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:




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


Transport


Scout


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.

-- 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

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!



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:



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:



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:




Now for those other objects within the file...

SajuukCor

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

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

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:




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

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

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

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.