Eldar and Chaos add-in modding

[NovaBurn]

I took it upon myself to make a new thread for those of us that are attempting to incorporate the Eldar and Chaos into the demo as fully playable races with all models, sounds and animations. The "Modding the Demo" thread was getting cluttered with pointless spam from people that can't read simple directions or skip half the posts.

What progress have you made towards getting the Eldar and Chaos into the demo? What have you gotten in game? What's worked and what hasn't? Gotten any crashes or errors? Any wierd side effects from building anything?

So far I have managed to get all the Chaos and Eldar models and textures in game and completely playable. I had grab the art dirs from the following SGA files in the beta:

W40kData.sga
W40kData-SharedTextures-Full.sga
W40kData-Whm-High.sga

and the sound dir from the locale folder
W40kData-Sound-Speech.sga

From each art folder I seperated the extraneous files and directories that had no relation to the eldar or chaos textures and models. I so i'm left with a data/art folder that is 337mb with 4370 files and 211 folders.

All models and textures are working for the Eldar, only thing that I noticed was that the LPs started out with the final model of the War Shrine even when going through the building upgrades. The following things are what I noticed that didn't work:

- all unit/building sounds instead is a beep or nothing at all
- none of the unit or building animations; this includes movement, idle, attack, death, building, special move animations.
- weapons fire effects from all eldar units including the LPs
- Eldar infantry are still stuck with the banner and upgraded weapons being held
- weapons fire hit effects for Eldar weapons except for the Brightlance Grav Plats, Fire Prism ground hit explosion
- the energy lightining crackle that occurs when the warp spiders teleport
- when the avatar is built he has this odd looking model that appear to be a "husk" that is blackened resembling the Avatar
- when the avatar is built, all eldar buildings gain this vivid red glow which remains active no matter how far the avatar is from home base. It only goes away when the avatar is killed or dies.
- all strategic points have what the building thing that pops up when its been captured.

Pictures:
http://students.uta.edu/sm/smd3899/images/relic00006.jpg
http://students.uta.edu/sm/smd3899/images/relic00007.jpg
http://students.uta.edu/sm/smd3899/images/relic00008.jpg
http://students.uta.edu/sm/smd3899/images/relic00009.jpg
http://students.uta.edu/sm/smd3899/images/relic00010.jpg
http://students.uta.edu/sm/smd3899/images/relic00011.jpg
http://students.uta.edu/sm/smd3899/images/relic00012.jpg


I now have to figure out how to get the sounds and animations working. So far I've only worked with Eldar, but I plan on getting Chaos once i figure out how to get the eldar problems fixed.

[SvK]

I've noticed that if you use beta models in the demo, they don't animate, and all their parts are turned on. For example, a Shoota Boy with have the lower jaw mask, and hold a Shoota, Big Shoota, Burna, and Rokkit Launcha all in his right hand, and an ax, a flag, and a Stikk Bomb in his left hand. This applies to buildings as well.

I don't have a solution. :(

[Richtofen]

maybe he has enough hand space to carry all that? :D

[BLARG!]

Well...orcs and other stuff worked fine...I want to add the models from the beta...but I have no key. :grrr:

[Sps]

will get textures in later - was just curious as to what the changes were


http://members.rogers.com/bradoc4/eldar.jpg

everything works - overall eldar have been STRENGHTENED

[BLARG!]

Hehehee....they remind me of unpainted miniatures. Are you working on getting textures :D. Or did you post that on a different thread? :D

[NovaBurn]

Please refrain from posting comments that add nothing constructive to the topic. I want to keep this spam free if possible.

Update so far is that I think that the certain files for the animations might be in different folders compared to that of the beta.

[theBlind]

- when the avatar is built, all eldar buildings gain this vivid red glow which remains active no matter how far the avatar is from home base. It only goes away when the avatar is killed or dies.


Just guessing, but that would be the effects the avatar has on all eldar (higher morale, faster building etc.), would it not?
Now, if only that demo was downloading faster, I could already be diving into files...

[NovaBurn]

Hmm not sure about that one, although it would be a neato effect seeing how HE IS ON FIRE!

Ok I just did some chaos testing and the results were basically the same as the Eldar. All the textures are working and the models work fine. I managed to fix the LP tower autopop up issue as stated earier. The Listening Posts still default to the final upgraded Tier 3 LP model when being built. No sounds or unit animation but the beeping I got with the eldar is gone, most likely due to my extracting of the sga archive from the Local folder in the Beta and putting it into the Demo Locale folder (removing the unneccessary dirs). I think the main problem with trying to find out where the animations are is in part because of there being three different SGA archives in the beta for the W40kData-Whm sga archives. I believe that this is where the unit animations are stored at as the only relevant things in there are lots of WHM files for the units and the buildings and some of the enviromental stuff. I'm not sure fi that's right, maybe someone at relic/thq can give a heads up on where the FX/animations/models are located at specifically.

As for the weapons/unit/building/enviromental effects (weapons fire and building effects, etc) I'm not really sure where they are as there are lots of "fx" related folders and it would be a long process of trying to figure out where exactly they are.

[Druidika]

To get the voice overs in, extract your <DemoGameDir>\W40k\Locale\English\W40kData-Sound-Speech.sga first. Then, do the same with the beta file and copy it into the demo directory. That's what I think got the voice overs working for me, but I gave up integrating the Eldar and Chaos when I didn't find out how to get the animations in...

[BRAINoff]

how about upping the modded files for download so i can take a look without doing all this stuff.

oh god im lazy :D

[NovaBurn]

You are freakin insane. Firstly we dont know what files are need and even so they are at least over 200mb so that is a resounding NO

[Tempest Storm]

I've noticed that if you use beta models in the demo, they don't animate, and all their parts are turned on. For example, a Shoota Boy with have the lower jaw mask, and hold a Shoota, Big Shoota, Burna, and Rokkit Launcha all in his right hand, and an ax, a flag, and a Stikk Bomb in his left hand. This applies to buildings as well.

I don't have a solution. :(

This could be that the model format was altered since the beta was released, and the demo engine does not like the beta meshes...although I am hoping thats not the case.

Another posibility is that there may be some configuring to do that gets the models working properly...could be alot of work.

[DarthVaygr]

Maybe there are certain "groups" assigned to the model, and this group goes away and this comes when you finish doing this research or upgrade. Lots of configuring..... O.o Anyway, I'm rather surprised that Relic wasn't efficient and had 1 gun model to load that goes onto all units when needed, as supposed to having each model having their own gun model, and eating up memory :/

[SvK]

There aren't very many guns that are shared between a lot different units. Standard bolters are only on Space Marines and Scouts, for example, not every SM infantry unit.

NovaBurn, try to be nicer. You could have said something like "The model and texture files are very large, and it would be faster to learn how to use the extractor than to download the files." Pretty much the same information, but without questioning his mental capacity.

[NovaBurn]

This could be that the model format was altered since the beta was released, and the demo engine does not like the beta meshes...although I am hoping thats not the case.

Another posibility is that there may be some configuring to do that gets the models working properly...could be alot of work.

Ya I'm starting to thing along those lines as I've noticed that if I extract the WH40k-SharedTextures.sga and WH40kWHM-High.sga and directly copy the the data folder into the Demo directly, all the beta models and textures import properly for Eldar/chaos/ork/SM but their unit animations are completely borked; even the SM and Orks.

Svk: wasn't try to sound like an ass but I'll be nicer :D

[Dalveldrin]

Hey maybe by the time you get Eldar and Chaos running in the Demo the final version will be released.

Anyway, good luck!

[NovaBurn]

w00t i just made my searching easier. I found a neato tool to compare folder contents and file contents. It allows me to make a side-by-side comparison of all the files in an archive and see what is there or not there. and if certain files point to different locations

http://www.comparesuite.com/features/folder_comparison.htm

[Babagarnu]

Just as a side note, I think the problem you are experienceing with the eldar listening posts, is not that they are being built with the final model... rather that they are being built with all of the models on top of one another, and the last is the biggest..

I believe that if someone manages to solve the issue of troops spawning with all their options inabled on the model then this problem too will be solved rather easliy in the same fashion.

I am still working on it, but have yet to make any real headway. Keep me/us posted on your findings plz. :D

[NovaBurn]

I didn't think of that one, I guess you are right, I also just noitced that the eldar HQ building has what looks to be the "under contruction model" of the HQ in it also. I'll try and see if I can find that problem.

[EDIT]
Finally managed to get the sounds working for Chaos and Eldar (i'm going to try in a few minutes), albiet they are the beta sounds which have the same voices/sounds for half the units and structures. What did to do with was I extracted the W40kData-Sound-Speech.sga from both the Demo and Beta Locale folders and then copied the chaos_marines (and eldar) folder from data\sound\speech\races\ in the beta locale folder to the data\sound\speech\races\ to the demo. By doing this I filled in the directory and file gaps missing between the two. But testing this immediately had no effect on the sounds, what I did was move the sound dir into the main data folder in the WH40k directory and tested it there; bam sounds work.

I also did this on a dry run meaning I started over with no imported models or textures for the chaos or eldar. I did happen to find that the Chaos Lord and Sorceror models/textures/animations/FX work right off the bat with no importation. Which leads me to believe that either the directory setup is different from that of the beta ( as I have noticed with misc files in the sga archives) for the sound/race specific effects/animations. More updates later

[DarthVaygr]

"all the beta models and textures import properly for Eldar/chaos/ork/SM but their unit animations are completely borked; even the SM and Orks."

that must be because the animations are found IN the model files, and not separate files like in HW or HW2. Chaos Lord and Sorcerer work because they are ingame for the single player purposes.

[NovaBurn]

well if the animations are in the model files then why wouldn't they work correctly if the models show properly and texture just fine? That my friend is the million dollar question (if it so happens to be that way)

[Progenitor]

is this mod gonna be out or is it dead because of the release?