Sunday, October 25, 2009

Conversion FAQ

"Can I have copy of map"
- No, I'm not going to release full maps, as all models are copyright by Mythic.

"Why you are doing this?"
- Just my personal interest for 3D Engines and Crysis.

"Can you make character models also"
- I can export static models to Crysis, basically also character model should be exportable, but as export do not give any animation and I do not have skill to make those, so conversion is quite useless :)

"Can you build ML9/Cities"
- This I checked quickly, there is not too many models in ML9, so it should be possible as I already converted some of models. But geometry working differently on those than normal terrain zones.
- Capital cities and some dungeons have just too many models to convert, so don't have time to make those.

"Daoc is working great, no need to new engine"
- Yes it's working, but Mythic/Gamebryo don't provide extra "candy" for users which like high end graphics and I think this is one of reasons why DAoC not get many new players anymore.

"have you contact Mythic?"
- I did contact Mythic, but did not get any replies yet.

"How this works?"
All terrain conversion things currently running top of Linux
- Extracted mpk with dempak (can be done also in Windows with DAoCMPAKManager.exe)
- shell script which converts heighmap pcx images to png and texture dds to tga.
- php script to read zone data and build Crysis xml layers and xml vegetation data.
- php script to combine heightmap data and build whole realm heightmap.
- php script to combine texturemaps to one big texture which is used as base color in Crysis.

If someone have more questions, just send those via youtube or reply to blog, I will try to reply those much as I can.

2 comments:

  1. Just like to say, thanks, you took me back quite a while.

    What worries me, is that I played these so much, but time is dulling the memory, so much so that it's hard to remember the old frontiers.

    Keep up the good work and I hope that Mythic come this way and help out :)

    Though god knows what kind of machine you would need with a load of players running on it? Though saying that it would really intrigue me to find out how a top of the line engine handled DAOC/Warhammer and the subltes of MMO's.

    Once again thanks.

    I will be throwing you a link out from my blog, once I write something.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks :)

    For me, Old frontier and old BGs as layout was much more fun than NF (to play).
    Of course there was bad things also, but it just worked :)

    I don't know how much Crysis/Cryengine 2 takes hit when a lot of player models in screen.
    Aion for sure takes quite hit, but it's running Cryengine 1 I think.

    ReplyDelete