IronDuke’s I-War2 Remake/I-War3

[IronyMan]

Dang. I’m impressed. Have you implemented functional thrusters on the ship yet? That may be what I’m most looking forward to.

Even with the system damage ramped way up in the vanilla game I never had the feeling that my ship could be really crippled by a critical hit; other ships never used disruptors in combat, and the engines couldn’t be individually damaged.

I am super pumped for this. Gonna look into modeling and working with Unity over the summer; maybe I’ll be able to contribute something.

Keep it up man, you’re doing great.

[admin]

Daaaaamn. That is really amazing. <3

If Atari ever decides to make a sequel, they should hire you. 🙂

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Space. The final frontier.

[Chessking]

I have recently implemented LDA shields into EOC 2-D, including rendering an LDA image. My question is, will you be able to use the LDA image from the actual game? If not, I can make one for you pretty easily. Unless the image has to be mapped to a convex mesh… in which case it will be the perfect warm-up for ship re-texturing. 😉

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This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay

Storm Petrel

[IronDuke]

@ Bozobub & Schmatzler

Thanks guys! Glad you like it so far. I’m pretty excited about how much stuff I can get working in Unity in a silly short amount of time. I took a couple months or so off from serious work, but I’ve finally managed to straighten out enough, and this Gunstar, which didn’t exist on Sunday, along with the Light PBC, were both created yesterday. B)

@IronyMan

Look at the first picture. There’s two windows on the right, the hierarchy and the inspector. If you look at the hierarchy, you can see nested under “Comsec” a large number of objects named Roll, Pitch, Yaw, Y, X, and Z. Those are all individual thrusters. They’re all fully functional in terms of thrust – the ship flies by applying thrust at each thruster location. No fancy graphics on them yet at all, but that’s simply a matter of making them, which I’ll likely do when I add AI piloting.

@Chessking

The visual for LDA hits in I-War 2 is a simple flare pointing at the camera that grows and then fades, plus a little shockwave-ring-thingy aligned to the normal of the impact point. I should know. I completely replaced it at one point as an experiment. I could point you straight to the .lws file too; there’s a second one as well that’s the same but without the shockwave, for use at longer ranges because you’d never see the shockwave so they figured on saving some rendering power.

Using the original images I’m not sure about; I don’t have a program that can convert the ingame textures to something I can edit. I used to on my old Pentium 4, but that computer’s long gone. I’m likely gonna need to just create a new effect from scratch. That’s fine by me; if there’s one thing I have never ever gotten tired of, it’s making special effects. I’ve burned out of literally everything else at some point or other, but not special effects. 👿

In terms of the work for getting 3-D models into the game, I just run the .pso through a reverse-engineered lwo-to-pso converter that Particle Systems Stephen Robertson supplied the modding community way back and some smart bloke managed to reverse it. This produces a .lwo, which I import into Blender. I fix any holes in the geometry, add seams to the automatic smoothing, then save it as a .blend in the Unity project folder. Unity can natively read .blend files, which is awesome.

The only real downside is that the reverse-converter only gives me the 3-D model. No original smoothing data, which means I have to use screenshots frrom the vanilla game to know where to place seams. No UVs, which means applying the original textures is darn near impossible. Doesn’t matter; not one of them is over 256×256, and I’d prefer to use 2k textures. B) We’ll have to make new ones. It’s a bummer I’m such a lousy artist at drawing stuff; maybe one of you guys is better than me at that.

–IronDuke

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I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂

[Chessking]

We once had a conversation with someone about the whole models and textures thing. I wasn’t able to find the thread again, but I know all about the situation. One of the things I mentioned was that I have found a way to convert the .RAW image files to .png. I’ll see if I can dig out the LDA images that way. 😉

I have converted to lda.ftu to lda.png. However, the result doesn’t look very useable, because like you said, the shield is drawn in two parts. If you want the file anyways, I can send it to you in a PM. In the meantime, I will type out a new LDA image.

Edit: what resolution do you want?
Edit2: I have more questions so I will send you a PM.

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This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay

Storm Petrel

[IronDuke]

Can you please tell me exactly how you are converting from .ftu to .png? That would be massively helpful for me to be able to do as well.

–IronDuke

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I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂

[Bozobub]

First, you burn an effigy of Bill Gates at a Linus Torvalds altar…

…I’ll see myself out, thanks, no need to push.

[Chessking]

The process is fairly simple. First, make a copy of the .ftu file. Second, rename the file .RAW. Then, download the program called Irfanview. Also download and install the extension for Irfanview allowing you to open many different file types. (Irfanview and the extension are both free, and download links are available here. However, the apparent links will use cnet.com, even though you can download it through the irfanview site. I will send you a PM including the specifics of this.) Then, open the .RAW file with Irfanview. It will open a dialog asking for specifications on how to open the file. Use the settings specified in part two of this mod guide. The file should open properly, and you can simple save as a .png through Irfanview.

Edit: I don’t think you need the plugins to use RAW files with Irfanview.

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This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay

Storm Petrel

[IronyMan]

Duke, I can do some digital art. Haven’t done much with textures yet, but if you’ll post a couple of .blend files for the game I can give retexturing a shot. If there’s anything I can do halfway decently for this project, it’ll be art. 😛

@Bozobub, I see you skulking over there. You rascal, you.

[Chessking]

I too am planning on helping with re-texturing. Perhaps, we can work together on it once things get rolling. (Along with IronDuke, of course). Would you be working with programs like Photoshop? If so, that could work well because I mostly do stuff with procedural content generation (perlin noise, algorithms, etc.). These techniques are most useful for generating patterns, such as metal patterns on a ship’s hull, but not for specific details or blending into different patterns across the hull. We’ll see how it goes.

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This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay

Storm Petrel

[IronyMan]

I’m a poor boy. I use Krita; it’s like Photoshop but free and open source. B)

[Chessking]

Interesting. I too do not use Photoshop, but Gimp when I really need to. Gimp is free as well, but seems to be rather difficult to use. Perhaps Krita is better.

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This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay

Storm Petrel

[IronDuke]

Right, I’ll try out Irfanview. Previously I’d used a really old version of Paint Shop Pro, since Gimp can’t seem to open .RAW files. Thanks Chessking! 🙂

As for texturing the models, to keep file sizes and load times down, I’d like to use procedural textures wherever possible. No idea how, but Unity’s documentation was talking about them, so I’m sure it’s not hard. Obviously lots of stuff can’t be textured procedurally, so the old-fashioned method will be needed as well.

–IronDuke

P.S. This thread really exploded. :blink:

P.P.S Bozobub, thank you for the giant laugh. 😆

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I-War 2 Discord: https://discord.gg/RWaabWB
Very little about the game is not known to me. Any questions you got, throw them at me. 🙂

[Chessking]

Remember when I tried to render the background stars in real-time? From that experience, it shouldn’t be too hard to implement what you are talking about. Basically, on program launch, the game will render textures and save them as images, that can then be used by the program throughout the game. An advanced solution would be for the game to save the rendered images to the hard drive, so they do not have to be rendered next time the game is loaded.

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This is one tough navy, boy. They don’t give you time off, even for being dead. -Clay

Storm Petrel

[Bozobub]

[quote=”Chessking” post=20616]Interesting. I too do not use Photoshop, but Gimp when I really need to. Gimp is free as well, but seems to be rather difficult to use. Perhaps Krita is better.[/quote]
There’s a LOT of crossover, but imo Krita is easier to use in many ways (much cleaner UI, for example) and more conducive to image creation, while GIMP 2 is best for image manipulation. It’s a lot like the distinction between Illustrator and Photoshop, in many ways.

A significant number of people create initial content in Krita, import to Gimp, then make it dance about. I’ve done it myself (badly).

Sadly, I am NOT much of a savant; the only artistic medium I can manipulate with much skill is clay 😛 . I’ll happily help with alpha/beta testing and such, however, if you need extra minions.

[Author]

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