints along the arms and fingers, so they don't bend so good at some angles, and the finger slider controls need to be able to bend them fully straight, and even slightly backwards a bit.
Citywatch rig
in Art Assets
Posted
One thing that's really bothering me about the skeleton - why IS the middle finger bent down in the rig? I could understand if both fingers were bent down, to give the mesh a chance of looking better when bent as opposed to straight, or vice versa... but one bent and the other straight? One will look good bent, and one will look good straight, and neither will be the same. Maybe it's not a huge issue but it's just odd that it's been this way for so long. Since you're switching the hands over from mitten to fingered, that would be a good time to fix it. Again, I don't mind taking on any of that work, I can use lightwave.