fun with .pso

Originally posted by Second Chance
That would probably be Jaspers pso to lwo converter doing that. He said that his parsing code assumes triangles, and so that should be what it's building.

While that's possible, it is not probable. If the code expects triangles but runs into quads, wouldn't it throw an error? I'm not aware of a program which can, on it's own, adjust to an exception without prior instructions.

Then consider that no game engine at the time of EoC's creation was able to handle quad polys. All game models, at that period, were converted to tri's. Given this information, I have to disagree with the theory that Flux can utilize anything other than triangles.

As far as surfacing, Second Chance is absolutely right; LW 5.6 only featured projection mapping. The best explaination of this is to consider the surface a projector screen and the texture being projected onto that screen as if by an imaginary projector which is positioned along the relevant (x,y, or z) axis.

I constructed a cube for you and await Cambragol's response. If he wouldn't mind reapplying the textures in 5.6 then we'll be up and running. Of course, if my dongle shows up tomorrow we'll be in business on our own.



Also included some specs which might assist:





And some more information. As soon as we hear from Cambragol or I get 5.6 running, I'll convert the object to a PSO and send it along with the LWO. Will this be suitable?

Yup, that will be just perfect

I can include some information from the 5.6 manual on image mapping (texturing via projection). Would you need any of that?

Cool! does the 6.5 .lwo use uv mapping?

Negative. Since the model was intended for 5.6 export I used the 5.6 mapping.

Yes, one of the things converter.exe does is to convert the LW style projection stuff to per-vertex texture co-ords - which as far as i can tell is the same thing as uvmapping.

Again, cool.

Then consider that no game engine at the time of EoC's creation was able to handle quad polys. All game models, at that period, were converted to tri's. Given this information, I have to disagree with the theory that Flux can utilize anything other than triangles.

Is this true? I've never heard that. Or seen any information indicating this to be the case for any rendering engine. I was actually going to say that, given the technology available at that time, it would seem rediculous for Particle Systems to leave out simple polygon optimization. From the interview with Roger Godfrey and Derek Marriott (producer and lead programmer, respectively) on the flux engine:

With Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos, Particle Systems set out to create the Flux engine, an entirely new game engine that takes full advantage of the technological advances of the NVIDIA® GeForce3™ graphics processing unit (GPU) that arrived with DirectX® 7.0 and 8.0

However, Just to be sure, I tested it. I built a standard 6 polygon cube in LW and converted it to pso. The converter log clearly stated that the pso object was constructed from 6 polygons, not 12.

But, flux quite clearly does support polygons with greater than 3 edges anyway. If all models were converted to (and flux only supported) tris, concave polygons wouldn't even be an issue. My workaround is based on splitting a complex concave poly into multiple non-concave polys. Since flux can't seem to render polys with holes or cut-outs properly. If the models were all converted to tris, there would be no concave polys.

As far as surfacing, Second Chance is absolutely right; LW 5.6 only featured projection mapping. The best explaination of this is to consider the surface a projector screen and the texture being projected onto that screen as if by an imaginary projector which is positioned along the relevant (x,y, or z) axis.

Great point! Thanks for pointing this out. I completely forgot to mention that the main difference between LW projection mapping and UV planar mapping is that LW mapping is restricted to being parallel to one of the world axes. Jasper, this might make it even easier to translate, since you won't have to determine an arbitrary vector that the mapping is applied from (as is possible in Planar UV mapping).

I'll send those files right away.

mailto:second_chance@cox.net
The Ultimate Guide To Modding: I-War 2 - Edge Of Chaos
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Hey Shane,

If you still need those textures applied to the the test boxes, I can do it. Just send to my email address. If you don't still have my old address, here is my new one: griffon_academy (at(just remove the spaces) yahoo.ca

Send it to either my old address or my new one, as they are both directed to the same place.

Thanks Cambragol. It's on the way.