No replies to this topic

[Banshee]

Hello everyone! We've been silent in the recent days,... weeks... ok! Months! The truth is that most of the Petroglyph community was invaded or attacked by Hierarchy and their Red machines and monsters. They have abducted our Master permanently to their home planet. He is now a slave managing those who mod their gibberish. They tried to abduct me temporarily as well, but their attempt failed. Apparently the costs to bring me to their gateway were beyond their budget. However, I can't say the same about my friend Sonic, from Petro-Gamers, who got to visit their home planet. But, what about Duke? He's getting too much interested on the Hierarchy's red garbage as well.

The rest of the community as also affected by these Hierarchy attacks or simply didn't got anything new from the silent Petroglyph Studios. According to Petroglyph, they are working on and whoever finds more about it will be executed. Anyway, here's the news we missed since...errr... our last news posted a long time ago, in a galaxy far away:


-> Mike.NL modding tools are now hosted at Petro-Gamers. He has also released a new version of the .ALO Viewer. The version 1.1 was released few days after the 1.0, which comes with the following features:

Overview of new features:

* Particles. Note: only the most common UaW particles are supported so far.
* Sounds!
* Support for Universe at War.
* Support for Mods. Select the 'active game/mod' from a menu.
* Works under Vista! Bones are readable.
* Auto-finds animations.
* Full list of bones, meshes, proxies and dazzles. Turn each on or off and show the bounds of meshes.
* Extended and improved model details.
* Shadow mesh debugging.
* Easy animation playback. Double-click for looping, single-click for play once.
* Exact camera positioning. For taking easy and consistent screenshots.
* Full render options. Control AA, Bloom, shadows, heat and Shader LOD.
* Debug Log. Find out why a shader failed to load or how many frames an animation has.
* Improved support for old video cards.
* Quick ALT & LOD select. Check quickly how a certain ALT or LOD looks in-game.

1.1 brings all that and a fix an orientation bug, which makes the viewer much more reliable.





-> Also on Mike.NL, he has released a very neat tool for all modders out there: The Alamo Object Importer. This should allow you to import all .ALO files at your 3Dsmax 6 or 8. Note that Dazzles are not supported yet by this tool. For dummies, this allows you to edit the 3D models that comes with the game... or even the ones from third party mods. But remember that, if you import something and modify it, you must have the permission from the author to do it and give him a proper credit. Do not make it pass as your own, since it is considered theft and it may ruin your reputation on any decent modding community.



-> And let's end this news with a very recent news. I mean, this was done few hours ago! Fantastic, for a site that wasn't updated for over a month. Anyway, our friend Mike.NL has justed updated the Animation Converter tool with a fix for a bug that prevented some users from loading files.