fun with .pso

Okay. That's not the experience I've had. In 6.5, when I applied the same (left side) asymmetrical texture to both the left and right wings of a ship, the right wing did not display the texture properly (flipped) in-game even after I had adusted it to display and fit properly in Lightwave. Another time, I had a texture map that I made too short, and the details didn't reach to the ends of the surface. After adjusting the scaling and position in the texture editor, the texture remained distorted (the way I built it) on the model in the game. All texture editor adjustments were completely ignored.

If there were more than two people actively building models for this game I might have had something other than just my own experience to draw on. If the texture editor controls work for EoC on other versions of Lightwave, I have no way of knowing.

Don't forget, early version support was completely dropped in 6.0, and only newly introduced in 6.5.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos
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Originally posted by Second ChanceOkay. That's not the experience I've had. In 6.5, when I applied the same (left side) asymmetrical texture to both the left and right wings of a ship, the right wing did not display the texture properly (flipped) in-game even after I had adusted it to display and fit properly in Lightwave. (etc.)

If you're getting textured models into the game using LW 6.5 then you've obviously built some conversion pipeline to do it. I would suggest the problems you encountered might lie there. Getting any modern model into the old 5.6 format is painfully difficult if 5.6 is not owned. When the extra complexity is added in I imagine it gets messy quickly.

If there were more than two people actively building models for this game I might have had something other than just my own experience to draw on. If the texture editor controls work for EoC on other versions of Lightwave, I have no way of knowing.

Well, if more than two people owned LW 5.6 then there would probably be more. I can only assume that PS was either unable or unwilling (probably unable... artists like state-of-the-art tools) to update their graphics programs/pipeline when EoC's development began. From what I understand of the dates, LW's 6.0 release was right about that time. (Though that's just pure speculation on my part.)

But I can assure you; the texture size, placement, projection axis and other data are used by Flux.

Originally posted by JasperSurface colour, transparancy (if present), specular (shinyness). thats about it i think.

Missing would be:

luminosity value (i.e. how much the glow map uses (I'm not sure if it's actually in the .pso's)).

the texture for the diffuse texture map, and the uv co-ords for it (if present).
same for the spec map.
same for the glow map.

Originally posted by Cambragol
I don't think the pso objects use the luminosity value. I have built a number of objects with luminosity, and the only thing that determined the intensity of the 'luminosity' was the brightness of the texture itself. Settings in lightwave had no effect. The same could be said for specular effects. Transparency on the other hand seemed to work based on the settings in lighwave. Likely you all knew this already though.

I know that Flux supports specularity maps. The textures for these can be seen in the game models (those are the greyscale maps when you convert an object's textures).

I'm 90% certain that Flux does not support diffuse maps. I've never been able to get any diffuse information except the basic diffuse setting value, which, like Cambragol said, affects the color of the surface a bit.

The transparency setting (1-100) works fine, but I was never able to get a transparency map in-game. I don't think transparency maps are supported.

Smoothing is supported (though a bit rough at times... I've encountered some serious smoothing errors in Flux which did not exist in the LW renders of the same objects).

I think the luminosity channel only exists as a place to put in a 'tag' so Flux can recognize that something should be glowing. But Cambragol's had more experience in this area. I'm a bit rusty here.

Reflection: I've gotten some strange results when cranking up the reflective properties of a surface. Not at all pleasant either... the surface tends to look 'hardened' and washed-out at the same time; like it was encased in plastic. When building the Terrapin I played around with this and finally decided it wasn't something supported (since no game objects looked like that) and have kept my reflection settings at zero since then.

If you're getting textured models into the game using LW 6.5 then you've obviously built some conversion pipeline to do it. I would suggest the problems you encountered might lie there.

Sadly, I can't take credit for inventing anything cool along these lines. All versions of Lightwave after 6.0 have native support for 5.6 files. Unfortunately, due to the large differences between the pre-6.0 files and the post-6.0 files, the support is through a built-in export converter rather than a save dialog. I'm sure you're right about this being the problem, though. Failed compatability between the file types seem to be the root of all the problems I've had. Oddly though, 5.6 files can be opened directly, without having to import. But need to be exported again to save.

I'm 90% certain that Flux does not support diffuse maps.

That would make sense. I don't think direct x supports diffusion.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos
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New version (0.6):

Due to the way vertices are stored in .pso files vertices with the same x,y,z are frequently duplicated, so rather than just pulling out all the triangles as they appear in the .pso compare all the vertices and merge very close ones (0.00001 units apart) together.

As a result the meshes produced are much more mesh like, rather than being a random collection of triangles that are only rarely share vertices.

I've also started on a webpage for the tools:

pointless.net/eoc/


It would be really helpful if someone with lightwave > 6.0 could try pso2lwo2.exe and see if the textures show up properly - they get mangled a bit in blender, and I don't know if it's my LWO2 export code, or blender's import code.

Due to the way vertices are stored in .pso files vertices with the same x,y,z are frequently duplicated, so rather than just pulling out all the triangles as they appear in the .pso compare all the vertices and merge very close ones (0.00001 units apart) together.

That might present a problem. The identical vertices are there on purpose to break up the Phong shading (smoothing process).

For instance, assume we're dealing with a model composed of two surfaces. Because of the high detail level, Surface #1 needs a smoothing setting of 25 degrees; anything more and the smoothing effect will make the intricate details 'smeared'. Surface #2 is curved and needs a smoothing setting of 89.9 degrees; anything less and we'll see the facets of this curved section.

Since these two surfaces border upon one another, they share points where one ends and the other begins.

Now, as the smoothing routine is caculated it runs into a problem. How does it shade the area where Surface #1 and Surface #2 meet? One has a smoothing value of 25 degrees... the other has a smoothing value of 89.9 degrees.

Of course, being a machine, the smoothing routine just averages out the two settings across the border polys and leaves poor humans to sort the mess out later. We end up with distorted details on Surface #1 and facets showing on Surface #2 in the border areas where the surfaces meet.

The only way to prevent these smoothing errors is to make sure the points of each surface are not shared by the other surface. In essence, the two surfaces are not connected to each other, they only look that way.

This process creates the duplicate vertices you're seeing. If merged, the models will end up with smoothing errors.

It's not a serious problem for experienced modelers. But novices might not know what to do, and the models won't look as they do in-game.

It would be really helpful if someone with lightwave > 6.0 could try pso2lwo2.exe and see if the textures show up properly - they get mangled a bit in blender, and I don't know if it's my LWO2 export code, or blender's import code.

LWO-Blender conversions (in my experience) are pretty tempermental. I will experiment with this tonight and post my results.

Wonderful stuff. You're a true gent Jasper.

Originally posted by Shane

Due to the way vertices are stored in .pso files vertices with the same x,y,z are frequently duplicated, so rather than just pulling out all the triangles as they appear in the .pso compare all the vertices and merge very close ones (0.00001 units apart) together.

That might present a problem. The identical vertices are there on purpose to break up the Phong shading (smoothing process).

yup, but .lwo's don't store surface normals, there is the "SMAN" chunk - SMoothing ANgle, this isn't stored in the .pso's (I assume it's used to calculate the surface normals that are stored in the .PSO's).

At the moment i set SMAN to 90 degrees (well about that, it uses radians).

The other main reson for the duplicated verts is that the uv co-ords are stored per vert, so there is a lot of duplication.

This process creates the duplicate vertices you're seeing. If merged, the models will end up with smoothing errors.

It's not a serious problem for experienced modelers. But novices might not know what to do, and the models won't look as they do in-game.

It would be really helpful if someone with lightwave > 6.0 could try pso2lwo2.exe and see if the textures show up properly - they get mangled a bit in blender, and I don't know if it's my LWO2 export code, or blender's import code.

LWO-Blender conversions (in my experience) are pretty tempermental. I will experiment with this tonight and post my results.

Wonderful stuff. You're a true gent Jasper.

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If there is hope it lies with the demo scene.
PSO and FTEX tools: pointless.net/eoc/