DescentBB

Hmm... it's been almost a week since the last peep from novacron. Clearly this is unacceptable.

*** simX runs off to refine his email-every-fifteen-minutes-script.

ooohh novacro---------n!

The natives are getting restless!!!!

Is that the sounds of drums in the air?

Novacron! Novacron! Novacron!

We! Need! More! Hi-res! Textures!

Uh - oh, simX is still alive!

Novacron,

this is not a more or less funny \"bug\" post. I will be a bit more serious this time.

When you started your hires texture project, you told everybody who listened that you'd pull this project through to the end. You went so far as to anncounce that you wouldn't publish any textures before all were done.

I want to be open: It looks like your promises weren't worth much, and that you are falling into the mainstream of ambitious people with ambitious projects who never live up to their own word, getting drawn away by the tide of time and other things.

Honestly, I am familiarizing myself with the thought that I better don't expect your project to ever be finished. Another wreck rotting on the pile of shattered Descent developer ambitions.

Of course this is entirely up to you, as it is your life, but it's a disappointment nevertheless.

Too bad.

Diedel (karx11erx)

Diedel wrote:Uh - oh, simX is still alive!

Novacron,

this is not a more or less funny "bug" post. I will be a bit more serious this time.

When you started your hires texture project, you told everybody who listened that you'd pull this project through to the end. You went so far as to anncounce that you wouldn't publish any textures before all were done.

I want to be open: It looks like your promises weren't worth much, and that you are falling into the mainstream of ambitious people with ambitious projects who never live up to their own word, getting drawn away by the tide of time and other things.

Honestly, I am familiarizing myself with the thought that I better don't expect your project to ever be finished. Another wreck rotting on the pile of shattered Descent developer ambitions.

Of course this is entirely up to you, as it is your life, but it's a disappointment nevertheless.

Too bad.

Diedel (karx11erx)

You are right, not a whole lot has been pushing further with the project. But unlike the rest of the people that merely said flat out 'I won't be continuing on with this', I am not saying it. I do have a life, you are correct. I do have other things I would rather be doing at the moment. That does not at all mean that I do not want one of my favorite past-time games not to look good. I am not eager but at the same time not dumping my goal.

I will still be in contact and I will not disappear. Thanks for your concern man

Most such project did not cease with a clear announcement - they slowly died because their contributors by and by changed their focus and got occupied with other things. The bigger and more ambitious the project, the more likely this will happen.

Making just the 910 D2 level textures in hires is a tremendous task - even if you complete one per day, making 7 a week, that would make 130 weeks to finish all - over 2 1/2 years! If I consider that, it looks like a fulltime job. I wonder how a single person could ever accomplish this. And D2 has over 2000 textures in all (together with sprite animations, backgrounds, cockpit, etc.)

*shrugs*

I guess we will have to see.

I still hope you will pull it off.

I assume that the finished textures will make up a file that will replace an existing file and then suddenly,... really pretty!!! If I read your site right, and red is completed, then most of them are done. Can we have a file with the completed textures in place to play with? At least most of the mine will look right.

No, you will have an extra subfolder named 'textures' where D2X-XL will take the textures from. D2X-XL will simply use any replacement textures it finds there. Theoretically, you can put any (uncompressed TGA) textures there to replace the original textures. You need to comply to the naming scheme though, and animations aren't stored a picture per frame, but all frames in one pictures (this theoretically allows to have more frames in a hires animation than the original has).

funny, i discovered d2xxl like 4 days ago and i thought about doing the same thing that novacron is doing. so i converted about 30 of my vast collection of photoshop styles to textures just to experience the capabilities of the improved engine and to contemplate future possibilities. the results were pretty cool. so i look forword to this projects completion. just let me know if you need any help.

Nuke,

please read your PM.

Diedel

ah yes. im still not to familiar with this forum system, that and i only come here every 3 or 4 days.

Hello everyone. A good friend of mine has come up with an idea. He thinks I should recruit someone to work on the bot textures. I think its a good idea and would hel p move the project forward faster. The only thing is I am not sure if D2X-XL supports searching for bot textures. If it does, and if ur interested Nuke, please contact me.

Hi Nova,

still alive?

D2X-XL can load whatever custom texture you provide as a replacement for the standard textures as long as you stick to the naming conventions, by which D2X-XL identifies and correlates such textures.

Novacron, it would be nice if you would offer the textures you have already done for download, so all of us could enjoy at least a \"half-way-killer-graphics\" Descent

X 3!

Yay! He liked my idea

I would help personally on the bots like I told him... but I SUCK in photoshop... lol.

((Neumaennl's post * 14)^2)*PI^399 !!

id probibly be better off doing the bot textures, im not really that good (or rather inexperienced) with natural materials such as rock. of course il do it at leasure because ive got my freespace mod and a couple other side projects going as well. ive been very intrested with whats been going on with descent 2 lately. so id be happy to help out as much as i can.

for the animated textures am i confined to using the same frame count as the originals or can i add more frames for a smoother animation?

Nuke,

for highres animations, put all frames of an animation in the same image. E.g. image size={w:512,h:512), 10 frames, would result in an animation image size={w:512,h:5120}. This allows for more animation frames than the original animation had (max. 127 though due to D2X-XL internal limitations).

i guess that makes sence. what about the directory structure. i figure i just give the texture the same name as the one from the pig files, but then the question is where do i put them in the directory structure?

i started a couple of textures, they look nice but i still dont think there up to par just yet.

dude, send them to me, they're awesome.
My email address is dark dot falcon757 at gmail dot com

Put hires textures in a subfolder of the Descent 2 main folder named 'textures'.

i wanted to have several textures done by now but work has been keeping me busy as of late.

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but I figured it would be better to confine myself here.

The Descent Relived website has moved under the sub-domain http://novacron.koolbear.com. A BIG thanks to Koolbear for it

Also, a news update is to be had on the site as well. You just might want to take a look at it...

Novacron,

you are very welcome indeed to dig up this thread. I think I should sticky it ...

Woohoo! *Dances for joy*

i still havent made much progress on the robot textures. work has kept me busy. i work a rather laborous job and i never seem to have enough energy left at the end of the day to make any textures. i was thinking that it might be better, with the oof support being implemented, to redo the robots as a whole, rather than textures only. i was wondering if it would be more effieteint as far as rendering goes to use a single skin for each hi-poly robot (plus an animated texture if the robot has need for an animated eye) rather than using tiles. also the reduced texture counts would come in handy if you ever decide to implement an htl engine.

Ill try to get back into the swing of things and help hope to see it all done in HIGHRES. MM rock textures.

Skins are generally a more modern method of doing it; although the animation would be a bit more tricky (it might actually be worth keeping the animated robot textures for that reason), it normally ends up looking prettier than the \"wallpaper\" method. It's technically more difficult for someone without the tools, knowledge, or talent to pull off, though.

But if you're going to create high-poly versions of the Descent 2 robots, in my opinion it's the way to go. More detailed models isn't going to look much better without appropriately detailed textures to go with them.

A little clarification:

There's two kind of animations for polymodels:

Animated textures (like moving eyes), and animated body parts (e.g. parts of the model moving in space relative to the models carcass or fuselage).

yes i would figure oof supports a submodel heirarchy of sorts that can be inferfaced with the submodel animation code. if i remeber correctly uses a list of positions, rotational offset values that denotes the orientations of objects at different states of the robots behavior, and then intrepolates between them for the model animation effect. i have made full robots for descent 2 before but ive never used an oof model formt. being a descent format oofs shouldnt work too differently from the pols.

as for my intention of texturing, i would use one skin for models without animated eyes, and two skins for models with eyes (one animated one static).

Nuke,

exactly. I just haven't implemented oof submodel movement code yet.

Hey Novacron!

Where are you? Have you done any more textures? The ones you have put up a GREAT, and the detail is excellent!

I need more!!!!

Give me more!!!!

MMOOORRRRREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(Please?)

Heya Novacron,

now that your project is rapidly nearing completion , how about giving me bump maps for your hires textures?

anyone know where i can get an oof converter? i need it to get started on the bot update.

Nuke wrote:anyone know where i can get an oof converter? i need it to get started on the bot update.

Off the top of my head you can try 3DSGEN, or any other editors in there if you havn't already. 3DSMAX does have a 30 day trial download, i'm not sure if you can use the OOF plug-in with that though.

OOF to what?

anything to oof is what i need. i have max 8 and truespace 6. i perfer to do all editing in one of those programs with as few conversions as possible.

Afaik there's a program OOFgen for that purpose. But that's all I remember. Ask SuperSheep, maybe he knows more.