In short, images without MIP maps were showing strange, interlaced looking thumbnails. There was also an issue with really big non-MIP images crashing explorer. This was due to the large ammounts of memory needed to generate thumbnails from the fullsize image rather than a MIP level. As a get-around for now the extension won’t attempt to generate thumbnails for non-MIPmapped images greater than 512×512 pixels.

The delay was due to both Nem being busy with real-life stuff and unfortunately losing the code to the Photoshop plug-in which meant a re-write. This lead to the new version of VTFLib being delayed and as so many of our tools rely on it, we couldn’t update without it.

Anyway, everything is updated now - Nem has released the new VTFLib, VTFEdt and his Photoshop VTF plug-in with 7.4 support and I’ve updated my XP/Vista Shell extensions. I’ll update the 3DS Max plug-ins hopefully in the next couple of days. I’ve also updated the documentation for VTFLib.

One new feature though that’s worth mentioning. Since VTF 7.3, the VTF format has added support for “resources” embedded inside the actual VTF file. This was originally added, I believe, to better support features on the XBox360. What’s nice is that developers can add any custom resource and data they might need.

This gave me a brainwave.

Often you find VTF textures all over the place and if you’re creating a Mod it can be a right pain-in-the-arse to keep track of texture assets. Wouldn’t it be great if there was some sort of metadata inside the actual file containing useful information about who made the texture, how to contact them and what game/mod it came from? Basically EXIF for VTF files.

Well that’s what we implemented. Using a custom “Information” resource you can now embed useful information into VTF files for TF2/Orangebox using VTFEdit. You have the basic author and contact info, your texture version number, what game/mod it’s for and include a short note. My VTF Shell extensions can show this info as part of the detail columns in XP or in the properties view in Vista.

So you know the drill - un-install any previous versions of the shell extensions you have installed and make sure you have the Visual C++ 2005 SP1 runtimes installed if you don’t already.

I think a lot of people know me from the years I spent on the old Day of Defeat forum. It’s where my interest in modding seriously started and where a lot of the inspiration for my modding tools came from (JHLMV was born there).

Anyway, late February we got word that Valve had finally decided to pull the seperate DoD site and forums and merge them into the Steampowered user forums. Sadly, we didn’t get a lot of advance warning and no provision was being made to back-up or archive the forums. Personally, I thought this was a real shame because the forums were a real goldmine of information for mappers and modders for both the Source and Goldsrc engines.

As best as I could, I set about writing a script to try and make a static archive of the forums but due to the time pressures I only managed the mapping and modelling forums. I went for these first as they had the largest ammount of info relevant to modders.

So here is what I managed to save. Sorry it’s not fantastically presented but the nature of trying to spider that many posts quickly and convert all the tags isn’t easy. However keeping it in a simple text format keeps the size/bandwidth down and makes it much easier to index.

Hope people find it useful.

I’ve been frantically working on a new project at work involving trying to re-build a web application platfom on newer hardware and with more recent software. It’s Java based (not my area of expertise) and involves moving from a very old version of NetBSD to Linux and in the process upgrading the Java VM, Apache, Tomcat and Cocoon. Sadly the old system doesn’t come with a lot of documentation and finding the source code has been tricky at times so theres been a lot of frustration. Of course the fact I only get to work on it part time isn’t helping much.

Evenings have pretty much been taken up with work on Ham and Jam and we’ve had a massive surge of development this month. John noted that this month has seen the
largest volume of commits to our SVN repository since the project began. We recently re-organised our team structure and things have definately improved and I’m really proud of what the teams achieved this month. Thanks to our Wiki and bug-tracking system development has got much more streamlined.

Regarding this blog entry’s title, I came across it on a story at Fox news. In the tired, stress addled state of my mind, it almost describes the Ham and Jam development process at times. :D

Other stuff. I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail regarding some my other projects so I thought I’d address them here.

The 3DS Max SMD import plug-in has been put to one side for a while so that I can get some fairly important stuff done on Ham and Jam. With the project having this much momentum at the moment, it would be foolish not to take full advantage of it. That said, the SMD importer isn’t “abandoned” and I fully intend to get back into it in a week or so. As for a when it will be finished, that depends on how development goes.

I’ve also been asked about making my VTF tools 7.4 format compatible. The answer is yes, I fully intend to support 7.4 format and in fact I have versions sat on my hard disk now that do. There has been a slight hiccup though that I’m currently not able to fix in that Nem, who maintains the VTFLib library that my tools use, has sort of “vanished” into thin air. He sent me a pre-release of the next VTFLib update with 7.4 support but then disappeared and all attempts to contact him have failed.

I could release my tools with the version of the library he sent me, but apart from the risk of version “clash” of the DLLs, I’d rather not do it out of respect for Nem and the work he does. Nem, if you’re out there man get in touch just to let me know you’re O.K.

Lastly I got asked about making my GUIStudioMDL2 compiler compatible with the Orange Box SDK beta. The answer is no, i’m not planning to. I only support official “releases” of their toolchain as it’s too much work trying to update my tools to work with something that Valve themselves are constantly changing.

It’s not much, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Well I’ve been saying for ages that I’m going to write a SMD importer plug-in for 3DS Max 9 & 2008 and this week I finally took some serious steps to get it from the paper planning stage into actual code.

The SMD format is pretty awful for storing 3D mesh data as it explodes the whole thing into seperate triangles instead of nice index linked lists as in say OBJ format (or the mythical MRM format StudioMDL supports…). To be honest, I’ve no idea why Valve still uses this format but I guess it’s just a legacy that no-ones seen the need, or has the time, to change.

Anyway, one of the big problems with handling SMD files istaking all those seperate triangles and intelligently joining them back together into one continuous mesh. I’ve spent quite some time trying to figure out how to do it and more importantly, how to do it quickly. I think I’ve got it figured now, more or less, and the proof-of-concept code seems to do it’s job.

You can see the fruit of experiements over the past couple of evenings. It’s not much more than a snazzy looking point cloud but it’s something at least. It’s quick too - at least when not running in debug mode. The picture on the left is from a SMD file containing 18000 lines of text. It read in 3600 individual vertices and filtered them down to just 2600 by removing duplicates - and it did it all in under 0.02 seconds.

The next stage is to write similar sorting and filtering code to handle the normal, UV and face data and then the logic to stitch it all together into a single mesh.

As usualy, no ETA as I’m working on this when I have the odd bit of spare time from other things, but hey - progress!

Henry Freeman or Ivan the Space Biker?

I spotted this picture hanging in the pub a while back (sorry for the crappy photo).

Yes, I’m a collosal nerd, but doesn’t he look an awful lot like “Ivan the Space Biker”, the first incarnation of Gordon Freeman?

But hang on, he is a Freeman!?

Is this yet another twist in the Half-Life universe? Are Gordon and Henry related? Is Ivan in fact not Gordon but his father who travelled through time via Xen to become shipwrecked?

Or did Insta and I just drink way to much again as usual.

Yeah, I’m going with the latter…

To start off the additions include support for exporting HL1 format unweighted SMD files. I underestimated how many people out there were using Max 9 and still modelling for Goldsrc games so per request I added the option to export files in the old format.

The second addition is a crude but useable “batch mode” which lets you configure and call the plug-in from Maxscript. One user had all their animations in one continuous sequence and was looking for a way to batch export them by specifying specific ranges. It’s fairly simple to use and I’ve included a basic example Maxscript in the ZIP file.

As for the bug, you may recall in previous blog posts that I was having considerable problems with Export Selected. After a lot of debugging and tracing I *think* I’ve nailed the problem. Certainly under the tests I’ve done you can now select part of a chain of bones and it will export and not lose position or destroy the animation. As always these things have a habit of blowing up in my face so I’ve retained the link to the old version of the exporter just in case people need to roll-back.

I’ve also marked this version as for 3D Studio Max 2008 too as users reported that it worked fine in both Max 9 and 2008 without problems.

I’m still getting e-mail/MSNs regarding problems with old Max 8 rigs that don’t work quite right with this exporter. In 99% of all cases it’s been simply been down to shoddy rig construction. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, when you mirror part of your rig, reset the transforms before you use it! It really messes up the 3D transformation matrices and while the code tries to fix it, it’s not that clever. Oh and please, stop trying to use splines as bone nodes…

It works pretty well, apart from the inherent bugs with the actual SDK compilers…

*edit* Oops. I farked up the link.

Currently, these sort of ads have been popping up all over Stockholm during December. The basic premise is that if you visit a Volvo dealership and test drive one of their cars (and their adverts often promote their eco-friendly line of vehicles) you will recieve, while stocks last, a free Christmas tree.

So hang on, you want people to travel to a dealership and take a test drive and in return, you’ll give them a dead (or at least dying) tree. A tree. Something which if you’d left in the ground as nature intended would of gone some way to absorbing the CO₂ emissions put out by the car during the strictly unnecessary trip that the test-drive is.

For a company that makes a big deal about their eco-cars this really does strike me as rather hypocritical.