I'm finally getting back into Myth II play and I'm missing some of the old TFL Multi-player Plug-Ins (mainly U2 and Torpidinium). I thought they were pretty popular back then. I know parts of U2 made it into UTB, but I'm not found anything like Torp.
Ray
Porting TFL MP Plug-ins? - I'm guessing it's tough
- William Wallet
- Posts: 1494
- Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:40 am
- Location: Perth Australia
- Contact:
Weeeelll...
From an amateurish point of view it's pretty tough to port a map from one to the other. If you can keep TFL Fear + Loathing from crashing, make good use of the original colourmaps, terrain maps, displacement maps (shadow maps aren't a biggie because you can redo those), use Spite and Malice to port any models you might want, and you've already got vTFL if you don't want to play using M2 style units...
The real bitch would be placing scenery. I heard a Magma member divined a way of converting things like that automatically (after another Magma member had already been painstakingly copying it by hand... heh).
Soooo yes. If you can track down TFL Fear and Loathing (and if you're on a Mac) you should be okay.
From an amateurish point of view it's pretty tough to port a map from one to the other. If you can keep TFL Fear + Loathing from crashing, make good use of the original colourmaps, terrain maps, displacement maps (shadow maps aren't a biggie because you can redo those), use Spite and Malice to port any models you might want, and you've already got vTFL if you don't want to play using M2 style units...
The real bitch would be placing scenery. I heard a Magma member divined a way of converting things like that automatically (after another Magma member had already been painstakingly copying it by hand... heh).
Soooo yes. If you can track down TFL Fear and Loathing (and if you're on a Mac) you should be okay.
Okay I got the models but now I'm too dumb to do anything with 'em
Here's a fairly accurate way to do it, if you CAN in fact get TFL Loathing to jive with your machine (I've never been able to get EITHER to work, and that was back on my 233 imac during os9 days..).
Enlarge the 'Overhead Map' in loathing so it is... large. now click the scenery button, and select scenery object X. lets call it tree1. Go under View Preferences, and you should see a box that says 'show all objects' or something... theres only one box there, impossible to miss. UNCHECK it. This effectively shows the blue (or whatever colour you may have set) dot locations on your overhead that indicate all of _that_ particular scenery item.
Take a screenshot, and then crop the overhead up in photoshop. force the image to take on the size of your colourmap, and import it into your m2 loathing. All the blue dots where tree1 were, now appear on your landscape. Place said tree1, then repeat the process for object Z, Y etc etc etc.
Long and tedius, but mb less tedius than setting up two monitors and doing it like FE did...
I honestly don't think people are going to mind if some bushes arent on the EXACT OMFG POINT as they were in TFL In fact, most people will probably have not seen the maps you intend to port for several years, others never before. So just go for it and port some of those classics!
I've always had aspirations to do a 3da port....
Enlarge the 'Overhead Map' in loathing so it is... large. now click the scenery button, and select scenery object X. lets call it tree1. Go under View Preferences, and you should see a box that says 'show all objects' or something... theres only one box there, impossible to miss. UNCHECK it. This effectively shows the blue (or whatever colour you may have set) dot locations on your overhead that indicate all of _that_ particular scenery item.
Take a screenshot, and then crop the overhead up in photoshop. force the image to take on the size of your colourmap, and import it into your m2 loathing. All the blue dots where tree1 were, now appear on your landscape. Place said tree1, then repeat the process for object Z, Y etc etc etc.
Long and tedius, but mb less tedius than setting up two monitors and doing it like FE did...
I honestly don't think people are going to mind if some bushes arent on the EXACT OMFG POINT as they were in TFL In fact, most people will probably have not seen the maps you intend to port for several years, others never before. So just go for it and port some of those classics!
I've always had aspirations to do a 3da port....
- William Wallet
- Posts: 1494
- Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:40 am
- Location: Perth Australia
- Contact:
Do "we" have access to the TFL Loathing and M2 Loathing code? For some of these things, it shouldn't be too tough to write a program to extract the data from one, do any coordinate change logic and then write the data out. Not knowing anything about the guts, I can't say for sure, but it doesn't seem like it would be too tough. Maybe not worth it, but not too tough.
Ray
Ray
- William Wallet
- Posts: 1494
- Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:40 am
- Location: Perth Australia
- Contact:
no need to do it yourself, he's already built the conversion program, and I THINK, converted the GR mesh. If he hasn't it should be a peice of cake. This does not address the scripting though which would be a huger undertaking.
Finally, this all assumes that the relevent plugins/program weren't lost in his HDD crash.
Finally, this all assumes that the relevent plugins/program weren't lost in his HDD crash.
- William Wallet
- Posts: 1494
- Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2004 9:40 am
- Location: Perth Australia
- Contact: