a little bit of insight on the ship texturing

[Guest JediIgor]

I've decided to ask Magus about importing textures into Rebellion, and here's a little bit of the chat transcript (the funny thing is that I didn't edit the punctuations ).

 

Anyways, we should have more info on Friday.

 

JediIgor: How do we go about importing ship textures into Rebellion?

M900000000: You can manually convert a bitmap to rebellion's wack format.

M900000000: Basically the rebellion textures are stripped down bitmaps which appear to have been re-encoded.

JediIgor: I see.

M900000000: Yea, there are two textures, a low detailed and a high detailed. High detail is 128x128 and low detail is 64x64.

JediIgor: Really? What's the difference?

M900000000: One of them is for computers which redefine suck and the other is for anything else.

M900000000: 64x64 is for computers barely meeting the minimum system requirements.

M900000000: Its an in game option. Both are in the tactical.dll

JediIgor: So, what about more of this wack format? Converting to it? Do you just replace it with the BMPs in the DLL afterwards?

M900000000: Basically you convert your 8-bit bitmap to rebellion's format and then put it in the dll.

 

That's all folks! It was informative indeed. I guess we find out the rest on Friday...

Edited November 8, 2002 by JediIgor

[Gank]

1 128*128 texture? thats not very encouraging

[ElvisMiggell]

Not that i know anything about this but is there not any way to bump it up a bit?

[Guest JediIgor]

Don't cry now.. Any texture is better than none, don't you think?

[ElvisMiggell]

Me? Cry? I think not!!!

I'm macho i am. "sniffles"

Nah 128*128 is okay, just be nice to bump it up a lil, make our mod nice and perty.

[Magus]

Heh. If you think 128x129 textures are bad, just take a look at some of the original models. They actually had to try to get the polygon counts in double digits.

[the_mask]

Hi Magus, long time no see. So how do we convert textures to Rebellion's format ?

[ElvisMiggell]

Well Magus?

[vakundok]

The SSD has a 256*256 texture. Actually, I do not think, that there are any size limitations, however, the larger textures will slow down the game as with the new models.

[Gank]

Are you able to convert them? if so can you tell us how, magus doesnt seem to want to share the info.

[vakundok]

Well, not really, but nearly.

I have the same problem, as with Rebed: The aft of the Dreadnaugth is extremly out of position, so, it is not 100%, And I need some models with textures, to create an encoding program.

However in my opinion:

The first DWORD (4 bytes) is the width, the second is the heigth. The whole thing is coded left to rigth, top to bottom, while bmps are bottom to top. So the code is byte pairs, where the first is the number of pixels, and the second is their color. There are byte pairs starting with 0, I think, they mean a line with that color. I also added an empty line to the top.

Ohh, about colors:

I think the textures use, the color palette of the tactical window's bmps wich is different form that of other pictures (eg:encyclopedia pictures)

And sorry about my poor english.

[ElvisMiggell]

This sounds prommising, how's it going now?

[the_mask]

This really sounds great !

 

Do you mean the textures of the original models from the game, or just new models, that have textures on them ?

 

If you just need new Star Wars models, try this site :

http://imperial.star-fleet.org/index.php

(Mesh area, StarWars SWMA)

[ElvisMiggell]

It is possible to make models from scratch isn't it?

[vakundok]

the_mask: I mean I need models with .bmp textures, witch textures are based on any of the tactical.dll's pictures (or I can send a bmp with all available colors). (I am really unfamiliar with color conversation.) I followed that link and will see what I can do with the AT-AT Barge. I will be back within a few days.

[the_mask]

Good

 

You can extract the original textures with Resource Hacker from the tactical.dll, they are in the 303 folder. Just select one and click on action-save resource as a binary file, there are two versions: high and low detail, but I don't think anyone ever played with the low detailed ones. I got Rebellion back then with a P/75 and the high ones worked just fine.

[ElvisMiggell]

Is it me or is this beginning to look promising?

[Gank]

that AT AT Barge has got backwards faces all over the shop iirc so ya might wanna try something else

[vakundok]

Yes, I already left it.

I found my error, so coding from binary to bitmap now works. However the reverse process is somewhat more difficult.

[ElvisMiggell]

Why is that? I have no idea about coding or anything, but i'm interested. I'm feeling the need for an idiots guide to texturing tutorial...

[vakundok]

ElvisMiggell: It is more difficult, because the data need to be read in reversed line but correct byte order to a puffer, where it is analyzed.

 

Disaster

I was able to replace the galleon with a textured box. (The texture was actually a bmp with all colorcodes.) Rebed shown it correctly, but in the game, the colors were totally corrupted, and it soon freezed the game.

(It looked like it was a 16 colors texture.)

So, maybe there are prohibited colors or something important in the binary code. To find it will require a huge amount of time, and Christmas is rigth here. I do not think I will have time to do it this year; sorry!

[the_mask]

You did use only 256 colors, did you ? Cause I don't think the engine will allow more than in the cards or with any other picture.

[vakundok]

Yes. I use a bitmap generated to show the colors of the tactical bmps' palette.

And I converted the Corvet52.bmp back to bin, replaced the orginal without trouble, so the converion seems OK.

maybe the colors between 160 and 247 are forbidden, I will try this.

[the_mask]

This really sounds promising

[vakundok]

I enlarged the texture of the corvette (to 256x256) and changed the color of the engine throttles. It did not cause any problem to the game.

Well, it is nearly unbelievable, but it seems that the game will only display 8 colors/texture!

How can I upload files?