.HOD file format

[Delphy]

Post any file formats / structures here :)

It's a simple IFF file structure, very similar to the IC ones.

I know Spooky is working on this format but I am too... Spooky if you want my recursive IFF chunk extraction routines just ask :)

[ZuiljiN]

hi Delphy
im bad at hexa or reading compiled files so i leave this job to you and crook :P

i have 2 questions about hod files...first hod contain the mesh and the textures??? i dont see any textures files in the .big..

second question...their is any way to know the numbers of polygons in hod file? for now i dont really need tools...anyway the demo doesnt look for updated files...i only want to know the polycount of the ships...almost everyone lag in mp and maybe in sp missions too...if i make ships with more polygons everyone will lag bad...so if you know a way to find the polycount it will greatly appreciate :)

ZuiljiN

[Langy]

ZuiljiN - What are you talkin' about, amost everyone lags? From what I've heard and seen, Homeworld 2 works suprisingly well, even on low-end systems, without any real load issues. Lag in MP is because of high pings and all that, not due to any real serious framerate issues due to high poly counts.

Besides, if I'm right then the .HOD should contain a few different meshes of varying polycounts, due to lodding, possibly a .lod type file as well, though lodding might be due to framerate rather than distance, unlike HW or Cata.

[Ghent]

LODs are definitely by distance, i spent awhile zooming in and out on a few ships to try and figure out how many LODs there might be.... looks like a more than just the 5 in the original, maybe at least 7. LOD0 appears to be VERY closeup also, some of the shadow & texture details change almost the instant you start zooming out from a ship. I think polycount is higher also (well DUH ghent, mistar genius).... like maybe 1000 polys on some of the frigs & caps, instead of a general 300 per any ship like in HW.

[Spooky]

Hehe - two heads are better than one. :) And yes please, I will be interested in seeing your code... :)

I have all the basic IFF chunks mapped out now - working through them one by one deciphering them.

I'm not certain about the number of mesh LODs yet but the textures certainly seem to have Mip levels using the DDS DXT5 format.

More to come...

[ZuiljiN]

Langy...you played alots of mp games on gamespy?? about 30 games here...got a raining weekend so nothing else to do ;) and unfortunatly i only got 5 games with no lag...even if everyone got ping under 100 or 200 its still lagging hard sometime...so its not only the ping...i still think alots of ppl try to play with tnt2 card or old comp...

[Langy]

They can't even run the game with a TNT2 card, ZuiljiN. Anyways, if they are slowing down due to framerate I don't believe it gives other people lag. Then again, I could be wrong. But if I am, I must question WTF Relic made that happen.

[Pesmontis]

Delphy, Spooky,

I wouldn't mind helping out, maybe we could coordinate a little who's working on what & spend time more efficient?

About the DXT5 format: There's the NVidia DDS plugin for Adobe Photoshop, which might be useful.

[Spooky]

Although somewhat hard to see here is my first major breakthough in the mesh extraction:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hscore01.jpg
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hscore02.jpg

What you can see are all the vertex coordinates from the Hiigaran Hyperspace Core as seen at the start of Level 1. :)

Next I will add the polygon faces to make it clearer :)

[Elif Tymes]

Yay Spooky!

[Valkrie]

Awesome job! So what other data is provided in the .hod file? Does it contain any code?

Spooky's da man. Woot!

[Spooky]

OK here we go :)

Hyperspace Core
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hscore03.jpg

Transport
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/sptanker01.jpg

Scout
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgnscout01.jpg

What you are seeing is the first object within the mesh so there are a few missing polys where multiple objects occur. I'm working on those at present... :)

[Pesmontis]

Holy hanky! Way to go!
Can you tell us something about numbers of vertices & faces?
You did this in C or in VB?

[Spooky]

OK - these are for the first object only remember:

HS Core - 1403 vertexes, 964 polys

Tanker - 1018 vertexes, 648 polys

Scout - 695 vertexes, 652 polys

And VB :)

[ZuiljiN]

GREAT job Spooky!

it will be hard to put the textures once polygon faces will be added? :)

oh...ive found this in a .lua...but seriously i have no idea if that could help you...
The valid texture formats are:

TF_RGBA32
TF_DXT1_NOALPHA
TF_DXT3
TF_DXT5

Other possible texture formats that are not implemented yet:

TF_RGBA16_4444
TF_RGB24
TF_LUMINANCE
TF_ALPHA
TF_LUMINANCEALPHA

[Spooky]

I have already extracted the UV coordinates for the textures. 'ALL' I need to do now is extract said textures from the file to have a fully textured mesh... :)

[TyrealMathias]

*drools* Spooky da man... u 2, Delphy.. of course ;)

[Langy]

OMG, Spooks! That's farkin' sweet! Good job!

[thesquare]

holy shnikeys!!!! spooky I love you !!!!plz say you can turn it back into multiple obj files :P < newb programer here(but experienced modeler) thought that they had lod smothing groops material id and uv corods with lod textures and shaders. thus i was like theres no way in hell any one is gonna figure it out b4 the release date. man you are awsome dude!!!:bow: :bow: :bow: :bow:

[Delphy]

Spooky, yup I have exactly the same stuff done... matrix / vertices / normals / polys etc etc

You just beat me to it :)

Although I made the Scout only 300 odd vertices

[Langy]

Delphy - Maybe you were working with a lower LOD scout? *shrug* dunno.

[Retroboy]

Good job. This thread is fun to watch.

Put the hyperspace core on its side, place a turret on it, and you'd have a sweet gun platform. :D

-- Retro

[SajuukCor]

I can't wait untill they finally crack the HOD format... I just got myself Maya and I want to try my hands on some rendered movies if I can manage. I'm a noob modder too, always wanted my own ships, and tryed making a couple for HW, so I just can't wait :gonemad:

You two are da manseses :banana:

[Rei Ayanami]

Hrhr cant wait to bring the first custom ship into the game. can you tell us how you get the poly invormation and so on ? did you reached to compile them to ascii or something like that ?

[Pesmontis]

... and the hgn_assaultcorvette probably about 725 vertices (extra objects not included).

Does any one of you have an idea about those 'latitude meshes'?
(seems not as easy to read as the ordinary vertex records).

About compressed DXT5: from the hgn_assaultcorvette.hod, the first 'Hgn_AssaultCorvette_Front_EXPORT.psd' DXT5 MIPmapped texture!

http://www.thegamingunion.co.uk/users/forumusers/first.find.jpg

This might be coincidence, because I used the header of a 256x256 DDS DXT5 image created with the NVidia Photoshop plugin.

[Skeeter]

Mesh from spooky.

Textures from Pesmontis.

Put together and hopefully a Fully Textured Ship. :)

[Pesmontis]

Not so coincidental anymore: after the 'readable' word "DXT5" there are three integers before the image data starts. The last two of these indicate texture size info., e.g. {00 01 00 00}{00 01 00 00} means 256x256, {40 00 00 00} {40 00 00 00} means 64x64.

The first integer after "DXT5" I'm not sure about.

There are textures for separate layers as well (indicated by "[#]"), but how these layers are interpreted by the engine is unclear to me at the moment (bump mapping?). Second layer:

http://www.thegamingunion.co.uk/users/forumusers/hgn_assaultcorvette_front_export_psd[2].jpg

O Skeeter, what I'd like to see is those ships in HW1... :worm:

[Ammon Ra]

holy crap..heheh.
u guys are great! now wee need to do is learn how ADD a ship to the demo ;) i wonder what Relic is thinking at this point. they're clearly not annoyed by this. i'd rather think the're goblesmacked at what you guys can do :)

[ZuiljiN]

Great job again guys :)

how LODs work you can see all of them? and when it will available for d/l? :)

[Spooky]

OK - I know for the format of the header for .DDS files. Here is the extracted Hyperspace Core main texture:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hscore04.jpg

Now to try and UV map it. :)

Pesmontis - I think the first value after the 'DXT5' might be the number of MIP levels - not sure though....

[Arioch]

What I'd really like access to is some of the 2D UI images, such as the ship and research icons. Is the ".ROT" a known format from IC?

[Spooky]

And here is the fully textured mesh:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hscore05.jpg
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hscore06.jpg

Now for those other objects within the file...

[SajuukCor]

:banana: Wheeeee, textured model!! Looks spifftastic Spooky, you're just too good at what you do :jig:

[Kadreal]

Now the question is can you work backwards? as in take a model and make it a format that hw2 can understand.

[Spooky]

Not yet - there are still a lot of fields to decipher. :)

[thesquare]

:bigwave: Ive read in several spots in the forums that people want to remake hw1 in the hw2 engine. I might have it backwards but I would like to help out with the modeling. I just wanted to know whats the best stuff to use to get the old models/textures out of hw1 and how many lod is there in the new models? :P Also what is the average polycount that your seeing in the models? Also what types of tags to put on polys to get the subsystem code to work on it? And any other info that you have that might help... :) cheers

[Kadreal]

I want my viking ship!!:cranky:

[Spooky]

Just for good measure here is the transport ship:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/sptanker02.jpg
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/sptanker03.jpg

The untextured grey spot is where the badge goes....

And most interestingly of all the texture map is 1024x256!

Question for the Devs - how large a texture map can HW2 cope with? :)

[TyrealMathias]

wow... i knew the tex sizes were going to be large than they were in HW1 and C... but... wow... dats big....

nice work, guys ;)

i second Arioch's request for the .rot files.... hehe..

[SajuukCor]

Hey Spooky, start compiling the beta to extract and view these beautiful models :bandit:

[Meurig47]

Hehehe :D

http://www.tgu.org.uk/users/farscape/pics/sptransport1.jpg

http://www.tgu.org.uk/users/farscape/pics/sptransport2.jpg

http://www.tgu.org.uk/users/farscape/pics/sptransport3.jpg

[Spooky]

Minor update - all separate texture groups within an object are being read correctly now. Tomorrow I hope to apply the textures and read in multiple objects... :)

[TyrealMathias]

yummmy...

Meurig, you scare me ;)

[SvK]

Meurig, you should make it more obvious that those pictures are from HW1.

[Langy]

How'd you extract 'em, Meurig? Did you make a program for yourself or something like that?

[Sojan Naabal]

Actually SvK, the part of the "Mark I " mothership visible in the back of Meurig's last shot makes it quite obvious... This whole effort is just Fabulous!!!

[Arioch]

The [#] layer looks like it may be a specularity map.

[Skeeter]

Meurig must have the tool spooky is making, maybe an early beta of it, can we get it too spooky?

[Meurig47]

Nothing so complex, Spooky just sent me the mesh and I got it into HW1 :p

Liflist couldn't handle the 1024x256 texture though! So I had to reduce it to 512x256, hence the slight fuzziness.

Also interesting to note, the HW2 ships are quite a lot smaller than the original's, the transport which seems massive in HW2 is only about 1.5 times the kushan assault frigate's length in HW1. It would appear that Hw2 has ironed out the 60m long fighter issue in its rescaling :p

Also, as Spooky was seeing last night, the bump maps are also within the .hod and are an entirely seperate texture, which is why the ingame hw1 version doesnt have those embossed boxes etc on its top hull. The badge part is also a seperate object.

I'll get the hyperspace core in game in a moment.

[Meurig47]

Just for good measure :p

And its tiny! Only about the width of two scouts.
Still looks good in HW1 :)

http://www.tgu.org.uk/users/farscape/pics/hscore1.jpg

[Ghent]

Arioch kinda beat me to my thought...

the # or blue layer posted earlier is... my guess... a reflection map, not a bump map or team color layer. Maybe specularity = reflection... i'm not up with all the semantics. It didn't look like a team color layer tho, with some of the areas of the texture that would have been given a team color. Black = no reflection, blue/white-ish = higher reflection.

HW2 ships must have something specified in the textures/mesh, tho, that governs the reflectivity of that part of the ship. You can tell, especially on the little collectors. Get focused on one then move around so the maps light source is behind it, camera looking into the light. You can really see the surfaces of the ship giving off a a brighter reflection when they're at the right angle. HW never did this. So there must be something new in HW2. The "higher" the color value in this # layer, the more reflection, much like the alpha layer works with opacity.

That's just my guess. First thing that came to mind when i saw the blue layer.

[Skeeter]

Seems to me that the models can go into hw pretty well. Anyone who wanted to make a hw2 - hw1 conversion mod would be able to do the models quickly but the mod would need alot of tweaking in the shp files and new mexes and stuff.

[Delphy]

Spooky any parts of the HOD you aren't sure about? Maybe I've deciphered them...

[Pesmontis]

That first integer might indeed be the number of MIPmaps. I think DX needs to know how many levels it should generate, although I can also think of this number being a game-default for every texture used. If this number changes for various textures this could indicate that the number of MIPmaps is NOT a default.

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1233.asp

(This is about C-code though, but explains MIPmapping nicely).

Arioch, you might be right about that specularity map. Here's some background on that:

http://www.digitalproducer.com/cgi-bin/getframeletter.cgi?/2001/09_sep/tutorials/09_24/photofish.htm

Delphy, there's (about) ten bytes between the vertex data and the face-numbering data, any idea?

[Spooky]

I'm fairly sure the value is the number of MIP levels. Look at the list of textures within the Vagyr battlecruiser and you can see the value changes:

LMIP Length=11032
Name Length=68
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Flap_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 128
LMIP Length=11032
Name Length=68
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Flap_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 128
LMIP Length=11034
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Engine_EXPORT.psd[3]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 128
LMIP Length=11034
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Engine_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 128
LMIP Length=11034
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Engine_EXPORT.psd[4]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 128
LMIP Length=11034
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Engine_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 128
LMIP Length=21970
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/Vgr_BC_LOD2_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=6, Size=128 x 128
LMIP Length=21970
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/Vgr_BC_LOD2_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=6, Size=128 x 128
LMIP Length=349664
Name Length=68
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Body_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=8, Size=512 x 512
LMIP Length=349664
Name Length=68
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Body_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=8, Size=512 x 512
LMIP Length=174887
Name Length=67
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Jaw_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=7, Size=512 x 256
LMIP Length=174887
Name Length=67
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Jaw_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=7, Size=512 x 256
LMIP Length=87512
Name Length=68
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Nose_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=7, Size=256 x 256
LMIP Length=87512
Name Length=68
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Nose_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=7, Size=256 x 256
LMIP Length=5577
Name Length=69
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Badge_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 64
LMIP Length=5577
Name Length=69
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Badge_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 64
LMIP Length=5577
Name Length=69
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Badge_EXPORT.psd[3]
DXT5 Levels=5, Size=64 x 64
LMIP Length=21970
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Bridge_EXPORT.psd[1]
DXT5 Levels=6, Size=128 x 128
LMIP Length=21970
Name Length=70
D:/Homeworld2/DataSrc/Ship/Vgr_BattleCruiser/V_BC_Bridge_EXPORT.psd[2]
DXT5 Levels=6, Size=128 x 128

I'm not sure what the first 6 bytes are for between the vertex and index lists but the last 4 bytes contain the number of entries in the index (divide by 3 to get number of polys...). :)

[Spooky]

Here are some pics of the first multiple textured single object ship I have extracted - the Hiigaran Torpedo Frigate:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgntorpedo01.jpg
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgntorpedo02.jpg
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgntorpedo03.jpg

Next task is to read in multiple object ships... :)

[Hopalong]

Nice work gang.

So the blue glow on the underside of the engine cowl is a texture, not a lighting effect. Interesting....

Any ideas on how the badges get placed?

Maybe some of the extra entries that Spooky mentioned are badge coordinates. Since you mentioned them for the BC, maybe they're transform matrix information to relate objects in a multiple object ship.

[Spooky]

The square of the badge is a separately textured 'object'. The badge texture in the .HOD is always 64x64 but as you can see in the first pic above it blends in nicely with the higher res of the rest of the top. I think the badge textures themselves are just put on top of the underlying texture....

And BTW there are 4 different textures used on the above ship.

[Pesmontis]

That's a pretty strong indication for MIP levels...

And yes I see that 'number of faces' there (divided by three, then multiplied by two I'd say).

[Spooky]

LOL - yep :)

Care of looking at multiple texture meshes I am working out what more and more of the unknown integer fields actually mean now. Some are still a mystery however!

OK - the max known texture size is increasing - the Vagyr Mothership has a 1024x512 map! :)

[TyrealMathias]

question: what model format are the objects in after decompression or whatever? :-p

[Spooky]

Well I am creating .OBJ/.MTL files from the mesh details I am extracting - fine for single object ships but it will not cope with hierarchy info as seen in turreted ships.

[Langy]

Then use a better standard, Spooks;) I dunno, like... hmm... something better. The Direct X one, maybe? Can't remember the extension, though... Been so long since I did stuff like that...

[TyrealMathias]

try a maya file type :)

[Spooky]

OK - you can now extract whichever LoD you specify and save each object as a separate file enabling you to join them together in your favourite modelling App. As an example here are the 3 LoDs of the Hiigaran Mothership:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgnmothership01.jpg

:)

That's the mesh section of the file done now - onto the hierarchy information...

[Rebel]

OmG...so, anyone up for "Homeworld: Time Machine Mod" in which the Hiigarans go back in time to kill the taiidani?

[TyrealMathias]

well now.. THATS an intresting idea.. hyperspace mix-up brings them back to the First Time.. ooooh.... sounds nice... hehehehe.... maybe they can even go toast the Naggarok so that HW:C never happens :D

[travis]

Mmmmm! Any chance of us getting an early look at your conversion app? I'd love to start playing with those meshes in 3dsMax!

Fantastic work! :)

Travis

[Crook]

There must be a simple format that can cope with hierarchy and matrices? I do love the OBJ standard though..... surely wavefront have included these things in later versions of the filespec ?

[Pesmontis]

To me, HOD files are not as easy as e.g. PEO files, because the latter use offsets nicely and I haven't seen offsets in a HOD file yet. Also, there's not only mesh info in a HOD file.

Therefor I can imagine a HOD file editor to be something like an 'extractor' & 'rebuilder' (I'm currently looking at the Winbig source ;-)

To use the OBJ format is only to provide quick access to mesh data which at least I extract manually for the time being, and I use a simple app to convert to OBJ & DDS. To publish an app at this time, would probably ask for hex-editing skills as well, but of course I don't know exactly how far Spooky has come.

Spooky or Delphy, could you tell us something about the HOD header structure or indeed the HOD hierarchy structure? So far, I've seen nothing like an object matrix in a HOD, but it seems to me that there's something like positional data for sub-objects.

By the way, in the hgn_assaultcorvette.hod I think there's at least 28 objects (LOD meshes too as shown by Spooky), plus additional meshes (BBOX) which I assume to be boundary mesh(es) like a collision box & sphere.

[Spooky]

OK - I was wondering what on earth the section of the mesh called Root_goblins was, now all is clear:

Take the basic mesh -
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgntorpedo04a.jpg
Add the close up details (goblins) -
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgntorpedo04b.jpg
End result -
http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgntorpedo04c.jpg

...next stop the hierarchy... :)

[Meurig47]

Clever system of pseudo-lodding!

[Pesmontis]

ehm... to give you an idea of these goblins, for the hgn_assaultcorvette this add-on detail mesh composition is twice as big (vertices / faces) as the LOD0 root mesh...

[Spooky]

:) ...and once you add all the goblin detail to the Hiigaran Mothership it is over 8500 polys - and that is without any additional subsystems!

In the above example the basic mesh is 767 polys and the goblins add another 1499...

[gthompsn]

HW to HW2 auto-conversion
Question for the gurus:

When you get these format issues worked out, would you please make a two way auto-conversion tool for getting HW and HW2's physical geometry and animation details into the other game's format?

I think that there has been a tremendous amount of exceptional work done by the modding community and it would be great not to have to re-invent the wheel by rebuilding the models.

Bringing ships from HW to HW2 might need re-texturing (to take advantage of the greater capabilities and detail possible in the new engine) and extensive changes to the respective *.shp file (due to differences in functionality or the need to re-balance weapons for use in the other game). Hopefully everything else could be automatic.

[TyrealMathias]

are all the goblins considered one object in the .HOD or are the seperate from each other?

[Spooky]

That depends. If there is only one object in the file (as per the Torpedo frigate) then there is one Goblin object. The mothership has 2 goblin objects, one for the main hull and one for the door but not every main mesh object has to have a goblin object...

[TyrealMathias]

interesting... thnx, Spooky :)

[Pesmontis]

Other shocking big stuff from HW2: 'just' a Tanis texture, 1024 x 2048, more than 2.5 Mb in size...

http://www.thegamingunion.co.uk/users/forumusers/big_field_tex_lites4_export7.jpg

[Spooky]

Good grief - and I thought 1024x512 was a large texture! :)

[thesquare]

wonder how big the damn shipyard texture is gonna be?

[TyrealMathias]

what about Bentus? :-D

[verybad]

Damn that's purty. What size is the mommyship's texture, that'll let us know how big we should go with a texture thats often used ingame rather than one we see once.

[Spooky]

The Hiigaran MS uses 8 textures, the two largest of which are both 512x1024. The Vagyr MS has 6, the two largest are 1024x512 and 512x512. :)

[Langy]

Gaddamn! That's one gigantic texture, man.

How large is a large texture in, say, an FPS game nowadays, anyways?

[Pesmontis]

Some other large textures are:

Tanis: 'MountainTop.dds' = 1024 x 1024 ;
Chimera: 'Mountain_side_small.dds' = 2048 x 256 ;
(the latter seems to be a left-over from Tanis texturing)

Then there's a subsystem called 'Vyagr Commstation Substation', which has a texture 'V_comm_bottom_hub.dds' of 1024 x 1024 , but I haven't tried yet to map that one to a mesh (mesh seems to be very composite).

[Spooky]

More progress. I have worked out how the HIER section hangs together, so now I can position all the various bits of multi-object meshes in the correct positions. For example the Hiigaran Mothership bay door:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgn_mothership01.jpg

:)

[Meurig47]

Yes, but can you sing and juggle whilst you're doing that?

[Spooky]

The HIER section also contains hardpoint data for the positioning of the various subsystems. Here is the frigate production subsystem placed on the carrier mesh using this above data...

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgn_carrier01.jpg

...and here are all the other subsystems in place (two rear ones are hyperspace and platform controls)...

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hgn_carrier02.jpg

Total poly count in this configuration is 3138. The Mothership above is 8549 polys. :)

[TyrealMathias]

damn you spooks... me wanto mess with teh models, hehehe... any ETA on the tool?

[somfuka]

u guys r spooky... no really!
umm.. pesmontis, I got your hod extractor but.....i've been try'n to extract hod files from extracted HW2 demo big, but i just get no chunks in file error? ....nice tanis mod :clap: my crapy pc won't do HW2 so i was gonna swap demo models to hw1. just to while away the insomnia:)

[Pesmontis]

Use Delphy's Relic Archive Extractor v.2.1 to get to the proper HODs (or, Delphy, v.2.3 ? ;-)

[somfuka]

yeah did that, ic extraxtor patched to extract HW2 big files....
still when i use Hod extractor still get no valid chunks??? is that the extractor u used for tanis base?

[Pesmontis]

You're probably using v.2.2 of the "RelicArchiveExtractor.exe": check it's properties.

[somfuka]

thanx :)
2.2 indeed it is .... where can i find 2.1/3?

ps. your eagle one is MAD ;)

[Ghent]

Originally posted by Spooky
OK - I was wondering what on earth the section of the mesh called Root_goblins was, now all is clear....

um... no offense, and nice work solving how to extract that section of the file.... but if you would have
1) read the developer interviews, or
2) just asked someone

...you would have known immediately what "Root_goblins" was the moment you saw it in the file. Relic said in an interview they were using a closeup "LOD" system they called goblins to add in extra closeup details onto a ship mesh. Reason would have it this would be not a LOD0 type thing, but an extra "object" in the ship folder or ship mesh that is only rendered when the camera is close. Not a big mystery :) Guess it proves that the genius analytical types need to look up every now and then and keep in touch with the bigger picture ;)

somfuka - best bet is to go here - http://mods.relicnews.com - and read Delphy's last post. SGA extractor is now v1.5

[Valkrie]

umm...no offense but this forum is for posting useful modding information and I think your information is redundant. Also, when will you have that decompiler for the .HOD file done?

Please don't knock the efforts of others. Its bad for the mod community.:hdown:

[Ghent]

Originally posted by Valkrie
...this forum is for posting useful modding information...

pld

[Spooky]

The last time I read that modding interview was when it first appeared and I had completely forgotten about that part. I knew what sort of data (i.e. mesh) it represented (it was obvious from it's structure), I just could not remember the details - not really an issue and hardly worthy of comment.

As for when it will be available? When I have all aspects of the file 100% completely understood which will not be until after the RDN tools are released (which should have the file specs thus providing me with the last bits of information required).

The following picture shows the hierarchy information stored in the HIER and ETSH sections of the file, there are one or two other types still to do in this FORM section which will add to the Treeview:

http://www.b5mods.com/spooky/hodviewer01.jpg

Progress is steady... :)

[somfuka]

sweet spooky

[Ammon Ra]

*chews the hw2 big file apart and spits out the usless (atm) parts*

Is that program ready for download??? :D

[Spooky]

Not yet unfortunately. :( I have had a very very busy week at work which has slowed things somewhat so I have not even finished reading all the file yet...

[NESEN_RENSC]

*does the impatient dance* come ooooooooon guys! Hurrrrrrrrrrrrrry! Please?! *cries* I wanna play with them too! :( _--Nesen

PS: I notice that you guys call modelled bits of detail "goblins", is that Maya slang? I use 3ds max and everyone on the forums I haunt calls them "greebles"?

[Crook]

Greebles (and nurnies) are something different.

[luther]

Greebles are little insets of techno-junk (that was always my word for this stuff); pipes, spikes, turbines, junction boxes, vents and so on. These are used to add interest or scale to an object and are normally made by extruding outlined shapes. 'Goblins' are similar but appear to be used in a slightly different context in HW2; these are large structures that break up a surface, such as control towers, docking ports, modules and other such features protruding from the surface of a ship. I've heard greebles used in a similar context and there's some overlap but I think goblins are generally larger scale, functional detail additions to a hull whereas greebles are your smaller scale techno-pipes and turbines (and of course, random flashing turquoise lights nested between shiny pipework)

Luther

[NESEN_RENSC]

ah. okay then. makes sense. :)

[Draven]

I've asked Right Hemisphere, the makers of Deep Exploration (what 3D Exploration became after they bought it) about .HOD file support andd while they don't plan to support it they have said any modding developers willing to write such support for them should contact them.