Progress Log #1 - New Beginnings

Tonberry

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Hello!

So those of you who are still following this project (and I greatly appreciate that support) will know I recently got back into the modding scene and have resumed work on the project. One thing this project has come with in the past is lack of detailed updates and huge periods of inactivity with no updates besides that work will resume eventually.

With all that in mind from now on I will also be posting these progress diaries. They will hopefully be a monthly deal but don't quote me on that. I've been out of this scene for a long time and found myself extremely rusty as far as modding goes, so this will probably be a fairly underwhelming update as so far I've just been easing myself in with smaller more miscellaneous improvements.




The first thing I have to show off an updated texture for the frag grenade model and various ranger traps. This is part of the mod which will target the models you see in the crafting window which just look awful in resolution. Ideally I want to re-texture as many craftable items and crafting components that is feel necessary. Things like synthetic cloth, armor attachments and various other common miscellaneous items. I started with ranger items because I have a ranger on basilisk and noticed how bad some of the traps look. Just to put the example in perspective, the original texture is 16x16, the new one is 2048x2048. A little overkill perhaps?


Original Texture​


New Texture (Downscaled)​


This screenshot is without a normal/bump map which is why it appears to lack some depth in comparison to the original which retains a clear indent despite being so horrifically low resolution. Once that is added it will look a lot more natural and the worn metal look will really be emphasized.

This is an example of what I hope to be able to do for any small crafting or even "clutter" item which I deem to be way too low resolution which will hopefully open up some more items to be used as decoration and not look horrible, as well as making the crafting grind slightly less depressing since you won't have to stare at those horrible low res textures.




Next up I have a loading screen, specifically the "space" loading screen or otherwise known as the one you get when you first log in. I do plan on redoing the other loading screen as well and hopefully add a little more life to them by adding some subtle animation if possible.

This is actually a concept I forgot about and found in some of my old files, then decided I should finish it. It's not at the point where I can say this will definitely be the loading screen but I definitely think it's one of my better designs so far. I thought it would be nice to showcase this as I actually documented the process of making it as I went.


Stage 1


Stage 2


Stage 3


Stage 4


Stage 5


Stage 6


Stage 7


Stage 8


Stage 9​

This isn't the final version of the loading screen but what you can't tell from the screenshots is it's fully wide screen like the other loading screens rather than 4:3 with most of the screen filled by black on modern monitors. The UI files have been modified for this wide screen change and so the text elements fit the design properly. I have also removed most of the old stuff which had loading screens split into several piece pieces. This is all one image which makes the whole process a lot easier.



I've made a few other changes to the interface in some shape or form, one of which being a slightly redesigned galaxy map using the GCW galaxy map added in one of the NGE patches as seen below. I've also changed the texture for Dathomir and Dantooine on the galaxy map to be closer to the changes I will be making to those planets, although in this particular image those are placeholder textures.




So that was a small preview of some random things I haven't shown before. I'll be continuing to work on these miscellaneous graphic updates as I go but will be primarily focusing back in on the planets themselves from now on. I'll be starting by finishing off Dantooine followed by Endor, of which I've already made some changes to such as fixing the horribly low resolution tree trunks and various other tweaks.

The project was intended to redesign a lot of the planets but at this point I've decided to flat out improve the quality of most of them. The main reason for this change is I won't be modifying any terrain data this time around due to future compatibility issues. This will give me significantly less freedom and makes textures which are shared across multiple planets a problem. If I make a change too radical to one of these textures as part of redesigning a planet it will look fine on that planet but show up completely out of place on the other.

The only two planets currently which will look noticeably different in terms of design are Dantooine which will be much more reminiscent of KOTOR in it's colour scheme and Dathomir which I would like to give a very red and sinister look like what was seen in the clone wars series.

That wraps it up for this update. Next time I'll have some screenshots of Dantooine and hopefully a few of Endor.
 

DavinFelth

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RE: Progress Diary #1

Awesome to see work resuming on this! Love the new loading screen and that frag grenade texture is looking mighty fine :D Not sure about the background image on the planetary travel map though, maybe less pink and sans ships? :p Great work all around though, can't wait to see some updates on the planet changes :)
 

Tonberry

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RE: Progress Diary #1

Yeah the map thing was pretty random, definitely not final. I just happened to find that in the files and thought what the hell, anything looks better than the regular starmap. I'd like to add one with more animated features when I get the chance to fiddle with it and perhaps even tweak the planet positions to be more lore accurate since it doesn't really make much sense currently.

But anyway, hoping to have some good planet screenshots for the next update. Now I just have to stop getting distracted messing with particles and whatnot. :p
 

Valkyra

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RE: Progress Diary #1

Sorry, I'll stop distracting him now so he can post da shiz ;)
 

starscream83

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RE: Progress Diary #1

I'm very happy to see you working on this again, one of the things I hear people saying is a barrier to them picking this game up for the first time or getting back into it is how dated etc it now looks and feels.

This project, coupled with other mods like the 60fps etc will/are making a massive difference... :)

Keep up the good work mate...
 

Tonberry

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RE: Progress Diary #1

starscream83 said:
I'm very happy to see you working on this again, one of the things I hear people saying is a barrier to them picking this game up for the first time or getting back into it is how dated etc it now looks and feels.

This project, coupled with other mods like the 60fps etc will/are making a massive difference... :)

Keep up the good work mate...
I completely understand. When I first logged in after a long break it really hit me how bad some parts of the game looked. I still think characters (the less human races at least) and various other things in the game look spectacular for how old they are but the majority of the game is really starting to look dated. It hits you right in the face if you've been off playing more recent games that's for sure.

Unlocking your client to 60 fps will be a requirement for this mod. I use 120 as my fps cap with forced 8xSGSAA and even with the mod installed in its current state I haven't seen it dip below 80fps.

But yeah, higher FPS cap, lots of forced AA and settings overrider are going to be recommended to get the most out of the mod. We've got like 11 years worth of hardware advancements to take advantage of after all.
 

Timbab

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RE: Progress Diary #1

Nice to see more life coming into the scene again.


Tonberry said:
The project was intended to redesign a lot of the planets but at this point I've decided to flat out improve the quality of most of them. The main reason for this change is I won't be modifying any terrain data this time around due to future compatibility issues. This will give me significantly less freedom and makes textures which are shared across multiple planets a problem. If I make a change too radical to one of these textures as part of redesigning a planet it will look fine on that planet but show up completely out of place on the other.
Not true, there are ways to get around that problem. SOE is notorious for reusing the same shit everywhere, one just has to look at the preCU weapon effects datatable to induce tears.

I'll make a guide or whip up a tool to do it when I have time, hopefully this weekend. Gotta clean up my tool anyway, gonna release it soon, because I don't have time for SWG really, anymore.
 

Tonberry

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RE: Progress Diary #1

I know there are ways it can be avoided as I avoided replacing any textures at all in the original incarnation of the project with the lavender themed Dantooine. Wow this is an old screenshot lol:


In that version every texture, shader and model was a new file. While that made everything cleaner from a modding stand point and opened up more possibilities it wasn't convenient as far as long term compatibility goes.

I want to ensure the mod will still work across different server communities who have started adding their own patches etc. The emulator is nearing the point where this will become significant, and if this thing ever gets released that's it, I won't be supporting it any further. I imagine "vanilla" servers will be few and far between and if I utilize full control over the mod it's fairly likely to be broken on any server using it's own content. If I keep it as strictly texture/shader based with minor tweaks to some datatables when absolutely necessary, it shouldn't have any issues as far as long term compatibility is concerned, hell it'll work across multiple emu's as well if I keep the datatable tweaks to the minimum.

Anyway to be quite honest Dantooine and Dathomir are the only planets I ever intended to be "redesigned" so shared textures shouldn't really be an issue with that in mind. I've lowered my goals somewhat but it's a necessary sacrifice as far as I'm concerned to give the project a realistic chance of actually being finished as well as giving it some longevity.
 

Timbab

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RE: Progress Diary #1

I understand ya, but to be honest, you can still do work arounds, be it with a patcher that can patch custom .trn's, manual editing guide (fairly simple to just swap nodes) for anyone who wants to get it to work with any overly modified stock .trn.

Besides, you'd just be editing the shader family, which opens up so much freedom in terms of larger number of textures per child, unique for each planet, etc. It's just a slight swap from the originals, doubt servers will do hard texture wise overhauls, but if they're smart, they'd use mods like these as a basis.

Anyway, there are ways to make it compatible with future stuff and you can always have a simple version and a modified .trn version that offers a lot more, without that much more work.
 

Tonberry

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RE: Progress Diary #1

Timbab said:
doubt servers will do hard texture wise overhauls, but if they're smart, they'd use mods like these as a basis.
Yeah unfortunately I doubt that will be the case. I did originally plan to release an optional patch for the mod which would include the modified terrains to push it that little bit further like the original mod did. I may still do that as a maximum quality version with a disclaimer about it's compatibility but I'm just going to keep the standard version texture/shader based so there is always a version of the mod that definitely works.

I did like the freedom I had when originally working with the terrain files though, so I probably will include them as an optional package. If there are some servers that choose to base their future changes on those terrain's that would be great.

I think I'll aim to release a 1k and 2k version of he mod (I really don't see the benefit of going beyond that, at least for terrain textures) with the modified terrains as an extra option.
 

Uli

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RE: Progress Diary #1

Tonberry said:
Yeah unfortunately I doubt that will be the case.
Make them want and need it.

Example: 60 FPS Mod.


It's legit not too hard, if you get enough people running it then boom easy done servers just will pick it up naturally.
 

Tonberry

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RE: Progress Diary #1

Well it's not quite the same thing, but I catch your drift. :p
 
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