[BloodFleet]

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

[mjn.mixael]

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.)

[BloodFleet]

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).

[mjn.mixael]

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.

[Kobrar44]

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.

[starlord]

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?

[BloodFleet]

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/

[Bobboau]

I'm firly sure most of that could be done, a bit of it would require heavy scripting though.

[JGZinv]

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...

[starlord]

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!

[JGZinv]

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.

[BloodFleet]

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.

[JGZinv]

http://www.zophar.net/forums/showthread.php?t=15038

Glide Wrapper....

[BloodFleet]

recommended settings for S:U?

well that seemed to fix the graphics problem but having some pretty nasty low framerate on most levels.

[JGZinv]

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.

[BloodFleet]

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.

[JGZinv]

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.

[starlord]

I sent a mail through linkedIn, we'll see what happens!

[JGZinv]

good luck... I know all too well the trials and tribulations of going from scratch and trying to get assets.

[starlord]

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?