114 replies to this topic

[Sûlherokhh]

Beautiful work, ttandc ...

Merry Christmas to the team, and to all the fans of SEE

I agree! Grandiose!

And Merry Christmas.!!!

[drogoth232]

Great job and....

Merry x-mas! (my long awaited, planned arrival)

Edited by drogoth232, 25 December 2009 - 08:36 PM.

[Damrod]

Well, cheers. Very much looking forward to the next release.

[Lord of Mordor]

A little late, but: Great work I'm really looking forward to the Evil Men faction

[Arveanor]

A little late, but: Great work I'm really looking forward to the Evil Men faction

yeah, me too, their gonna be an absolutely amazing faction!

[Nazgûl]

P-R-O-G-R-E-S-S-!!!... finally!

Thanks to "TT" (ttandchotmail)... this baby is FFFIIINNNAAALLLYYY about to be FINISHED! You can NOT imagine how GOOD I feel right now after waiting for sooo long for this. TT and I have been communicating almost daily for weeks now, regarding progress on this... The Fortress, the Arrow Towers, the Scorpion Dens and the newly added Dragon Statues (emphasizing the factions connection to vorshiping dragons). There only a few minor things left and this HUUUGE road bump will be a (bad) memory

[ttandchotmail]

Hahaha but it was so much fun

[Archon]

And, once its finished, NEW BETA???!!!!?!!!

No, just kidding. I don't really care when the new release comes out, but kudos to you guys for all the hard work you've done for this mod. This has been your project from the start and you've never given up on it, even when the people from your mod and others have .

[Predi]

WOW! Awesome!

I was wondering when it would be finished, So right now I'm very happy. I hope that now the next beta is not too far away.
(I wonder wich one wil be finished first: next SEE beta or Black Mesa Source)

Anyway, keep up!

[Nazgûl]

Thanks guys...

Another update, with new problems (off course).
TT can't, for some reason get the models to export to W3D properly. And for some strange reason it "works" in my computer... exporting from RenX to W3D format, that is. However - the exported models refuse to look like they do in RenX... In W3D format, displayed in the viewer, it has faulty textures with black parts as well as overbrightened tint... Very strange. I need someone to help us with the exporting...

[Kraft Singles]

I find that the viewer can be a bit glitchy. Have you tried using it ingame? Or are you not at the point in which it's ingame yet?

Edited by Kraft Singles, 19 January 2010 - 02:58 AM.

[khamulrulz]

are the dragons gonna be in place of those altars of sacrifice? cuz i thought they were pretty cool...

[ttandchotmail]

Guys this is one for the books With huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge thanks to Rob38 for the tip

The program G Max was created about the same time as Autodesks 3ds Max Version 4 or 5. A new version of 3ds Max comes out once a year. I started learning about 3D modelling with 3DS max 6 just before version 7 was released. By the time I finished my course and could afford to buy a license for 3DS Max verion 8 was well on it's way.

So Since November I've been trying to reverse engineer everything I have learnt with the programs more advanced than G max. Add onto that Renx and the w3d viewer. Now I'm no bright spark by any stretch of the imagination and I was hitting the old head a few times when I couldn't find options I was used to or the render button which apparently g max and renx don't have ( that took some time to find out ) But with the help of some of the great guys on this forum ( Rob38, Nertea to name a few ) I was able to complete a model with animation about once a week. After I did one I tried to export it to a format called w3d with some annoying results. Some would work wome wouldn't and we couldn't figure out why. But at the end of each week or so I would waste another few days trying to get it to view in the w3d viewer, and eventually give up thinking this can be fixed later I should get the rest of the fort done first.

After getting the models together wrapping the textures around them and animating them I thought "you beauty, I'm done". Then Came the w3d viewer. Holy crap what a pain that was. The animation was done by late December. Getting the W3d viewer to work was the biggest hump we had. It still wouldn't work properly.

And now thanks to a tip from Rob38 I think the problem is solved I never would have figured this out without Rob38 telling me but apparently

Are you sitting down?

Apparently the file name was too long

That's right!! If the title of the file goes over a certain amount of letters then the file will NOT be viewable in the w3d viewer.

I never would have thought that was the problem.

So I should be able to get it to Nazgul now, I hope

K - the dragons are on a large alter like platform. I wasn't sure what to name it in the programs so I think it was box #4

[Sûlherokhh]

Oh boy...

[Nazgûl]

Well, I won't go singing just yet...
I need to see them 100% correct in the viewer before I do

Once again, in my experience, EVERYTHING you see in the viewer and everything you don't see there, is what happens in game - always =p But I'm crossing my fingers for sure...

[khamulrulz]

what i was meaning was that iirc there was going to be a cool skeleton-in-cage expansion that would frighten away enemies. has the dragon altar thingy replaced that?

great news, btw. great to see some progress being made... how much work left is there to do before a potential release? (i would imagine all the ai and coding for the new faction w/ powers and heroes)

[Archon]

That's right!! If the title of the file goes over a certain amount of letters then the file will NOT be viewable in the w3d viewer.

*slaps ttandchotmail*
JK. Great work on solving the problem.

[Námo]

[Nazgûl]

what i was meaning was that iirc there was going to be a cool skeleton-in-cage expansion that would frighten away enemies. has the dragon altar thingy replaced that?

Yes. The cage thingy will be used in a (hopefully) future Harad Fort instead...

[Nazgûl]

Thanks guys...

Another update, with new problems (off course).
TT can't, for some reason get the models to export to W3D properly. And for some strange reason it "works" in my computer... exporting from RenX to W3D format, that is. However - the exported models refuse to look like they do in RenX... In W3D format, displayed in the viewer, it has faulty textures with black parts as well as overbrightened tint... Very strange. I need someone to help us with the exporting...

Guess what... I FOUND IT! The source of this new dazzling problem with exporting was the actual W3D Viewer itself! As TT said, Rob38 told us that the name of the model in W3D format can't be too long. That might cause models to go invisible in the Viewer. But what we could not figure out is why the models still had two major problems:

- Overbrightened textures!
and
- Big black areas/parts of the textures, often cutting a piece of the structure in half with almost solid black (approx 90% black).

This made the models look like THIS in the W3D Viewer (v 6.0):


I could for the life of me not understand why, as TT defenitely seems to know what he's doing in RenX (at least when MAKING the models, hehe). And asking around in the forums, noone else seemed to know either. So I started to suspect my system and some kind of error/bug virus etc. The lucky thing is that earlier tonight, while scratching my head around why we couldn't get the models to look ok in the Viewer, after being exported into W3D format... the Viewer crashed on me (for the first time). Upon restarting - guess what - ALL models was suddenly fully working - 100% A-OK! (???) Wonderful off course... but why? I guess the bug cured itself? No... the computer, for some reason, started up the other version of the W3D Viewer - the Renegade version 5.3 and not the EA (MOD SDK) version 6.0, and THAT "solved" the problem. I still don't know why they look so weird in the 6.0 version and not in the 5.3 version, but never mind - THEY DO WORK! And thus, they should be ok in game...

This is what the model looks like in Renegade's version 5.3 of the W3D Viewer:



So... tomorrow, wednesday, I'll hopefully collect all the models and textures in the correct Art folders, and upload to the reposiroty at Google, where Sûlherokhh can access them and start coding, whenever he can...

Edited by Nazgûl, 19 January 2010 - 09:38 PM.