IBBoard

I'm finally getting somewhere with my mod! The race now shows up in the Army Painter (all be it with the wrong name, it's showing the ID). Just got to hex-edit the WHM and WHE files and then I'll hopefully have the first of my patterns playable as a completely inherited race

Would anyone be willing to play test briefly and make sure that things like AI, abilities and requirements etc are inherited properly?

Thanks

Sigismund

I'd be happy to test it for you IBBoard. Just send me a link to the file and I'll get started.

IBBoard

Will do, once it's done I'm still fighting the hex-editing part to try to get it to stop sharing textures. I've just downloaded the XVI32 that everyone else says is good (because my current hex editor doesn't have a replace function :S ) so hopefully I should be able to fix it all now

IBBoard

Gah, still no luck with the separating of textures
I did just test it and find that you can't inherit addons though - obviously more of an "inherit data" inherit than a "inherit and an object orientated way so that you're still recognised as a specialised version of your parent" inherit.
Time to check my PM from EdCase again and then post a new thread if I still can't manage it :\

[edit] Oh, and AI isn't working either :\ I'd have thought it could have just inherited AI, but apparently not
I've sent a new PM to EdCase, but if anyone else has any ideas why it's still showing the old textures when I've got a halved WTP, and a hex-edited and renamed RSH, WHM and base_mesh WHM then it'd be great.

ShinGouki

I assume your ebps LUA's are pointing to the correct animator for your new .whe / .whm files??

As for the AI can't you just copy and past the Space Marine AI and put it under your new race name as a new race??

When you say your race is just showing up as ID do you have your locale/yourmod.ucs file in the right place with the race name in the UCS file, and the lua for racebps pointing to the correct string.

If you need me to describe these in more detail let me know.

IBBoard

I've got the race name working now, that was nice and simple (and partly the fault of the AE for tacking some phrase that I can't remember on the end of the ID - "No range" or something)

AI, I might be able to copy and paste, I don't know, I didn't try. I'll give it a go now.

EBPS LUAs, yep, they're pointing to races/HalvedMarines/Troops/HalvedMarine (or something similar, I can't remember the exact string, but Space_Marine has been replace with Halved Marine).

I'm currently working my way through all of the researches etc to make sure they're inherited correctly from the generic Marines with the new structure names over-riding the old requirements etc. Hopefully I'm not going to have to go through the weapons as well now!

[edit]
* IBBoard quickly nips between computers


OK, the EBPS code is:

Thunderhawk

I hope that once you do this you will do the same for the quartered textures. Bets you will need to go through everything. Look forward to the release.

IBBoard

Yep, Quartered will be coming after this, with the possibility of Mentor Legion, Masked Marines and any of the other ones I've done if this turns out popular enough. Once I've done two or three "Texture as a Race" mods, I'll also add instructions for the normal person on how to combine them and make them playable all at once.

ShinGouki

I actually have a similar problem, with my harlequins mod for now i have the space marine sacred artifact as a placeholder for one of my buildings.

Obviously none of the inheritance has anything to do with space marines in my race, but if there is another space marine player it will take the army colour of that player and apply it to my building so im wondering if it's actually something elsewhere causing the problem??

I;m interested in helping you find a solution as well though as im doing something very similar to you with eldar craftworlds at the moment and was actually planning on doing what your doing now anyway for my factions mod.

Ill do some experimenting myself. Could you tell me what you hex edited in the whe / whm files? I know to look for references to the texture obviously but is there anything else i need to look out for??

I would like my current harlequins to have seperate textures from the default eldar so that it doesn't make vanilla eldar look like my harlies.

IBBoard

I can't quite remember what was in which file at the moment, but I replaced references to the "space_marines/base_mesh/space_marine" with "HalvedMarines/base_mesh/HalvedMarine" in the WHMs, I didn't find anything I can remember in the WHEs (or if I did, I replaced it), I replaced references to the "space_marines/texture_share" to "HalvedMarines/texture_share" in RSH. Other than that you'll have to wait until I can remember exactly what I did or someone else gives you more answers

But now I've hit a worse problem - the game won't load because of a validation error that AE doesn't pick up on and one for a file I don't think I've referenced and definately haven't created/edited. Hey ho, time for a "fatal error" thread...

Sasquatch

No, nothing more than the texture references has to be edited. But take care of either stay at the same file length (not replacing the texture reference by anything longer or shorter) or redo the relic junky header.
The colourbleeding is normal, every mod using proxy models from other races has this problem.

IBBoard

yeah, luckily halvedmarines is the same length as space_marines, so I was fine with the length, nothing got changed there, but even if it did, I'd have thought that would have resulted in a crash/PBoD (Pink Boxes of Doom), not the original/currently installed skins :\

Sorry if people think this shouldn't be a new post, but I've been reacking up replies quite quickly (thanks peeps ) so people might not notice the addition otherwise:

I'm nearly there! I've got a pink box now The error log says "invalid chunk header" so I think one of my find and replaces went a little stray.

One other thing to note - it helps when your army painter is showing halvedmarine_unit and not space_marine_unit

[edit] Huh? I thought I quick-replied for that! never mind! I might be back later today, or if not it'll be tomorrow GMT

ShinGouki

Ha ha yeah thats a good point sorry for not thinking of that. Of course you'll have to change your racebps file to display the new model in your army painter :-D otherwise even if it's working it will just be displaying the regular marine anyway

Sounds like your making good progress. What do you use to hex edit by the way? I have ultra edit but im always a little baffled by hex editors and the best way of using them.

EdCase

Use XVI32 to hexedit..its search and replace functions are the only way to go when it comes to DOW "hexing"

Danimator

I'll have a look at the ai if you like but I'll need a working version and a copy of the luas as well as RGD files. Sounds like fun

I can then do a little testing, time permitting but DH and BA will have to come first.

Let me know if you're interested. PM me if you like.

ShinGouki

Thanks for that EdCase, i really like ultra edit for my LUA and SCAR files, but that program you linked me to is definately more user friendly for hex editing.

mel_danes

IBB, you dog, texture mod. Very cool. I hope this works out. I'll download every damn one of em'. Those quartered guys kick butt. Keep at it. I'm sure Ed could help you out if you need it.

BrotherLucius

Lets say you get this all done and it works wonderfully (not doubting that it won't of course). How hard would it be to do the same for the other textures you dilligently made so far? Would this work you are doing now would lay a good foundation for making more?

Just interested. And awesome job as usual IBBoard!

IBBoard

BrotherLucius: Once this is done, I'd say about five minutes More realistically, probably about half an hour to an hour. I'll have basic LUAs for the races and then I just need to hex-edit the WHMs and RSH files - I've found you don't even need to rename the RSH and WHM files because they're already in different folders, it's just units and their LUAs that need different names

Mel_Danes: Good to see you again, if you get enough of it done, I could possibly whip up a quick LotD race as long as no-one beat me too it already

ShinGouki: I was using Textpad (and force opening as Binary) but then I decided that since it didn't have find and replace and there were upto 30 references in a WHM, XVI32 was a good idea

Danimator: thanks for the AI offer - I tried just copying and pasting the AI, but still nothing (even after copying the space_marine folder and renaming it). Hopefully you'll have some ideas I'll just release it as a 1.0 at first once it works as a human race and then 1.1 if we can get the AI working

And progress: Skins seem to be working, buildings are building, units are available (although I'm still checking some of them) and research seems to work. The only problems so far are:

1) Weapons and sergeant for tactical squad don't become available when I build an armoury (I'm guessing I've got the wrong type of armoury specified, either as what was built or as their requirement that I've not overriden)

2) Strategic Point banners are Ork banners. I know this is a problem other people have had, but it'd be great if I could just straight inherit the Space Marine pole for it.

3) All buildings and all units that don't have over-ridden animators (i.e. are still using the Space Marine animator) are my team colour for normal Space Marine players.

[update] OK, point 1 is now sorted, but unfortunately I've had to add a point three (that I might be fixing anyway soon - I think my idea of making the mod inherit and re-use as much as possible failed when it came to re-using the building animators :\ )

IBBoard

Gah, so close! I managed to get it so that everything but the drop pods and the builder arms were in Space Marine colours and not mine, only to notice that they were then in the wrong colours (both of the allied SM teams had the same colour builder arms :\ ) so then I've gone and hex-edited some more base meshes (and every single RSH and WHM - the mod is 120MB unzipped so far because it won't work properly if I reuse them) and now it's back to showing my team colours :\

Also, one I've got to track down in the logs (because I didn't look what it said when it happens) is that the Space Marine unit 'portrait' went pink when I added a flamer. Any ideas? It's ok if I add extra guys or a sergeant.

Hopefully I'll solve these last few problems and get a beta release to some testers soon!

Oh, and point 2 is now the only problem I'm having from that list - my banners are showing up as Ork (and strangely so far, the SM banners are showing up in my TC with my banner :\ )

[edit] OK, so the logs told me nothing (apart from "unable to load ebps/races/" - no file name) and I'm still having the colourtexture bleed issues with the towers, strategic point banners and builder arms :\ (see other thread). But once they're fixed, I think that's it minus AI of course.

Unfortuantely I've got my first driving lesson this afternoon, and then I promised my g/f I'd add an extra feature to her site, so I don't think a beta will be available until Monday at the earliest :\

Stevocarty

Well for the pink icon problem you need to create some more icons as when a squad upgrades to a new weapon they switch to a new icon , so you must create an icon for every upgrade , plus a multi icon for squads for more than one type of weapon upgrade,

eg:
tacticalmarine_icon
tacticalmarine_icon__multi
tacticalmarine_icon__space_marine_flamer_tactical
tacticalmarine_icon__space_marine_heavy_bolter_tactical
tacticalmarine_icon__space_marine_missile_launcher_tactical
tacticalmarine_icon__space_marine_plasma_gun

after every upgrade icon you put the name of the weapon lua the upgrade inherits its stats from,plus if youre cloning the space marine race you will have to repeat this process for the scouts,terminators,dreadnought & hellfire plus any other squads that have purchased weapon upgrades, i hope this helps

IBBoard

So it'll inherit the original icon but not the later icons?
And can it not be changed in the LUAs somewhere so that it always inherits the relevant SM icon?

Stevocarty

as far as im aware i dont think it can be changed in the luas,if youre running youre mod from renamed luas then i dont think the icons will work properly you will have to create your own folder in art\ui\ingame\your race name and redirect the icon line in your luas to this folder you will also have to make an ingame_disabled folder of the same name only with all your icons black & white ofcourse

IBBoard

Oh well, I was hoping to avoid having to do things like that :\ I purposefully inherited as many attributes as I could instead of copying them so that if Relic changed things then it'd be changed in my mods as well.

At least they're only small images, I suppose, and I can just rip the current ones and be lazy with them.

EdCase

IBBoard ,..I have beat you on the LoTD

But its not released yet Mel_Danes has seen it..I have been using it for my own pleasure


Though strictly speaking it isn't quite the same..as it has custom,randomizrd marine models...
And for anyone about to as..no it is not release ready..maybe after WA. I am a LoTD obsessive compulsive and I want it to be damn near perfect when/if I finally expose it to the public

mel_danes

Edcase as I have stated before you do my work such justice as to make me blush. Thank you for you dedication and talents. :king:

IBB, yeah the wonderful 200+ Mb simple copy mod, you now face the behemoth several others before you have fought and few have defeated. I think you can pull it off but, I really think this is an issue Relic should get in on. CMIIW but there was a system started in the engine proper for multiple schemes WTN?

Grimnar42

Actually if u want to do a straight out clone job for texture purpose's it's not that hard really where you start to hit a lot of trouble is inheriting directly from space marine files lots and lots of frustrating minor problems you are better of renaming the luas etc. Those files I sent IBB board should have made it easy.

IBBoard

Yeah, thanks for the files Grimnar, but I'd seen a post (that didn't actually get much response) that said about inheriting things instead, so I thought I'd approach it that way. Your files are still proving great for the initial inspiration and reference as to what the heck I might have deleted and shouldn't have I'll try to get them available to others as soon as I can

As for texture inheritance, it does seem like a bit of a flaw that not only can you not use the LUAs to inherit and share models across races, but that you've also got to clone and/or hex-edit the WHMs, RSHs _and_ WTPs. I was hoping to keep the size down and not hex-edit the RSH files so it still used the standard WTPs, but it still seemed to want to colour-bleed :\

I've still got no idea as to why the builder arms, banners and tower01 textures are colour bleeding though :\


[edit] One thing to add, with regard to downloads (I'll probably contact mods directly to ask anyway, but I'll try here as well) - how much bandwidth is all of this likely to drain? will it be hugely popular?

At the moment I've got 300,000MB (roughly) of bandwidth spare each month, which if the download is 80MB equates to 3,750 downloads per month or about 125 per day. Now that seems like a lot, but I'm wondering about popularity and how many of these I'll end up doing. I can double my bandwidth (again! for the third time!) if I take up my host's $20 one-off fee offer before the 28th August.

So, do people think I'll need to double my bandwidth? or should 300,000MB (300GB to their 'Marketting Calculations') be enough?

Thunderhawk

Personally I would say double it since WA should be bringing alot more people in.

@EdCase: Damn... any chance of a beta test?

IBBoard

Judging from current downloads, I should (possibly) be ok (I only actually use about 8GB per month on textures) but the mod idea seems to be much more popular than textures, and like you said with WA coming things might get more popular again.

If only Games Workshop weren't so picky about not having sponsorship and Paypal buttons, I'd be able to make more use of my paypal account :\ Damned student life and trying to budget (even if it is better really because you don't have to do a job!)

EdCase

well...maybe as a "bolt-on" squad for regular marines...Grimnar has offered to code the LoTD as a squad any SM Chapter can use (per 3rd/4th edition TT rules) and...well...I think I shall take him up on his offer....but not until I return from Chicago.

IBBoard

OK, I've got the squad images sorted - since I was inheriting the normal squad images anyway, all I needed to do was add the alternate weapon names (e.g. tacticalmarine_icon__halved_marine_heavy_bolter_tactical.tga or whatever the long name ends up as) into the Space Marines folder and it automatically picked up the rest of them Just got to fix the remaining colour bleeds and the strategic point banner issues (which I'll ask Compiler about)

Oh, and the download only seems to be about 37MB when RARed so far still means I'll probably need to see if I can afford extra bandwidth (quadrupling to 1.2TB is seeming more and more tempting, but I don't know if I can afford it with a student budget on what was supposed to be cheap hosting!) because it'll still be a lot of potential downloads of large files.

ShinGouki

Why don't you just ask if you can host it on DoW files, i think hosting it on your own site is potentially a bad idea as lots of people downloading a file that size will quickly use up your host's bandwidth allowance and you could find your site having downtime very quickly. All the other mods / maps get hosted there anyway so you could just link to it from your site. I guess bit torrent is another option, though it might be hard to keep seeded.

IBBoard

ShinGouki: simple answer - adverts = bad! Popups = very bad!
I'm lucky enough to have Firefox and the ad blocker extension, other people aren't so lucky. My site was on DoWFiles for a few months until I decided I didn't want to keep linking to an intermediate page with adverts before people could download a file.

As for bandwidth allowance, I'll hopefully be able to get it quite large soon, and if it does start getting used up very quickly then I've had a possible offer from another site that I'd much rather have it mirrored on (thanks for the PM Thunderhawk )

The download has ended up comparatively smaller than I was expecting (full race textures are about 15MB for troops and not buildings) and if I can manage to get my mad plan of copying RSH's and pointing them to the original WTPs to work (which is actually doubtful) then it'll be even smaller because it's the WTPs that take up most of the space.

IBBoard

OK, I've had a crazy idea to drop the compressed file size down to around the 27-28MB mark - build an exe that will automatically extract the required WTPs into the correct place from the user's texture SGA.

Now I just need to find and understand that post about the SGA format again :\ I'll ask in a separate thread, but does anyone know if Spooky or Corsix are still around for a little help?

Also, should I release this now or wait until post-WA so that my halved Marines can include the new Chaplain?

IBBoard

OK, all of the texture problems _seem_ to be fixed now, and ignoring the fact that I want to release it with a small installer that'll extract the unchanged .WTP files on the user side, the mod is now complete to a beta level I'll PM those who offered to Beta, but if anyone else wants me to send a copy (I'll send it through YouSendIt.com for now instead of using my website's bandwidth for a beta!) just PM me with your email address and I'll get it to you ASAP

[edit] Acutally, one thing's still not working that I forgot to ask Compiler about so far - banners on Strategic Points and Relics, but that'll be sorted later. The main chunk is definately beta ready

Sigismund

Unfortunatly, your PM box is full IBBoard. Could you please send me the link at wyrd_boy@hotmail.com

*edit*
Although I think someone mentioned something like this, maybe you could see if Corsix will make an auto-extraction script for his SGA reader that you could use.

IBBoard

Yeah, I was thinking about asking Corsix for a script, because I'd have had to do it in C# (or Java if I can remember my Java from 2 years ago and if I had a development environment and if I could get it to do it all and....). I'll PM him later, as well as PMing Compiler or whoever about the banner issue.

Sorry about the inbox being full though, I've cleared if out a little now - all those sent items!

But now it is time for lunch and then the F1, so I'll try to get the zip to you later today

IBBoard

OK, I'm attaching/sending the beta versions out now (and the requested LUAs for the AI inclusion as well )

Now to actually get round to contacting Compiler and Corsix!

IBBoard

Thanks to Danimator for the work on the AI and Sigismund for beta testing (before his graphics card went!), and Nortonius for the offer.

Unfortuantely Danimator and Sigismund have found some problems with abilities (some that crash the AI and some that don't work for human players) so I'm going to have to make another beta release. I'm a bit busy at the moment, but hopefully it should be out in the next day or so.

IBBoard

Hmmmmm, repeated posts anyone?

Anyway, Sigismund's problems are now fixed (mainly Terminator problems). I've just got one last thing to fix (troop transports not transporting troops!) and then I'll have a 0.2 beta release available (nearly called it a beta build, after having worked in a s/w company for a year ). The only bug that should be left in the 0.2 version will be the strategic point banner bugs, which I'll hopefully sort out later (it's known and been done by others before)

[edit]OK, v0.2 beta released I'm emailing it out now. Sigismund, contact me if you get a new graphics card soon and want to beta test again

Lefty

isn't that spamming posting that many times after eachother?

mel_danes

Most of these posts are a day apart, and they add new info from the creator, I would call that frequent updating.

IBBoard

Yeah, if it's close together or similar content updates then I always edit, but this was new information and announcements each time and people might have read the first post and then not looked back and spoted an update, so I posted separately instead.

The AI man and the lone beta tester have been sent their versions. Hopefully it should all be ok, but another beta tester or two wouldn't go amiss

hangar-8

IBBoard

Thanks, Hangar. Danimator and Nortonius have reported some problems, so I'll try and get a 0.3 version made and shipped today.

Lefty

ok alright then

IBBoard

Black Templar, if you want to be picky about rules, those posts could be considered off topic

But anyway, 0.3 was shipped out earlier today. Hopefully it'll fix all of the problems (no-one had spotted that the Skull Probe was missing ) and hopefully Danimator should be able to get the AI to work. If no problems are reported (other than AI) I'll add the download anyway (just as soon as I fix that banner issue by editing the listening point!) and add AI as a later patch/update

telboy007

IBBoard if you want more testers for this then I'll volunteer gladly, I'm actually a software tester for a living so I'll try and give your mod a good going over!