You need help with Graphics?

[Methuselas]

I used to work on Mechcommander Omnitech. I had issues, though, with the importing of animations, as I work mostly in Maya, not Max. If you can get me Bone support for animations and get rid of awful Targas, using something better for GPUs, I'll update all the graphics for you, since you're actually building an updated 64bit port for Windows/Linux. I actually have some models I built for the game, but never used. Problem is they ran about 5-6k polys which was too much for MCO to use.

Shoot me an email at methuselas@gmail.com if you'd like a graphic artist. :)

-M

[alariq]

Hi, Methuselas

This would be great. I also was thinkng about moving away from TGA's. You are right that high poly models kill performance in MC, because all T&L is done on CPU and in addition game is not multithreaded.

Currently, I at least want to finish all small things and put the game somewhere, so everybody can try it. And if there will be enough demand then I can think about rewriting T&L and other parts of the engine. Because it is quite a big chunk of work, although not that complicated and it will simplify code at the end. After this, bone support can be added. MC2 spports bones, I think it is a matter of correctly naming joints, etc. Have you tried first to import some existing mech animation and analyse it? They are in max format have .ase extension (i.e. anubiswalk.ase, just simple ASCII exported max file).

The problem is I do not have much free time, so we'll see how it goes.
In any case, thank you for your interest!
I'll keep you updated if I be starting on any of those changes.

[Methuselas]

You should really go talk to Magic about the MCO build. It's only 32bit, but you're already further along with the engine rebuild, you two might be able to share code. His Mech Bay is amazing, as it allows for adding or reducing tonnage, hiring mechwarriors , doing repairs, etc. He stripped the engine of all the excess UI that was unneeded. I posted a link about your build on the forums. You can find them here:

https://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?board=210.0

As for animations, trust me, I've picked apart the ASE files over the years. It's not using actual bones, but helpers (or locators in maya) to move the polys. It's a bit of a pita and an antiquated system. I've literally pulled a model, converted it to an FBX in Max, imported it into Maya, deleted all the polygons, added my own, renamed them all to match the original polygon names, parented them to the corresponding joint helper, imported it back into Max, exported it as an ASE and it still crashes the engine. Only thing I can think of, is it's something to do with importing to Maya, but I don't use Max. I'm going to keep messing with it, since my clan died in MWO, so what little free time I have now, is back with MWO.

Last message I read was that Magic had reached the limit of what he could do with the Engine, when I popped back in, so I started looking for a replacement engine. That's when I came across your build. I wanted to test it out, but my wife couldn't build it in VS (she's the software developer, not me. :P)

I really want to rebuild all the models and had planned to, but the limits with tgas, low poly count and no shader support had me migrating off to do other things. If it's not fun to do, you don't end up doing it. I got an itch to play MC2 again and then saw your build. A 64 bit MC2 engine would be outstanding.

[alariq]

I see, have not looked that much at animation code as math was not the main issue when porting the engine. I understand your concerns with animations now.

Building code in VS should be quite straightforward if one has experience with CMake (it is just a matter of setting up paths to 3rdparties like SDL correctly), but I am planning to add some instructions to README file. I am also working on automated generation of all binary resources and packs from source data, so it is easy update game resources. It is currently in "working on my machine" state, but I already can play with my own generated resources and finished the game on Linux.

[Methuselas]

As soon as you can get me a way to build a Windows version, let me know and I can bug test for you, at least on the Windows side. I've been itching to play vanilla MC2, but I miss the video files, so I'll probably dig out my old disc. ;) I've got a bunch of FIT files and CSV files that are more true to tabletop I've been wanting to test out.

I may just break down and watch some intro to max tutorials on Digital Tutors. When I left the Amiga scene, I toyed with Max in 2000, but the UI was so kludgy, I quit. Then, I took a couple of Maya courses and ran with Animation. Snagged me a few jobs in the game industry for a while. Now that I'm a Dad, this is more for fun. My son likes watching me play MWO, so I showed him MCO and now he wants to play it.

[Methuselas]

Hey Alariq,

I've managed a workaround with Max and Maya. I successfully imported a mech, in game this weekend and passed a converted ASE animation to BVH (motionbuilder) back and forth between Max, Maya and the MC2 engine. I'm going to make a rig for Max and Maya, build generic animations to replace the current ones and update the game graphics. I want to do them in batches, so if you'd like copies of them, when I finish (I'm working on vehicles as well), let me know and I'll post you archives on my google drive. I'm working in vanilla MC2, since I need the Encyclopedia to view them.

[alariq]

That is great. Sure I'll be glad to test them. By the way I also ported Mechlopedia (in fact this was the first thing I did : -) )

[Methuselas]

Don't get your hopes up just yet. It was proof of concept. The bones I converted from helper bones still show up in the engine, instead of being invisible. They are moving, however, which is what I wanted. I'm still working the kinks out.

When testing, I jump back and forth between MCO and Vanilla. I use Vanilla's Encyclopedia to to test the fit files to make sure they're working and the mission editor to check the models. MCO supports up to 10k polys now (I wasn't aware of the update) and 512k targas, which is my test bed for graphics.

BTW, concerning the Encyclopedia, are you going to remove the string.txt from the dll file? I know you can just use 7zip to remove it for editing, but an external xml or an xls file would be so much nicer to use.

[alariq]

you mean string.res.cpp/.h. Yes I was thinking about it. But at the beginning for me as a programmer it was much easier to write a simple script which would grab all strings and embed them right in cpp file )

I am not sure what do you mean by 7zip, because it is not packed. All string are stored in plain cpp source file. So if one would like to make some changes it is a matter of changing this file and recompiling mc2res.dll

[Methuselas]

I'm a former game developer (art, side, not code side - I'm a script kiddie, at best), but I like the ability for people to mod with ease. That's why I love XML files, but despise schema files. XD I've always hated the way the encyclopedia looked and functioned. They should have put drop down menus that point to external string files. I used to have a mockup I did of a new encyclopedia that would have supported drop down menus but it never got anywhere.

As for the mec2res.dll, I just always opened the library with 7zip stripped the string.txt, edited it and put it back. I can't remember if I got it to work or not. The reason I asked, was 'cos I always wanted the ability to add things to the encyclopedia on the fly, based on campaigns. All this was beyond my coding expertise, however. I work best in an enclosed environment, with a hard-coded limit on what I could and couldn't do. Neverwinter Nights was a perfect example. Their script engine allowed me to code, but I couldn't break anything too bad. XD

I was talking on the Autodesk forums and I may have found a way to hide the bones from the engine, using a material. I haven't tested it yet, though, 'cos I just found out about it last night. I was always told the engine doesn't support IK, but I know for a fact that the animations are burned in the ase/tgl files, so I really would like to build generic rigs for mechs and humanoid (vehicles are easy - it's 2 helpers, plus point helpers for weapons.), so people can animate their own mechs. There's a lot of wasted disk space from animators being lazy and not animating from default pose, so we're stuck with walk2run and other junk animations which aren't needed.

I don't know if this material thing is feasible, however. It's my understanding that the MC2 engine is hard-coded for a single texture map, which may break the engine, if bones are using a separate material, to make them invisible during renders (and I'm not even sure if the engine classifies as a render.) If it doesn't work on my side, I'll send you a replacement mech from the game, just with bones, instead of bone helpers, to see if you can change the way the engine responds to bones.

[alariq]

for the strings. Easy way (if you have compiler) is to just add/modify sttring in text file and recompile dll.
AFAIR, indeed, each mech has only one texture, but even if there would be ability to hide bones by rendering them with "null" material, it does not sound like a good decision. In fact all this part has to be rewritten.

[Methuselas]

Yeah, I see your point. I'm always looking at things from a modding perspective. The more a game has an ability to mod, the more likely you are to attract new developers. A lot of people can't compile and truthfully, I never understood GitHub enough to add commits to the other game project I'm working on.

So, are you planning on re-writing all the animation routines? I mean, I can deal with the animations issue, now that I know what I was doing wrong this entire time. I even setup a VM workstation test bed, just so I could install an old copy of 3DS Max 4.2 to see if I could maximize the limitations in the animation code. If you are going to do this, I would suggest keeping legacy code, to do it the old way, until, at the very least, I get new skeletons and animations done for all the different mechs. (I believe there's only 4 or 5 different helper skeletons in the game.)

Let me know when you're ready and I'll build you a rigged mech to test in game. I do have a simple request, though, if you have the time. Can you have the engine look for "variant" mech models in the mech cvs? Basically, have a "mechname" under the variant section that points to a different model, with another weapon loadout. If it doesn't fine one, it automatically uses the default mech model.

[alariq]

I understand "modding viewpoint" as well. It is just that too much time needed to make everything "the right way". So for me it was a shortcut to write script to autoconvert all strings and embed them in the code. Though compiling is not that scary :) in most cases it is just a matter of one button press. Way too easier than making an anmimation.

I do not think that I'll be able to change animation code in near future. Task number one for me (after sorting out all infrastructure issues, so that anyone can easilly build code and data and run game) - is to rewrite model loading and rendering code, which is quite a big piece of work, but it will make everything look simpler and will allow to strip away a lot of code. From more high level perspective it will remove hard constrain on the amount of vertices/textures in the models and allow for more sophisticated lighting/shading as it will be performed on GPU, not to mention performance boost.

Though, if there will be no interest to the game I might as well loose motivation )

[Methuselas]

Don't lose motivation! :( I've already started doing new models for kit bashing. Besides, you're the closest I'll get to being able to make a setup as close to tabletop, as possible. Also, is the HBSTATZ.csv, where we would find all the stats for ranges for weapons?

I mentioned your build on the old MCO site. I was going to mention it on the MWO forums, but I wasn't sure if you wanted that many inquiries so soon. Like I said, I stumbled upon you accidentally.

[alariq]

I can't find any reference on HBSTATZ.csv in the code/data. Not sure if it is needed

[Methuselas]

I think that's for range values, as well as a few other in-game things, but I'm not sure. BTW, I hope you're still motivated, as I have this completed. I haven't UV mapped it, but it's 10k tris, which is about 10 times what we got in the original game and it's half the size of the MWO model I based it on. ;)

https://i.imgur.com/wrmNNYg.png