Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: BloodFleet on October 01, 2011, 06:33:07 pm
-
another member here (starlord) recently asked if I could get Sinistar:Unleashed stuff for FS2. Just wanna know how much of this game would be possible before I get too into trying to do it lol, one of the game clips I put up is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hEuHhaWwgg
I've got a lot of the weapons, that was pretty easy. What about a lot of the other stuff?
I'm talking like, the asteroids that spawn crystals you pick up for energy to fire special weapons and auto-heal your ship and some of the special weapons like mind control and lightning storm, as well as the powerups. I know those at least can work...the Antagonist campaign for example had weapon swapping, but this would be like giving your ship a temporary defense ai (aka orbital defense, for those who played this), cloaking, shields, or a large amount of crystal energy. hmm, theres like 10 different weapons so...I'm guessing I have to just go with the 3 primary and 4 secondary maximum?
As for the player and enemies. I would like to get the stuff from the game but I can't figure out how. The files are in formats I don't have a way to view or anything. It looks like the models are the .rsc files, textures are .tex and the .dat I'm guessing is game data like ship speed, rate of fire for a weapon, etc. Tried opening with wordpad but its all compiled or something, can't read it.
EDIT: Well I've got a good start on this now, will update a ModDB page here http://www.moddb.com/mods/sinispace
-
Not watching the video but just reading the post, here are my thoughts...
Having powerups spawn out of asteroids? Probably not.. I can't think of a way to hack it either.
Mind Control of other ships... could potentially be possible... having yourself be controlled.. definitely possible.
Lightning storm... that one's tricky, but you might be able to hack something with the nebula lightning and fake damage reduction.
Orbital defense? That's probably doable. Cloaking and shields are doable. You could do special energy a number of different ways.
You could fake having 10 weapons pretty easily actually. Create a new hud gauge to list all 10 weapons and use special keystrokes to allow the player to switch weapons. Then you can switch the active weapon for the player ship with FRED commands.
FRED is mighty and powerful with a little imagination. Actually.. a competent FREDer around here just told me this little number and it's so true. FREDing is more like being an illusionist with slight of hand than being a sorcerer and actually making things happen. (That is quoted verbatim, but you get my point.)
-
The asteroids would be stationary btw not like most FS2 asteroid fields (ya I know you can give those 0 speed). Though it would really help to be able to randomly generate them like that, putting that many individual things into FRED...well actually the levels are all pretty identical, its a ring of rocks around the jumpgate that spawns the sinistar (or blows up after 12 minutes if you keep destroying the gate crystals) levels in Sinistar have enough so that it would take like an hour to destroy them all. So I would probably only have to do it once and spamming rocks everywhere I guess wouldn't take that long really...well idk thats if I go furthur with this.
You can have them be untargetable like Sinistar I know that, which would be a must otherwise your radar would be filled up so much you couldnt tell things apart. Only a few of them (blue marks on ones that do btw) spawned powerups so I could just pick out random ones and FRED them to spawn something when destroyed yeah? Shouldn't be too hard actually.
Mainly though I would at least want to get the player ship, isn't much without that. Also some weapon issues are that I don't seem to be able to get missiles to use weapon energy when fired? Weapons in Sinistar all draw from your crystal/energy supply when fired (except your mining laser).
-
The only way that would work would be to table asteroid models as ships and place them all manually in FRED. Currently (as far as I know), there is no way to hook into when a specific asteroid is destroyed and have something happen. So you could hack it by creating a field manually.. but that would be neither efficient.. nor do I think it would run very well.
-
Everything i've seen in this vid is doable, even the legs of those worms could be done somehow, but all of this requires certain effort. The case is if you are eager to do it or not. If you are planning to make a mod, you should be.
-
thank you for posting bloodfleet!
I found the creator of the models, yet he doesn't have them unmodified and he sadly knows nothing of the proprietary format THQ used for S:U...
Perhaps an extractor the likes of 3D ripper is the way to go?
-
Recreating S:U with FSO? Yeah I'd like to see it, a lot more could be done that S:U never did (like multiplayer, among many other things).
I need to find a way to get at the models and such first though. If anyone thinks they can open these things I can send some of the files. In the meantime I'll keep getting S:U like weapons in FS2 and looking for a way to get the models. I suppose if all else fails I could just use FS2 ships to recreate similar gameplay (fan made or not, doesn't matter).
Ok well I looked up and got that 3D ripper, that seemed to work I've definitely got the textures for the player ship and such. Of course the model/geometry thing seems to extract like...the whole level lol. Doesn't seem to like it though, the player ship and all the other objects are all split up into many parts...don't think this is gonna work for that part, here is what I see even after removing a bunch of things that appear to be the background or whatever and finding what looks like your fighter in the mess http://imageshack.us/f/31/ohwtf.jpg/
-
I'm firly sure most of that could be done, a bit of it would require heavy scripting though.
-
Blood - which ripper did you try? 3D Ripper DX ? There's several out there, but it greatly depends on what directX version (or opengl too) was this game made for...
RipperDX has some Max scripts on their forum made by users that can fix some things, but if the geometry looks like thousands of shards, might as well forget it
beyond being a nice texture ripper. Anything under say, DX 8 or 9 isn't supported hardly at all and the author isn't interested in fixing it. I've been down this whole route not more
than a month ago. I'd also note that you'll get different results depending on if you're running Win 7 or XP, though neither were usable.
If you want proof it does work on newer games... here's a tutorial I made on getting models out of Blur - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67HV5TfRrQg
If you don't want per say to get into hex editing, at least try asking at the Xentax forums. You can use my post as a template - http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=7312
More often than not, most formats are one or more file types hidden in a "wrapper" of sorts. But they'd have the tools and people (if you can get some to help) that would
be able to do something with your files.
Edit... actually searching around, you're not the first person to try this: http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=4114&view=next
and o hai starlord... seems we think alike... http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7323&p=59260&hilit=sinistar+unleashed#p59260
and so not to leave you completely high and dry... here's another one of the guys that modeled SU's assets, http://www.linkedin.com/in/richsullivanconcept
might see if his memory is any more complete on the subject...
-
Hmm, good find! I'll try to contact him through linkedIn (later though, next week)!
As for the rest, S:U uses directX 8.1 I think!
-
I very highly doubt that star... it was made in 1999, same year as FS2 and Tachyon... so at best it'd be DX6 or 7.... plus it was developed for the 3DFX engine / Voodoo cards.
You have to use a Glide wrapper to even get it to run on any recent video card from what I can tell... which being that the branch of THQ
that made this, was their special development division, could very well be related to why this is a unique format.
Knowing that Max produced the models does help you a little in that Max back then, if they were like Novalogic... was probably 3DS Max 3.
It doesn't export to many file types... but as others have said, what these files are now, is not usable. I looked at them in hex (not that I'm a whiz or anything)
and found nothing in plain text to give us a clue. Now something you might try, is I saw there was a patch for SU... you might see if you can lock it up
during the install process, and copy the files it's dropping into the directory. One popular method for games was to make a patch that copied the files to the
install directory, pack them into the archive, then delete the visible copies in the folder. If that is the case and you can catch it, you may get your hands on
uncompressed, or "raw" files that'll give you or someone else a clue.
-
Yeah it is 3D Ripper DX...and when I put S:U in it wanted to put like DirectX6.1 (of course I have much higher than that now so...yeah I didn't install that).
huh that may be the problem with S:U on this comp? After I play for like 2 levels everything (all textures) turn yellow and the game fps slows down to like...1 lol. There is like no support whatsoever for S:U so I never knew what to do about it.
-
http://www.zophar.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15038
Glide Wrapper....
-
recommended settings for S:U?
well that seemed to fix the graphics problem but having some pretty nasty low framerate on most levels.
-
Not sure, here's the creator's site and it has some information - http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide
Ask on their forum.... seems like it's supposed to run fine on even old systems.
If the graphics are better, might try the ripper again for kicks.... how the screen is rendered may have been affected,
which might produce a change in the ripper results.
-
hmm well back on topic with this then, no I tried again and got the same result...so idk what to do now, I'm guessing at this point I might have to model everything myself, which I could do now (to an extent) but texturing not yet...at least I have those though the ripper did that part fine.
Also some of the weapons and powerups I'm thinking will be difficult, such as the charging photon and lightning gun. And for the missiles, can you have primaries that can home like heat seekers (and of course use a missile model) so the $Energy Consumed line works? It doesn't appear to make a difference when used on secondaries. Either that or secondaries that use energy, don't know how else I'd get the long and short range missiles to use energy when fired.
-
If you can do the modeling, then the UV and texturing isn't a huge deal. You've got the maps already, which cuts out 60% of the texturing process.
To make things even quicker, see if you can't use DX ripper's wireframe mode and get a screen shot from the necessary angles to base a model on.
-
I sent a mail through linkedIn, we'll see what happens!
-
good luck... I know all too well the trials and tribulations of going from scratch and trying to get assets.
-
so do I! that's not a first!
We'll see what comes of this!
Also, regarding the charging photon, is it that much of a big deal? Can't FSO handle chargable primaries?
As for the lightning gun, a beam with lightning effects?
-
Really, I would not worry at all about weapons. Charging stuff has been done as has lightning like beam hacks. Just search HLP.
Remember the engine is also "moving" under you while you're building your mod, so what may not be possible today, may work tomorrow.
Assets assets assets.... those take time (blood sweat and tears not included either) to get ready and in game.
Weapons, and ship stats are largely text tables... you can sit a tweak those easily and quickly, or hand it off to someone
else that can't do the modeling or related tasks.
It probably would be worth your while to establish a basic project plan, and a loose timetable for yourself. Figure out what should
be done first so you're not spending time in 30 directions that don't need to be done right away. It's a great way to get unfocused, get bored/depressed/sloppy,
then find yourself in a rut. Aim for just very basic (attainable) goals to start with, even if that's just one fighter flyable in game, then maybe go
to 2 ships, or 1 ship and a weapon.
Making a mod is sort of like a food eating contest. The guys that go in there guzzling everything at once won't last long. The people with staying power
are methodical and take it one piece at a time. Rome wasn't built in a day so to speak, neither was Egypt.
/end old fogie advice
-
I'm concentrating on model availability myself, and I'm lucky so far as I know a few people involved in S:U!
I also know a few involved in bang: gunship elite (very nice ships) and halcyon sun.
-
Well to replicate S:U it would need to be a primary that you can either tap to fire basic shot or hold to charge a more powerful shot similar to Descent 3 Fusion cannon. Lightning gun yeah a beam but in SU it locks onto targets within about a 30 degree arc in front of your ship (to an extent, like limited beam range of around 1800 or something probably).
But that is secondary, primary objective is of course to get the player ship and at least one of the Sporg enemies, seeing as they are the enemy force for the first half of the game. I've got as best of screenshots as I can get so...well I'll see what I can do with max, the S:U models aren't that complex (even moreso the enemies). The player ship is probably the most complex model lol, besides the sinistar boss enemies that is.
btw turning on wireframe with the 3d ripper = this http://imageshack.us/f/716/hmmfb.jpg/
so yeah not that helpful...besides showing me that the background is just a bunch of triangles :P
Best thing I've got to go off is like... http://imageshack.us/f/843/playerfighter.jpg/ and http://imageshack.us/f/542/sporgguardian.jpg/ so yeah again I'll see what I can manage.
-
what about the lightning storm?
Also, the space stations and asteroid colonies in the bonus levels are quite nice too!
-
well heres my first attempt and like the 3rd model ive actually gone thru with in my life so yeah lol :P
http://imageshack.us/f/411/playerlvl1.jpg/
pretty much looked at the above playerfighter image and kept modifying a box until I got that.
now as for getting this textured and into FS2?...or do more stuff to it. I could probably do with applying some smoothing
-
I've got news from linkedIn: Seems that the only thing Mr sullivan told me was that no, THQ didn't temper with model file formats and that the models were done by 3dstudio... what's your opinion?
-
well I'm guessing that stuff is in the .rsc files but I've searched quite a bit for something that can view that and well no luck.
-
you need to get samples of other file types and compare the headers in hex probably... see if you can't find a match
-
http://www.ehow.com/how_5764206_determine-file-type-missing-extension.html
mentions using this program: (known pattern & signature file type matcher)
http://mark0.net/soft-trid-e.html
Also, there is this: (dumps headerfile hex to clipboard)
http://mark0.net/soft-minidumper-e.html
mentioned here:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=44017.msg766008#msg766008
-
im not seeing how that is going to help view the contents of the files...or how I would go about doing that
wait what? I don't need to find out the extension its .rsc
-
JR2 all the "oh let me tell you what this is" programs are pretty close to useless, I'm speaking from experience here.
I've used Trid and a dozen others before...
All they do is look at the file header area and try to match a few lines to a database, anything mismatched or without a header,
or a compressed, unique format.... which is most files you're trying to figure out... it won't return anything.
Basically if it won't tell you anything more than looking at the extension or opening it in notepad would.
My point was to get that version of max off the web, or produce the same file formats old Max could, and then compare the files in
something free like HxD (hex editor) and see if you get anything with matching similarities. Attack it from both sides.
It's pretty concrete now that Max was used, and you've got the notes of the guy from Xentax on the matter, there's only
so many formats Max can export. The only issue is going to be if they converted the models for game use (sort of like how we
use DAE here out of Max, then go to POF).
-
you need to get samples of other file types and compare the headers in hex probably... see if you can't find a match
Also, there is this: (dumps headerfile hex to clipboard)
http://mark0.net/soft-minidumper-e.html
:P
-
I never claimed "that" link was neigh useless... just the file analyzing ones.
2 minutes with HxD and Google are about the best you're going to be able to get without
detailed knowledge on a particular format, if it's not glaringly obvious what it is. The "what is it"
apps are just far too limited in their pattern detection to be of real use for our kind of work in games.
-
well since I've already gone through with doing at least 1 thing pretty quickly (took like 2 hours), as I showed above in #26, I'm content with doing it myself. Would benefit me and from the looks of it be easier than trying to get the stuff out of S:U
k, well I got PCS2 to allow .dae import, and I have the model I did in .dae, tried to import and nothing happened...so I'm guessing there is something else I need to do?
it seems to load the .dds texture I quickly/crapily made for it though, but I see no model.
-
Picture please - also you should post in the PCS2 help thread.
I'd guess for the simplest issue to check for is did you reset x-form (Max) before you exported, made sure everything still looked
correct afterwards? Are your LODs setup correctly, is the mesh hidden?
-
I never claimed "that" link was neigh useless... just the file analyzing ones.
Hmm, yeah, I was just hoping that TRID would be an easier option... I guess it's still not that good at identification.
-
yeah I did reset x-form and it looked fine, then exported to .dae, do I need LODs? This thing is only like 300 polys. Try to import the .dae into PCS2 and this is what I get... http://imageshack.us/f/210/hmmd.jpg/
-
Make sure your objects are named properly. 'detail0' 'detail1' 'detail2' 'debris01' 'debris02' etc.. (That is only for root objects. If it is linked as a subobject, then it can be named whatever as long as the root is detail0.
Also make sure your scale isn't something super tiny.
-
k its good now...I named it detail0 and that fixed it.
of course now its facing 180 degrees the wrong way and needs to be 2 times bigger lol...but I know how to fix that too.
ok I got it in, woot http://imageshack.us/f/580/screen0004x.jpg/ http://imageshack.us/f/32/screen0005vs.jpg/
-
looks like you got it! congrats!
Can you try to export the bugs also?
-
ive got a moddb page for this now btw http://www.moddb.com/mods/sinispace
-
well done! congrats!
-
ok well ive got an asteroid field of sorts in...can I have them have their own explosion sound and effects? Obviously them exploding like they are ships doesnt make much sense...
-
Look for the asteroid script that just came out here in the last week or two. That should help somewhat, but the sound thing I'm not sure of.
Check the wiki probably.
-
well...these asteroids are ships (as in entries in the ship table) because I need to place them manually. Unless there is a way to do asteroid fields in shapes (like a ring of asteroids) that don't respawn I am assuming there isn't. So the normal way of FS asteroids aka asteroid table doesn't look like it will help here...
-
Ah sorry I didn't get what you were asking for then.
-
Well next thing then...
In S:U the worker enemies would gather crystals and attach them to the jump gate, when there was enough the sinistar would warp in (you could also keep destroying them and prevent that causing the gate to blow up after about 12 minutes). Is there a way I could replicate that?
-
Make the gate a dockable object, and establish dockpoints for the crystals or enemy units, then do some fancy event freding to dock them on some sort of trigger.
Pretty much everything after your first comma is fred work.
-
k wanted to ask if there is anything I can do with the ai as some things in S:U acted different than others. For example when you damaged the strike warrior enemies enough they would flee the area at high speed using afterburner. I'm thinking FRED would allow for that, but what about how the sinistar bosses played? They would always chase after you (though some would temporarily flee when you hit them with a sinibomb) and some have tractor beams they can use to pull you around or push away your sinibombs. I have some of these enemies in game but they are not much different from the rest atm and well, they should be if possible.
some more stuff ive done on http://www.moddb.com/mods/sinispace btw
-
Not my territory, but you'll eventually have someone tell you about this.
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Ai_profiles.tbl
-
I like your squadron warrior! you capture the S:U look quite well!
-
some more things on the moddb page now, but for the heavy fighter what went wrong here. I did everything for it the same as everything else so far and I have this ingame http://imageshack.us/f/706/hfwtf.jpg/
where did these invisible polys come from? In max it looks fine.
-
If there's something going wrong with your model during conversion, then you need to check a couple things:
1. Make sure there are no duplicate vertices.
2. All the normals are facing the right direction.
3. The model is triangulated sometime before you make a .POF.
4. There are no holes in the mesh.
5. Object location are set to plane origin.
6. Your hierarchy is correct with the base object being "detail0".
Edit: If it's not one of these, I don't know what it could be. All of the errors I've gotten, except for one type, come from that list. The exception was when I rotated an object instead of rotating the polies that make up the object which made the POF read a subobject incorrectly, making it tilted about 30 degrees.
-
well me still being an uber noob at this stuff...
eh nevermind I re-exported after editing the model in that area a bit and its ok now
1. how would I check to see if that is the case?
2. I always make sure all the faces are good, in this case they are.
3. same as #1...or do you mean the reset x-form thing? cause I do do that.
4. again I check for any wrong face direction or holes...don't see any.
5. Always have the model set to 0, 0, 0 and try to get pivot point as close as I can to objects center point (sometimes it is below or above but I fix that)
6. that was a problem before but I know to do that now, so that can't be it.