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feersum.endjinn

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Posts posted by feersum.endjinn

  2. Posted

    What makes you do it?

    There isn't really commercial possibility for realistic tacticals shooter simulation having Finnish forces, so if you want it, you have to do it yourself and OFP makes it possible.

    What do you get out of it?

    Well, you get the game that plays just way you want it... If you're not happy with something in OFP then you can change it, and OFP's scripting language has proven to be suprisingly powerful.

    What problems does it cause you?

    Of course time spent modding is away from actually playing OFP tounge_o.gif Otherwise than that, it really does not cause problems. If there comes the day it is no longer fun, then I just stop doing it...

  3. Posted

    Are these guys paratroopers?

    Will FDFMod support something like real parachutes?

    -single use and all?

    Yes, they're paratroopers, same ones already in FDFMod. We've thought about having realistic parachutes and things like removing eject action from helo pilots and passengers (unless they carry a parachute) but unfortunately it would break too many old missions. If there's a good solution to make it configurable for missions builders, then we might include it.

    Anyway very nice Fokker! (hope it is joystick compatible)

    wow_o.gif

    Well, currently it definitely needs some tuning to make it flyable even with mouse (turns very sluggishly). Model needs a lot of work too.

  5. Posted

    Finnish paratroopers queue for a jump training on a biting cold clear day while their comrades practice low-level parachuting methods nearby. Since the 60s Dutch Fokker F.27 Friendship/Troopship series has been widely popular transport aircraft. It replaced DC-3s in Finnish service but now only one remains in FAF service as jump trainer plane, one as Electronic Warfare aircraft and third has been sold for aviation mechanic training purposes. The Troopship is capable of transporting 44 paratroops in addition to crew with cruising speed being 480 km/h.

    fokker1.jpg

  8. Posted

    There just isn't more space reserved for texture name than 31 characters in MLOD files. If you somehow manage to use longer paths (i.e. hex editor), it will overwrite other important data in your models.

    You can however use some placeholder texture names and replace them after binarizing, ODOL files do not have same limitations on texture filename length.

  9. Posted

    Are there any chances that you tune up the compression alghoritm to work faster? It's very usefull tool but also terribly slow. wink_o.gif

    I know, I was just lazy and main focus was at having better DXT compression code, other formats are just bonus. If I have to do any bugfixes I'll try to also optimize compression algorithm for RGBA4444, RGBA5551 and IA88 formats.

  10. Posted

    However i did have some problems with greyscale images using auto-detect ('can't load mip-map' error in buldozer) and i wasn't able to convert a greyscale texture that had a multi-shade alpha channel.

    I can't seem to be able to reproduce this bug. What was size of the texture you were trying to convert?

  12. Posted

    So whats the legal situation for distributing a tool that allows people to break BIS copyrights?  rock.gif  I mean, OFPinternals didnt get sued (although they didnt exactly distribute it).

    I just hope that you dont go public with your tool feersum sad_o.gif

    No.

    It does not work properly and it would be way too much work to do last 10% properly, time which could be spent on more productive work as well smile_o.gif While releasing such tool probably would be currently legal, using it to rip models is completely different thing. And MLODs from demo already been available for ages and most of modders will gladly share their work with other mod teams if you just ask politely anyway.

    If people want to see how some special models work, ODOL Explorer is already available.

  13. Posted

    Not that I want to encourage people of deassembling your game code, but there are countries where it is allowed to reverse engineer code if you can't retrieve information about file formats otherwise (I think Denmark is one of those countries).

    It is indeed perfectly legal in European Union, unless done to circumvent copy protection mechanisms, however you are  allowed to do it only for educational purposes or to achieve compatibility.

    Content inside P3D files is however protected by copyright, so distributing for example Resistance models in MLOD format would be illegal and it would probably force Codemasters to act legally against distributers in some way. So whoever out there has P3DEdit, don't distribute those MLOD models - you'll only get in trouble (and righly so).

    In near future, new EU digital content copyright laws might also consider MLOD->ODOL conversion content protection even though there isn't any explicit encryption, and circumventing that would be copyright infringement.

  14. Posted

    I'm sad to hear more childish talking about things you cant even immagine rock.gif  With this statement you prooved to be an incompetent in coding field, since it took almost 1 year of standalone research of 3 different persons, to be then able to write something like p3dedit. And believe me, GUI took only ~0,05% of the time involved...

    Thank you for your confidence in my programming skills. As I already have about 90% working ODOL -> MLOD converter, I might offer other opinion.

    Since someone is probably going to ask "how?", I'll tell you: secret to opening ODOL format is good old-fashioned reverse engineering the game executable.

    --- several reverse engineering tips removed from here ---.

    --- several details about proprietary file format removed ----

    It's tedious job and requires fairly good knowledge of x86 assembler but some things are just almost impossible to find out with just comparing two slightly different binarized models.

    Maybe someday I'll can be bothered finishing that code and I'll publish file format specs, but I think you'll see OFP2 sooner than that, it's always the last 10% which takes 90% of time... tounge_o.gif

  15. Posted

    Probably anyone with any previous experience at 3D coding can code their own basic ODOL->MLOD converter pretty quickly. Make a object consisting of different sized cubes in all LODs, binarize it and compare them in hex editor. Most of data is in same format as MLOD, just optimized a lot and you'll figure out how to extract at least vertex data and face lists pretty quickly. That's what I was experimenting with before our mod team got their dirty hands on p3dedit tounge_o.gif

    I'd guess that 90% of time coding p3dedit has been spent on making actual GUI, reverse engineering file formats and data conversion is lot simpler work.

  18. Posted

    And since you've been asking, I made small GUI.

    Download it here.

    It also gives access to some of the effects provided by nVidias library but most of them aren't that useful, exception being maybe different mipmap filtering options and dithering.

    I'm no Windows programming guru, so there's no preview option or support for some of more fancy features found in nVidia library and code is somewhat unstable (won't run at all when compiled on Debug configuration, something to do with different local heaps and callbacks from DXT library not liking each other)...

    But it writes out valid .paa's 99% of the time so that's enough for me biggrin_o.gif

  19. Posted

    Quote[/b] ]... compression code there would get you failed  ...

    I think you cry well, but on the wrong tomb - the brute force code used is the code found on nVidia web site.  wow_o.gif

    Code I'm talking about is one written by me in "compress.cpp", which is used to compress non-DXT1 textures. It's slowest LZ77 implementation I've seen so far, maybe I should be proud of myself tounge_o.gif

    nVidias DXT library on the other hand is really fast.

  20. Posted

    Great, and source code provided, excellent for people who want to learn something from it.  smile_o.gif

    Well, at least it is great example of how to not write code: for example compression code there would get you failed grade at any university course dealing with data compression. Brute force algorithm for finding longest match is really bad, it takes about 90 seconds to compress 512x256 texture on my AMD 1600+ tounge_o.gif

  21. Posted

    One more hint: if I recall it correctly, nVidia sources are based on assumption decompression is done in 16-b color space as opposed to 32-b. This leads to unnecessary artifacts when compressing smooth gradiens, and it can be avoided by adapting the source code. Some older nVidia cards really peformed decompression this way, so you will see no improvents on them, but cards of other vendors, and recent nVidia cards as well, perform decompression in 32-b space - you can learn more about this on many web sites, including Epic Games web site.

    Unfortunately nVidia only provides source code to older version of DXT compression tools which is different codebase (and not actually even written by nVidia), but I'm hopeful that these issues are addressed in binary-only library since latest release is just couple of weeks old.

    Now it seems OFP itself recognizes few additional texture formats like DXT2-DXT5, is there support for these formats since using DXT3 or DXT5 would help really cutting down size of textures with more than 1 bit of alpha channel in VRAM. OFP recognizes headers 0xFF02-0xFF05 but when trying use those formats it will display some error message ("invalid texture format (VRAM)" if I remember correctly) and crash OFP back to desktop.

  23. Posted

    Can't understand why anyone would choose to go back to 1.91?

    Moving to TS.

    One reason would be that there maybe aren't any cracked 1.96.exe's out yet..

    Not that Benaksoy needs one but it's just a possible reason why to wanna go back to 1.91.

    1.96 beta exe does not contain any copy protection...

  24. Posted

    This is first version of PNG2PAC, only thing actually missing is GUI with preview and actual PNG support tounge_o.gif Current version reads 32 bpp TGA files (RLE compressed files are supported). This small command-line tool uses NVidia's DXT texture compression library, which gives superior quality compared to Texview while files are still same size.

    Visual C++ source code is provided, no GUI features are used so probably this can be ported to other compilers as C++ Builder quite easily.

    Download it here

    Download GUI version here

    NVidia DXT library can be downloaded from NVIdia developer pages

  25. Posted

    Quote[/b] ]This fix does not cause incompatibilities between patched and non-patched clients, unless server is configured explicitly to check for scripts.pbo, although it is recommended that all players joining game do have this patch installed since every patched client reduces amount of lag generated by extra explosions.

    Are only the vehicle burning scripts replaced in this update?

    Yes. Actual patch is just few bytes =)

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