Help Moneky Island 4 Models

[Serge]

Ooh, great! Thanks Didn't think anyone would provide unrestricted access to servers... I'll check if it works this afternoon.

- Serge

[Serge]

Works fine... Although they only allow one server at a time, and I need to be on gamesnet and freenode at the same time, oh well Also feel a bit bad about misusing other peoples' cgi friendliness

Oh, ben (John), did I never send you those .3do specs I meant to send to you? Can't tell from the specs you've made - although I CAN tell that a lot is missing, it may be stuff my (almost complete) specs just got wrong. If I didn't, I might as well send them to you in case you ever start working on .3do again.

Can't post them here for various reasons that I won't go into

- Serge

[khalek]

If you're after proven Grim Fandango specs you could have a look at the residual interpreter in ScummVM CVS which renders 3DOs fine and lets you play the game to a rather limited extent.

[myzinsky]

please translate / bitte übersetzen

thx

[Serge]

That too, yes, khalek... Which would be better than the specs I made 2 years ago.

And which also reminds me to bow down in awe of the fantastic dedication of the ScummVM team Too bad that it's already NECESSARY to do a GrimE engine port. Not just for other platforms, but even for Windows :P

Long live LEC's support for "old" games...

- Serge

[john_doe]

I haven't updated my specs as you might have guessed, they've been untouched for several years

And when I'm in the right mood I'll work on my tool again (mentioned somewhere above) and integrate support for 3do files and maybe (!) also make an exporter or even an importer (i.e. a converter).

But there's so much I want to do regarding "game resource viewers", I'm working on too much stuff
Tools for Toonstruck, Broken Sword 1+2, Discworld, Goblins 1-3(..) and a player for Sierra's VMD videos....

[khalek]

Originally posted by john_doe
I haven't updated my specs as you might have guessed, they've been untouched for several years

And when I'm in the right mood I'll work on my tool again (mentioned somewhere above) and integrate support for 3do files and maybe (!) also make an exporter or even an importer (i.e. a converter).

But there's so much I want to do regarding "game resource viewers", I'm working on too much stuff
Tools for Toonstruck, Broken Sword 1+2, Discworld, Goblins 1-3(..) and a player for Sierra's VMD videos....

Well for Broken Sword 2 you have the modified version of the original code in ScummVM CVS to look at, and any broken sword questions can probably be answered if need be as well

Might I suggest you talk to/collaborate with Mike Melanson regarding the VMD stuff? He is quite interested in all these game video formats as you'll see by poking around http://www.pcisys.net/~melanson/codecs/ or the game formats part of the mplayer sample ftp he maintains. He mentioned in one of his journal entries he has a bunch of VMD files from GK and maybe something else, can't remember now.

[john_doe]

I know enough of most formats/resources of the games to actually display the sprites, for example.

The only thing I'm still missing is how the sprite codec called "RLE7" in Broken Sword 1 works. It's probably simple but I didn't look that deeply into it.
However, I've made a program for BS2 more than a year ago which displays the rooms or at least the background screen, I didn't know about the multiple layers then, and plays the sprite animations.

And I can play some of the VMD movies from GK2. However, some movies seem to be different than others and they crash my player. This is still quite new, I only started two weeks ago to make a new player. I have an old player I made several years ago and still runs in DOS
Still, compared to Smush/Insane the VMD format is a piece of cake. The hardest thing was to find out how the LZ decompression works (I had it disassembled, but my assembly knowledge is at a bare minimum).

Nuff nonsense for today, nag you later.

[myzinsky]

i dont understand!!!!
in german please!!!

i need the help for the models!!!!

[Drigo Zoxx]

Originally posted by khalek

Might I suggest you talk to/collaborate with Mike Melanson regarding the VMD stuff? He is quite interested in all these game video formats as you'll see by poking around http://www.pcisys.net/~melanson/codecs/ or the game formats part of the mplayer sample ftp he maintains. He mentioned in one of his journal entries he has a bunch of VMD files from GK and maybe something else, can't remember now.

There is a brand new VMD player by Vladimir Gneushev. I've not tied it yet, but it sounds promising. Also, I know that's totally out of thread, however...

http://vagsoft.chat.ru/sci.html

[john_doe]

That's interesting. I'll test it when I'm home and maybe I can help him, however I think his player is more advanced, he even has a player for the robot files...

[john_doe]

I just tested the VMD player with a demo of Lighthouse. Works perfectly so far.

[Ender]

Originally posted by john_doe
The only thing I'm still missing is how the sprite codec called "RLE7" in Broken Sword 1 works.

Did khalek answer you on this?
RLE7 is standard 7bit run-length-encoding. No idea why they use the palette the way they do, this is just copied (into pseudo-code) from the original source:

while (comp_pos < compSize_in_header)

if bit > 127 OR bit = 0
  // Single pixel, so just copy
  uncompressed[pos] = bit;
  pos++; comp_pos++;
  bit = compressed[comp_pos]; 
else
 // Color run
 run_length = compressed[comp_pos];
 color = compressed[comp_pos + 1];
 comp_pos = comp_pos + 2;
 for i = 0 to runlength
   uncompressed[pos + i] = color;
 pos = pos + runlength + 1;

[khalek]

Originally posted by Ender
Did khalek answer you on this?
RLE7 is standard 7bit run-length-encoding. No idea why they use the palette the way they do, this is just copied (into pseudo-code) from the original source:

while (comp_pos < compSize_in_header)

if bit > 127 OR bit = 0
  // Single pixel, so just copy
  uncompressed[pos] = bit;
  pos++; comp_pos++;
  bit = compressed[comp_pos]; 
else
 // Color run
 run_length = compressed[comp_pos];
 color = compressed[comp_pos + 1];
 comp_pos = comp_pos + 2;
 for i = 0 to runlength
   uncompressed[pos + i] = color;
 pos = pos + runlength + 1;

yes I sent him an email about it a while back

[john_doe]

I've worked on the EMI skeletons again, and found out the routine that converts quaternions to angle/axis was kinda different So I replaced it with another routine and now the skeleton almost looks right.
Still, some joints seem to be rotated at a wrong angle, e.g. the legs and fingers don't seem to be where they should be, where other joints seem to be at the right place (a lot of seem there ).

Does anyone know if this might be caused by the fact that I convert the quaternion rotation to angle/axis and there's a "gimbal lock" so the joint doesn't rotate how it should?

Currently, I go though each joint, calculate the rotation/translation matrix, and if the joint has a parent, I add the parent's matrix to the current one.

Or maybe I shouldn't add the matrices but instead add the quaternion rotations and translations, and only calc the matrix when the joint is drawn?

[bgbennyboy]

I'm afraid I cant help there, I dont have a clue about 3d stuff.

Keep going though, you're doing great work

[john_doe]

Finally! I did it!

The skeletons show how they should! After hours reading tutorials and FAQs about matrix/vector stuff.
Turns out it was the rotation that didn't always work as it should have.

Well, now I can implement animations. I hope this will not take my head as close to exploding as the skeleton stuff (but I'm afaraid it will).

[ThunderPeel2001]

Wow!! Well done John_Doe!! to think we might be able to improve on the characters (maybe add those "extra" frames of animation from the PS2 version ) and generally muck around with MI4 one day.

I've LOVE to be able to mess around with Manny and Co though, I've always wanted to increase the resolution of his skeletal head texture and give him "proper" hands. Also maybe fix Max's (?) cigar.

There's already people doing this for other games, check out the System Shock 2: Rebirth mod... replacement high-polygon models for the ingame characters... very cool!

[bgbennyboy]

Great stuff! Bloody well done!

Thunderpeel: On a sidenote, Jake and I once tried making high-res textures for grim. It didnt work, Grim didnt like having bigger textures and didnt scale em down, I might still have a screenshot of it somewhere.

[DMCBatman]

Wow, this is pretty amazing.

Any chance at a mac port someday?

If a recompile is a all that's needed, I could do it.

[ThunderPeel2001]

BG: Dang

That's number 46 on the list then

[john_doe]

Another update:
Now I can play almost all the animations (one I tested didn't work correctly, i.e. the vertices were kinda..weird).
Now I need to calc the correct vertex normals (for shadows/lighting) and there's another problem with unicolored textures. They're not lighted correctly and I still need to find out if it's normal in OpenGL or if I missed some settings.
If everything goes well I'll release the new version towards the end of the week.

[ThunderPeel2001]

woohoo!

[john_doe]

I wanted to implement bone weights before I release the viewer but the results look pretty surreal.
If I can't get it to work I'll just release it without it, the aninmations look ok anyway.

[fixxxer4ever]

Hi,

John_doe what is the progress so far ?! You said you were up to releasing a working version of your model viewer, and we all are still waiting ...

Thanks for your hard work.

[john_doe]

I wanted to release it but it still needs some polishing in the GUI and I need to remove debug-stuff. I haven't got much time so it'll take a while.

[SkullHW™]

Eep.

How do i hack EMI bundles?

[fixxxer4ever]

Hi,

So, is there any progress yet! Sorry for keeping to pop up like this, but being able to view EMI models and animations has always been in my wish-list

fx

[SkullHW™]

Meh.



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