I'll cut to the chase... I've got $275 USD to spend towards having an old model extractor program overhauled
so it spits out geometry, textures, and UVs correctly. I'm offering the job here and elseware to try and get a bite.
The extractor is for Tachyon the Fringe's old PAK archive format. It is not a "normal" PAK or one that can be opened
with any of the other PAK tools out there. that I've located.
The existing extractor was made in VisualBasic 6 circa 2001, and has a dev log of the author brute forcing his way though
some example files. I have the source as well of course. I don't care what the final program is written in if you want to port the
code over or start from scratch - it just needs to work. I'm not even worried if it has a GUI. I just need to know how to use it, and
it preferably run in Windows (Linux might work too if we absolutely "must").
It does have some problems, namely:
OBJ exports are unreadable in anything besides Deep Exploration due to the author commenting every other line. - fixed by Goober
Scale of the exported objects is approximately planet to galaxy size, not fighter size.
There may be some issues with geometry skewing. - Item removed due to there not being a way to prove or disprove errors.
The PCX textures export, but are not exported correctly to be viewable by anything but DE again. PCX are viewable in hex easily enough. - fixed by Goober
UV maps are pretty much unfinished, the author says it the log he couldn't figure out the math to finish extraction.
There are some Array Out of Bounds errors, so on a handful of models it will crash on processing.
There are two things I'd like to see in the way of added features to the extractor:
1. Read a text file and place the relevant object pieces in XYZ space, in a single OBJ, after the source files have been initially extracted.
In Tachyon any large object is held together with an OCF or Object Combination File, which is text. I've already figured out pretty much everything
as to what does what in the file. But some bases and ships are 100 to 200 pieces (more like 14 unique parts repeated) arranged. I'd really really like to avoid
having to place everything by hand. I don't need the pieces physically connected or setup with subsystems, just oriented and placed correctly.
2. Batch mode. There's 1160 PAK files. It'd be nice if I could just aim it at a directory and it'd start at A and work to Z. I already extracted everything I could
one by one (sometimes 2 and 3 times), and that takes a long long time to do. - fixed by Goober
A nice wish would be if I could reimport things back into PAK for use in Tachyon, but I'm not holding out hope for something that complicated.
We could rennovate Tachyon and test things a lot easier though if it was possible.
In any case, getting this fixed would mean we could cut another 3 to 4 years of model fabrication off our FringeSpace project. They aren't the prettiest models
in the universe, but a lot can be done later to make it better, and there's a lot of improvements just moving to FSO in the lighting dept. alone.
Here's example files, and the PAK extractor itself with all it's related files... if you want to take a look.
http://files.fringespace.org/jgz/Pakextractor/PAK%20Extrator%20Package.zipAn OCF file decrypted:
http://files.fringespace.org/jgz/Pakextractor/GALCRUIS.txtIf you think you can do what we need, please contact me.
