Tîntai

[tharo]

So hello. It was time for a new Thread bout the shit iam doing right now.
First of all I wish to give a short overview of the development itself.

Some Years ago I started to do WoW Tools. It all rellys more or less on the same bucn of code that is known as the "Taliis"-Core. This included as well the editor (later) as also many of the plugins that got written for it.

After almost tree years of development I noticed many weak points of this core. Thats why i did an entire restart called the Lyn-Core. It aimed to work completly just by using XML files based on the WoWDev Wiki. And of course it was fast an usable anyway. And a Fuck of work. After the first smal projects (such as a programm that ports cataclysm files back to wotlk) it turned out that doing tools is just absolute over complicated. In the WoW modder Scene its not only about clean and good code. Its more bout results. If u loose interest the result will be Zero. And thats why Lyn was a design failure.

Even Thought this I did a big merge of Taliis and Lyn concepts and designed a new, super smal Code that i want to call Tintai (after my Character on Aldor).

Tintai is not using any XML Files. But any of the core classes got redesigned to work even with complete unknown data. If a tool get written fast it will only work with one revision of the WOW Files. If it get written good it will work with most or any of them.  Tintai itself is less than 10 basic classes that brings anything along that is needed.

In this Thread I want to present results. Means: New Tools. New shit ive done but also ask question about things that wondered me. Maybe someone also noticed that.

Showoff:
Cataclysm on WoW WOTLK Live Server Summer 2010)

This was done by Lyn. A script took the new Stormwind.wmo from the leaked cata alpha and took out any linked ressource. Did the same for any m2 Model that was used, places of in any set. In the end a <900 Files string patch came out that made this possible.

[tharo]

I just noticed that in MOGN always two empty bytes padd the string container. Did someone found out why?

[tharo]

Seems that nobody cares a shit. However.

I did a smal WMO to OBJ Convertor (or let say im working on it) here some screens I made using glc_player - an open source OBJ viewer.




It was a bit nasty but in the end it was depressing easy (as always).
Atm I only export the shape itself and the corespodending groups. Next would be to also export normals and of course texture coordinates.

[schlumpf]

MOGN should pad to 4 byte alignment. Also, the only name with meaning is "antiportal". All others are purely informational for the developers and extracted from the .max file. These chunks are made for directly being loaded into RAM and have fast access to the entries. There is no copying from the file to RAM and then closing the file again in the client.

[tharo]

Oooh it should padd, huh? So then tell my the "logic" behind padding something to a 16 bit Boundary. I mean:

MAGIC (4 bytes)
size (4 bytes)
twoUselessSpaces (2 bytes)
Data ...

Thats "padding" ? Ahuh o.O Of course my friend of course  :ustupid:
I think its as barlow said: It was a running gag and the only person that was involved died by accident. thats why it came into the game as is it.

[tharo]

Okay im done for today. Absolute no motivation left.



Thats the results. As u can see (or not) there some bugs happening.

1. The textures. I dont exactly know where to get the textures from. First of all I thought from MOBA - But this seems to be made for the Vertexes only and not rlly for the surfaces. Translating it makes absolute no sense o.O

Then I asked MOMT. Texture pointers, huh? Fuck that o.O - the wiki is outdated. Again...  Or in other words: useless.

2. So coz i dont knew where to get my infomations from i just decided to use MOPY. Its pretty good so far with only one problem: The result is as it is. Some textures get set wrong. Why? What do i know -.-" also some values are just fucked. Dont tell me theres a Material 80 or 77 somewhere  :usad:

Oh boy .. i see a lot of pain comming to get rid of this .. try and error, huh? In the end theres also some flickering happend. gosh ..

[Soluhe]

Seems that nobody cares a shit. However.

I am interessetet in your project, but i can't help you much so I decide to don't answer to your posts :p "If you don't have to say something special ... shut up"
But you made a nice progress, so keep up

and you don't know where to find the right textures or you can't extract them (no client?)
because when you open your rootwmo whit notepad ... you can find what your textures you need

if you don't have the client... maybe i can upload some textures for you!? just answer me

regards Soluhe

[Tigurius]

WoWModelViewer uses MOBA for it's texturing by vertices.

[tharo]

ah shit. obj files are surfave based instead of vertex based if it comes to this things. u cannot group vertexes only the faces... pfew.. i see a lot of dirty work incomming ..

On the other side: if someone knows a OBJ statement that allows to group vertexies .. wi would be happy to know. and no, "g" only affects the surface statements.

[tharo]

Okay. After some mimimi yesterday I found a (more or less) good solution for this issue.
The Results:




After all I think its not thaat bad for 3 days of work..
The obj File itself comes up later today.  (but yes, it will come of course ^^)

[schlumpf]

Oooh it should padd, huh? So then tell my the "logic" behind padding something to a 16 bit Boundary. I mean:

MAGIC (4 bytes)
size (4 bytes)
twoUselessSpaces (2 bytes)
Data ...

Thats "padding" ? Ahuh o.O Of course my friend of course  :ustupid:
I think its as barlow said: It was a running gag and the only person that was involved died by accident. thats why it came into the game as is it.

Ah, those. Nah, that's a zero padded zero-length string ended with a .. therefore one zero is the empty string and the second the padding. That string is referenced from somewhere as the referencing group has no name.

Alignment can be different for different data types. It does not have to be 16 bytes. It just has to be a power of two.

[tharo]

Hey! I released something! Gimme my facking contributor color and script kiddie iconz nao!

Anyway. I was thinking about what to do next. Of course, and as u all can expect the main goal keeps manipulating the Data in the client.

After some remarks from Schlumpf i was checking how good or worse the OBJ format is for this matter. And in the end I think its okay. Of course the max formats are only there. And they DO support render batches for exsample...  But OBJ is just wonderfull to debug it.

Coverting wmo's - even "easy ones" to obj brings a heavy data loss. But atm it seems that i can recalculate any of them. Of course it wont be like the original file anymore. But it will still work and with some defragmenting algorythms there wont be any perfomace loss after all.

Of course im ONLY talking about the 3D Data itself. For music, portals, colligion and any other additional data u can bet your ass that some extra work will be needed anyway.

[Pinkhair3d]

Amazing work! Bene hoping for something like this to come along for a long time.

As for format, Lightwave files have a lot of similarity to wow files in terms of the data that can be held- kjasi on the wowmodelviewer forums has been doing a bunch with it.

[Steff]

Hi THaro.
Nice to have you back on code. And to have working model tools whould be perfect.

[tharo]

Okay time for some updates.

Firs of all: Whats the state of development?
- Exporter for both formats are done.

Of course the next planed feature is the setup of own vertex structures. Unlucky there are some infomations that have do be known such as the entire MOBA.

I tryed several calculations and presentations of the datas to find em out... Some things got descovered. But many did not. Thats why atm i plan to do a longer test course that hopefully might show up the golden spot.

Point is:
AS LONG MOBA 0x0 - 0x12 is unknown there wont be a working import function.