Lightmaps and new areas

[Gargoyle King]

I noticed something else that gives me more certainty that Kotor actually uses my model , there are no more shadows .

 

And this is one of the options I haven't put "on" in 3D-Max in the aurora-trimesh modifier , Render is "on" ( obvisiously) .

 

I'll now check my mdl with a HEX-editor , perhaps I should change the name in there aswell .

Good work Quanon, your very talented in this (seen your Coruscant reskins aswell, i'm very impressed ). We're getting closer to the goal now can't wait for the first ever "Custom" area built from scratch!

[Pavlos]

Well congratulations to you both. Just out of interest, is there any chance of you running a test for KotOR II. Though several of the model formats were altered for TSL, it will be nice to know if this sort of thing is possible in the sequel.

 

Again, brilliant stuff, guys. Hopefully, these discoveries will usher in a new age for the KotOR community.

[Gargoyle King]

Well congratulations to you both. Just out of interest, is there any chance of you running a test for KotOR II. Though several of the model formats were altered for TSL, it will be nice to know if this sort of thing is possible in the sequel.

 

Again, brilliant stuff, guys. Hopefully, these discoveries will usher in a new age for the KotOR community.

I'm sure it would be possible, i think first it would be good to concetrate on getting it right on K1, to know it works and then try to implement that in TSL, as only few alterations would have to be done for it to work in TSL surely?

[SithRevan]

Awesome stuff guys! Good work. It looks like we'll see Sleheyron soon after all!

[Quanon]

Okay , Custom walkmeshes do work , I just did some testing with just putting .wok files into the Override folder.

 

See, I can ran pretty far away from area geometry , the orginal Walkmesh has been overriden .

 

 

Great , we can walk through walls now . Whenever I try to replace the .mdl and .mdx file I get zero result or wierd things like this :

 

 

Yep my head is floating around .

 

I even tried to use some of my older .mdl and .mdx , JUst thought I might see just a part of them or even their "screwed-up" version , like in my first test run.

 

I even did a succesfull replace Geosphere to Box with MDlops , but then Kaurora keeps crashing on these files , so I can't get a .wok .

 

And worse the game crashes on these files .

 

So I'll first clean up my folders , cause I'm getting a huge pile of .Mdl and such . I'll restart fresh and clean

[magnusll]

Just a quick note: I was doing some tests myself, and I noticed a possible problem with how Kaurora handles walkmeshes. Namely, Kaurora uses the vertex coordinates it gets from the NWMax .mdl file, i.e. relative to the node position, but a quick glance at vertices in the .wok files seem to suggest they get stored in absolute coordinates. Were you forced to use walkmeshes which are much bigger than the area geometry to make them work? If yes, this would be the cause.

 

I'll do further checks and, if needed, eliminate the bug. Meanwhile, you can get around the problem by making sure that both the area model and the walkmesh have their position at (0, 0, 0); this will make absolute and relative coordinates equal.

[Quanon]

Just a quick note: I was doing some tests myself, and I noticed a possible problem with how Kaurora handles walkmeshes. Namely, Kaurora uses the vertex coordinates it gets from the NWMax .mdl file, i.e. relative to the node position, but a quick glance at vertices in the .wok files seem to suggest they get stored in absolute coordinates. Were you forced to use walkmeshes which are much bigger than the area geometry to make them work? If yes, this would be the cause.

 

I'll do further checks and, if needed, eliminate the bug. Meanwhile, you can get around the problem by making sure that both the area model and the walkmesh have their position at (0, 0, 0); this will make absolute and relative coordinates equal.

 

Yep , the new area and its walkmesh are bigger , much bigger infact then the original . Do note that the orginal "dome" of m46aa_01a hangs far off to the right of the AuroraBase . My first more succesfull walkmesh was very big and I had made sure that both the "dome" and AuroraBase where in it .

 

Second walkmesh ( from my last 2 screenshots above) is not that much bigger, , strange thing is it cuts the dome in two , but in Max I made sure I could walk around in the whole dome. Its like it has been pulled backwards a couple of steps .

 

And Ow ,dear thats something I'm not sure of I did in the last couple of test , the positioning + the pivot point thing .

 

I also noticed something about map/ coordinates + reallife coordinates in the Ngon object . Does this has any effect or use for my area .mdl and .mdx ?

[magnusll]

Ok, here's what I found out: the walkmesh you have in the .mdl (the original one modeled by Bioware in Max) gets processed before being translated in a .wok file. You can have a look by simply exporting both the .mdl and the .wok in ascii (using mdlops and Kaurora). You'll notice that "object01" (the walkmesh in the mdl) has 63 vertices, while the one in the .wok has 42. This is because there are 21 duplicated vertices in the original mesh (the one in 0, 0, 0 alone is duplicated 19 times); these "useless" vertices get deleted before building the .wok. Also, the coordinates in the .wok file are absolute, i.e. they are the result of the coordinates in the mdl + the position controller of the walkmesh (which in this case is 100, 100, 0).

 

I've added a new menu option in Kaurora which does the processing, so now when you import a walkmesh created from scratch in Max (i.e. you're not working on one extracted from a previously existing .wok), you'll have to use this option before building the .wok, and this will result in a .wok with the correct vertices and coordinates being built. I tried it by creating a new walkmesh for the mind prison, using a square instead of the oval normally used for the dome, and it works correctly. I can walk outside the dome if I go in the corners outside the oval, but I can't go far... correctly. The walkmesh has the right dimensions and is in the right place.

 

On a negative note, when I use the very same walkmesh in a new area I created by substituting the dome with a box, I get nowhere. While I enter the area in the correct position, I find myself in the black and unable to move... will have to do more tests to see what is going wrong. But I really think the walkmesh part is working fine now, so we can definitely build new walkmeshes from scratch.

[Quanon]

Yep , your walkmesh program does his work good , I did some sound-testing.

 

I've divided my Walkmesh , into several differant "grounds" : dirt , metal ,snow , sand , door ... each of them give another foorstep sound .

 

And they work perfectly , and like this I was able to orientate me better in my invisible white world .

 

Sadly I have no idea why or .mdl refuse to show up in Kotor , I would suggest to use the replace technique like you would do with saber-hilts , perhaps this will give a better result .

 

Since m46aa_01a , just contains one mesh , Geosphere01 . You could easly replace this with your Box or other object.

 

I might have try at it today.

 

I'll post when I have more results , hopefully something visible .

[Quanon]

I was about to start to do some tests today ,but to my suprise I found a small notepad file in my Kotor Directory called :

 

AR_ERROR , the file contains one line of text :

 

Names Differ: NewBox01 m46aa_01a

 

^ Not sure when Kotor created this file , or from witch of my .mdl might be the source .

 

Do you have any of thes ERROR reports ? Do you think they're the proof of the game saying it doesn't like our new models ?

 

And how do these ambientcolor values work in the .are file , are they the standard RGB values from 0-256 , doesn't look that way though .

 

And what about those BYTE can you switch things on by setting them to 1 ( example , chancesnow or rain -> VALUE :0 = off VALUE : 1 = on ), or do they have a range from 0-7 , BYTE is 8 bits , right ?

[stoffe]

I was about to start to do some tests today ,but to my suprise I found a small notepad file in my Kotor Directory called :

 

AR_ERROR , the file contains one line of text :

 

Names Differ: NewBox01 m46aa_01a

 

As far as I know the Aurora/Odyssey engines generate an AR_ERROR.log file whenever it encounters a MDL file where the name of the .mdl file and the internal model name within it differs.

 

So in this case I'd guess that m46aa_01a.mdl has NewBox01 set as model name internally.

[Quanon]

As far as I know the Aurora/Odyssey engines generate an AR_ERROR.log file whenever it encounters a MDL file where the name of the .mdl file and the internal model name within it differs.

 

So in this case I'd guess that m46aa_01a.mdl has NewBox01 set as model name internally.

 

hmmm , then most of the time I've been using wrong .mdl files .

 

I thought it didn't matter that much if the actual mesh/object was called something different , or is it refering to the AuroraBase ?

 

I was not sure if it would have been advisable to HEX-edit my .mdl to alter the name again, as they're not the same length .

 

Great I think I made just one of the dumbest mistakes EVER :s , ow the shame of it .

[Revan_Pwn_Malak]

I'm barely even able to contain my excitement. Though there seems to be many problems, this is only natural when stepping into Unknown Space. I hope your tests produce more amazing results.

[Fred Tetra]

I was about to start to do some tests today ,but to my suprise I found a small notepad file in my Kotor Directory called :

 

AR_ERROR , the file contains one line of text :

 

Names Differ: NewBox01 m46aa_01a

 

^ Not sure when Kotor created this file , or from witch of my .mdl might be the source .

 

Do you have any of thes ERROR reports ? Do you think they're the proof of the game saying it doesn't like our new models ?

 

And how do these ambientcolor values work in the .are file , are they the standard RGB values from 0-256 , doesn't look that way though .

 

And what about those BYTE can you switch things on by setting them to 1 ( example , chancesnow or rain -> VALUE :0 = off VALUE : 1 = on ), or do they have a range from 0-7 , BYTE is 8 bits , right ?

 

You might try editing your .ARE file in the Kotor Tool module editor; it has a nice UI for managing these sort of values.

[Quanon]

You might try editing your .ARE file in the Kotor Tool module editor; it has a nice UI for managing these sort of values.

 

Was using your program and the K-GFF from TK , anyway the value's themselve are a bit weird to me .

 

Agh, anywayz it doesn't change a bit , I'm still wondering around in the absolute whiteness or blackness .

[Master Zionosis]

You might try editing your .ARE file in the Kotor Tool module editor; it has a nice UI for managing these sort of values.

 

OMG, Fred Tetra's back. Welcome back FT, we all missed you .