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Plaything 2.5... maybe

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Errol
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Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Errol »

Disclaimer:

This is more of a "thinking (while posting on a forum) out loud" sort of thread, rather than a get-your-hopes-up kind of thing. At no point am I saying I'll actually get anywhere with any of this.

With that said, as many of you know I'm playing around with recoding the Carma 2 engine with backwards support of all existing assets. I've knocked together parsers for .dat, .act, .mat, (.cat in a .hat with a .bat), .pix, .tif, .twt and so on. Basically, if it exists in C2 I can read it and write it.

One of the obvious uses for this is a redeveloped Plaything 2. One that doesn't (hopefully) crash anywhere near as often and can be run in full fancy 32bits!

Now, the question is, what would this new and fancy Plaything be expected to do?

For maps it could be use in the same way that UnrealEd was for UT2004. Press a button and jump into the map in realtime. This could be handy for maybe plotting the course (press a button and drop course markers down behind you) - instant route for the AI! Maybe dropping noncars and powerups as you drive around too, ready for fine tuning back in the main mode.

For cars you could test out handling and collision with the touch of a button, jump into a few test maps set up for rolls, jumps, splitting the vehicle, things like that. Maybe simulate damage and see if your detachables detach and your smashables smash.

I don't think I'd be making a full 3d modelling package though, you'd need to import your models created elsewhere. It would purely be for setting them up for C2.

I was also thinking it could be handy to have a "package and deploy" option. Maybe creating the C2C file for cars and whatever the file is that maps have. But not only that, it could compile the tifs into a .p08 and .p16 and maybe even put it all together as a .twt. This could then be automatically zipped and uploaded to some online location (maybe more on that later).

What I want to know is what you chaps would like in a tool like this, if I were to go ahead with it I'd want to make something that would be useful to everyone.

Feel free to comment but please don't get your hopes up. I'm notorious for never finishing anything (see CopLand, South Park'ageddon, SmashMap, Death Race (the UT2004 mod) and so on).

-Errol
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by TTR »

Wow, well..i don't think i got anything to add, it all sounds wonderful :thumbsup:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Harmalarm »

:supercrazy:

well, first off this sounds like a very interesting project! Plaything 2 is off course a notorious bitch. We all know a program cannot make mistakes but the user can do this easily with pt2, as I have experienced personally over the last year. Anyway, a new version can make things a lot easier for us.

The things you speak of, quick testing of maps and cars, plotting opponent paths and non cars, would off course be fucking great.

Creating a twt file, containing all the files would also be a very good idea because that would save a lot of time on the 'packaging' stage.

Some things I was thinking off.

- Different import formats, like 3ds, obj or ASE. Perhaps also material flag's import support (setting things up in 3ds max, and seeing the flags checked in the new pt2)

- as you were saying, an improvement on the placing of non cars but don't forget the power ups! Most tracks miss power ups, just because it's such a time consuming job right now... perhaps we could just import objects with the same name, and within plaything assing a powerup number to any arbitrary object withing the track file.

- automating the txt-file creation. This could be done by editing the 'setup car' function in pt. You could add all options for the car like suspension setup, groove setup, funk setup, etc... And a WAM file creation, setup up detachable and smach-ies.

- Better ways to re-name objects. (pt2 has some renaming options, but missing things like searching for strings,and replacing parts of a name.)

I like the way you are thinking here. :cool: so I am just 'thinking' along... :tongue:



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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Morbid Angel »

Hi there !

This sounds really great !

I don't think of a new idea for the moment ...

The only one I've got in my head is to make the new PT2 vista compatible !

I'm under Vista, Cared works fine, but Pt2 doesn't ... I need to use it on another computer (that's under XP) ...

Or I'll have to create a virtual machine using VMWare ...

It's a real pleasure to see such huge projects still rising for C2 !

I hope you won't let it fall and abandon the idea, it's a great idea !

Make it open source, so every coders could add ideas into it !

:grin:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by autopilot »

speaking of... what are the chances of a that city map you did for that UT2004 mod being converted over (if you still have it that is?), from what I remember it looked really good.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by SoupaVedg »

That be great, Errol.

Seeing all that's been done lately, just wanna make me return here. I don't have much to offer... YET... Maybe later. When my Windows side on my iMac is more stable/available.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Alan »

Holy crap, hey Errol!! Awesome to see you back :smile: Sounds like an awesome project there! Let me know if you need someone who still doesnt know what the hell he's doing!
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Dalags177 »

Good idea. I use Plaything 2 allot so some new stuff would be great.

I like the idea of a damage simulator allot :cool:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by coffeycup »

Being able to 'jump into' a map would be awesome for placing noncars and AI path markers. Getting a map ingame is already really easy, it's the noncars, powerups and opponent paths that I find tedious. I know there's scripts and tools for doing some of this. But being able to drive around and 'poop' powerup location out would be easier.

I usually don't like files all TWTed up so the 'package deploy' thingie doesn't interest me too much.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Razor »

Wow, sounds good, alot has been happening for the 4 days i haven't had internet.

I love the Unreal Editor, it's a great map editor, I've made some awesome maps for UT2k4 since it was released, it would be good to have a UnrealEd style path editing function as it's very easy to make bot paths in the Unreal editor.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Econobrick »

As a fellow abandonist, I say capital idea! Whether or not it gets done?!

Greetings to comrades Alan and Pilote as well?!
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Errol »

lo there Econo, long time! Is Alan still around too?

Also, some further ponderings...

Carstockalypse v2 and Mapstockalypse v2.

Things have come a long way since both apps were originally put together, cars tend to have new sounds these days, maps have custom peds, noncars, sounds, the whole shebang.

I was wondering if there would be any use in updated versions of both apps that could handle these things.

I've already knocked together a car "parser" that can go through a whole folder of cars and let you know if there will be any material name collisions (car A has "wheel" and car B also has "wheel". I seem to remember this causing problems)

Not only that but it spits out all sorts of interesting stats: number of polys, number of parts, list of detachables, smashables, all sorts of interesting facts. I've also played with having it auto generate more accurate bounding boxes and build the simple model of the car too. Annoys the hell out of me when people don't make those things.

Oh, it also makes a proper car image on the standard Carmageddon 2 background, complete with drop shadow. I like things being standardised :wink:

-Errol
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Harmalarm »

:eek: Geez you already did all these things or are planning to do them?

this is interesting stuff you speak of, because yes, carstockalypse and mapstockalypse could definitely use an update! And yes, these manual installations of sounds and peds can be quite annoying! Sounds can have the problem of using the same sound ref. number, so your program could cover that too. Also, carstock doesn't show the car images (24bit problems), and I hate it not to know/see what I install. Specially when I have ton's of cars installed...

btw, yes, duplicate material names give a problem, as I have unfortunately discovered with my cars. Even though I was warned bout it... :sad:

and yes, I hate it too when bboxes are not right and cars miss the simple model and even the shell.

geez, you automated a lot of stuff man! you have a sort of fetish? :smile: But real good work! How's the model viewer/engine going?

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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Errol »

Automating stuff is sort of my thing. I can spend 20x longer automating a job than it would actually take to do the job and feel like I'm still saving time. It's a disease I tells you!

Short of wrapping a bunch of code in an easy to use app I've done all the car/mapstockalypse stuff.

Most of it are simply extensions of the parsers required to load the cars into my engine.

With regards to the model viewer/engine, I've decided I'm going to use the PhysX physics library to speed things up a bit. My lack of Physics skills have made writing my own engine a nightmare. It does mean I can't release my stuff on the xbox360 marketplace but I'd likely get my arse sued off if I tried that anyway :wink:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Razor »

Good thing with the Bounding Boxes, I find it sometimes irritating to made a simple model around the car, then into PT2 and save as drone (forgot what the command is called) just to find you get the error "Wheels outside all shapes".

I also love the idea on the car menu image, would save me the trouble of firing up Photoshop just to make a menu image.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by C2 Scientist »

As you may already know, a few years back a member called Cesm20 was updating PT2 as well, improving its stability, cleaning up the various menus, and implementing new functions, some of which required some sort of external program running in the background (I've forgot by now) as they were macros. You will probably do just fine on your own, but I'm letting you know in case you're interested. He's been a bit absent lately, but showed up again about a month ago in another thread.

Helping people with making better bboxes sounds good, but I'm not sure about automating the task. Could it be smart enough to output anything more complex than a simple fit-to-volume box? :smile: There are some quite complex vehicles out there, which might prove problematic. I was thinking of some sort of new tool in PT2.5 which visualized the bboxes and let you manually build and refine new ones over the 3d model of the vehicle. Of course, there would have to be simple modeling primitives, perhaps the possibility to move the individual vertices in some cases, and possibly a camera zooming/rotating function for increased precision. Still, it would beat textfile editing.

When you mentioned editing car specs inside PT2.5 (or did you?), and the game physics working in it as well, the following small feature crossed my mind. In a racing simulator called "Live for Speed", when you're tuning the ride height and the various suspension settings of your car in the garage, there is a "drop"-button. It drops the car from a small height (similar to the recover-function in Carmageddon), and you can see how the suspension is working with the current settings. This could be a useful feature, if you want to consider it.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Errol »

C2 Scientist! I've heard alot about you but you were after my time.

I'm especially impressed at the contents of the "advanced map and car tricks" thread at the top of this section, seems like you learnt how to make C2 dance to your own tune.

I admit that automated bounding box generation can be a little shoddy but for most basic "car" shaped vehicles it'll do the trick. More obscure shapes can be built up piece by piece with multiple passes but that tends to rely on people creating a pointless heirarchy within their model or just blind luck.

The basic concept is it creates a box that fits from a side view, then attempts to tighten the box using the front view and finally tweaks it from the top. If during the 2nd or 3rd pass (front and top) it discovers a part sticks out too much it will ignore that part and create a 2nd smaller box around it. The SupaStucka for example ends up with between 3 and 5 boxes depending on tightness settings. Unfortunately it requires the wam file to know if a part detaches or not (you obviously don't want to place a bounding box around a part that will eventually fall off). I'm planning on alleviating this issue by pulling the wam setup into the editor itself, context menus on parts to set them as detachable, smashable and so on.

Another idea is to allow the modeller to define (a) bounding box/es within their 3d program, as long as it uses some specific designator this could be parsed on import and the job is jobbed. I've used this method in a couple of games I've knocked together, speeds the process up no end.

I was planning on including some basic editing support; translate, scale, rotate meshes, poly selection and UV editing but I'm not too sure whether going as far as vertex editing is something I want to do. I'm a sucker for biting off more than I can chew so this is more a self imposed limitation to hopefully ensure I actually finish a project :wink:

Same as the wam stuff I'm planning on bringing most, if not all, of the .txt file stuff within the editor so your speed/driving/suspension testing scenario would be pretty useful. Possibly being able to hand control of the vehicle to an AI while it navigates a sort of stunt map (jumps, bumpy ground, long straights for speed, curvey bends) and having onscreen debug output (various numerics for speed, suspension, and so on) and having various .txt file settings editable in realtime (change a suspension setting and have it instantly apply to the simulation). But I fear I'm getting a little ahead of myself there :wink:

-Errol
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Alan »

Greetings to comrades Econo and Errol!!

Econo: We need to get 1nsane reinstalled again for more face-shredding wheelchair races!! Then theres the spaghetti with fried bumblebees..

:help:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Errol »

Alan! You lunatic!

Getting just like old times...

Just no-one invite Beast, that guy was a dick :wink:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by C2 Scientist »

Ok, so it can be smart enough to output more boxes. :smile: But if I understood correctly, the shapes are still boxes even at the higher precision settings. I do realize it is (probably?) difficult to write a code that also recognizes the tapering in some car parts and refines the shapes accordingly, which is why I suggested the simple, manual bbox editor. Of course the automated tool you've described would be more than enough for 98.4% of the addon car makers, but since bbox making is one of the (few) cases where I tend to be such a perfectionist...

As for the vertex editing: for example, tapering the SupaStucka wings towards the tips would require that user can select the individual vertices of the box and move them (or at least the individual edges). So that's why I mentioned vertex-level editing, no need for a complete 3D modeling package. :wink:

Another idea is to allow the modeller to define (a) bounding box/es within their 3d program, as long as it uses some specific designator this could be parsed on import and the job is jobbed. I've used this method in a couple of games I've knocked together, speeds the process up no end.
True, and I used this in most of my newest addon vehicles. Actually, if the cars are opened in PT2, I think the shapes covering the cars and its major parts are still there, named as "BBody","BRoof", "BSomething", etc, grouped under a dummy object called "Helpers". They use an invisible material so they don't show up in game. It's somewhat helpful if one decides to re-scale/raise/lower the car: you could just use the "save noncar textile"-function on the shapes (or whatever it was called) and grab the wanted coordinates from the textfile.

EDIT:

Here's a short video of the drop-button in LFS, if you're interested: "Drop vehicle"-button in LFS
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Errol »

Another way of getting tigher, polyhedron bounding shapes would be a sort of octree culling method, split the car into 8 parts, split those into 8 parts, so on and so on. Discard any one of these blocks that contains no data and create a smoothed shape that keeps most of the content inside. The tighter the fit, the more points you need (obviously, the tightest fit would be an exact duplicate of the original mesh, but that's neither workable nor worth the effort.)

But yes, multiple shapes and shapes with more than 8 points are more than possible. I've used a similar technique for generating low LoD objects for distant rendering.

I'd just need to refresh my memory as to the number of boxes and number of points per box you can have per vehicle. I know the more boxes, and the more complicated they are, the greater the chance the game will crash when the vehicle gets split in half.

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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Razor »

I think (I'm not sure) the maximum number of points per box is 32. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm not sure on the amount of bounding shapes you can have, the most I've ever made is 8.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Errol »

Did that vehicle split in half ok?

I used to have a test map for that sort of thing, a long straight ending in a wedge shape, guaranteed split. If the game crashed I new my bounding box was too complicated :wink:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Razor »

No, the game crashed when it split, had to make it unsnappable.

Looking forward to a PlayThing that can run under 32bit mode, would save a lot of hassle.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by cesm20 »

to errol :

Actually c2scientist is right yes i am absent from c2 editing but sometimes i check cwaboard and make a few posts here and there, but i am still not doing c2 editing at the moment. Altough now that you are back, and specially this thing about a new plaything2, i would like you to reply his part about my pt2mod, i know that i won't be continuing it right away, but later when i resume the project, which now is a v2 in which it launches plaything2.exe and stays running in the background as a memory resident program which monitors what the user does in plaything2.exe (in the same way that macros do) and reacts accordingly, yes now the macros are built-in and don't require external macro programs besides this one itself. I even achieved in making a mouse look in the 3dviewport by using simlated arrow keys keystrokes when the mouse cursor moves (and this worked quite well), but at the moment this v2 is on stop again.

So it's of course of my interest too to know if you REALLY plan on going on with this new plaything or not... if you do maybe it's better i drop my project right away to avoid duplicated work :smile: So please as soon as possible you know if you're really going on with this tell me. sure i haven't done much progress on my pt2 mod too so this isn't exactly a worry...

to c2scientist :

well i see you gone back to c2 editing, just wondering why you haven't replyed the emails i sent :smile: anyways there isn't much to talk since i don't do c2 editing at the moment and i still don't know when i am coming back full time, specially now that errol has come back and he understands about this a lot more than me and has better tools and knowledge about game formats as he told :smile:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by C2 Scientist »


just wondering why you haven't replyed the emails i sent :smile:
I don't see what you mean, the last mail I received was back in April 2006. :smile:
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by cesm20 »

Hum... i was just speaking from memory, i haven't actually checked that when i post the reply, i am sorry about that, just nevermind that.
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by PumaY2K »

Seems to be a great project!

Very nice to see Alan and Econo too :o
PumaY2K out.

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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by juozas »

Meh it could be good to see a new version of pt2 :lol: Altrough there should be some documentation and help files for total newbies how not to mess up. And at leas it should have something like where you can drop objects at a time when you "go" around the map and set up various points like opponent patchs too.

Anyway good luck doing hard job from scratch. For that at least you should know how graphics of game and pt2 works, know its formats and maybe some code.

p.s. Disassembling old code and understanding how it works and maybe knowing to translate to more understandale programming language may help and could be useful.

Whenever you're doing it from scratch or making different way you should know most specs anyway. And using lower pc specs dependant code would be prefferred if it's any how possible.

Edit: Watch out of bugs if you going to dig into this very deep :lol: coz it'd be messed up of that...
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Noodlez »

As the old folks are chiming in..... All I have to say is I like tacos!
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Re: Plaything 2.5... maybe

Post by Razor »

Howdy, Noodlez!
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