IronDuke's I-War2 Remake/I-War3

@ 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.


@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. :evil:


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 [strike]Particle Systems[/strike] 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 256x256, and I'd prefer to use 2k textures. 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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.