Updated textures?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by LoLitsNeal, Jan 21, 2022.

  1. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    EQ titanium is up to DoDH I believe, which is what most E m u's use(everything post Velious is disabled on p99 though).
    I think the DX9 upgrade was around UF, so E m u's are running a DX8 engine(I think 2048x2048 was max texture size back then).
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  2. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh


    A: It doesn't get better than TTobey

    B: Ttobey "At one point we just had to rebuild it in Maya." Maya is the 3d software they use for modeling. He is giving an example of opening a model in Maya and editing it (before they had to give up and rebuild because of an issue with a particular model, not all models). The model file is all that's required to open in Maya and edit, there is nothing else for them to have 'lost'.

    That is models. As I mentioned earlier, even IF they couldn't open a model file (which they can), the TEXTURES can still be edited with ease.

    C: There may be other reasons why they can't edit the BASE model and/or texture files (as there are no 'source files'). Only one crazy possibility is they don't actually own those original assets for anything other than use in their game. They may have been outsourced and under a specific agreement long ago.

    D: I remember the story how Old Freeport was 'lost' too. Their environment files, I don't know, maybe they do have 'source files' they need to edit properly. But, none of the stuff was overly complicated, and in general the file will reference textures by name, and define everything unique about itself within it's own data.
  3. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    This has more to do with Live servers dealing with much greater numbers of textures, items, geometry, player data, etc, etc than your average E M U. The E M U can afford to allocate more of the memory to textures due to not needing to allocate as much to other things.
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  4. LoLitsNeal Journeyman

    Good read here. Thank you everyone for the input to my question! =P
    Long story short, it sounds like there is nothing official to support this but, who knows, maybe in the future something can be done.

    It also makes sense that Live has way more to update than classic-velious.

    Anyone try using the textures for the p99 stuff on live? I know its not supported, but in theory it would work right? I wonder would it just update old zones/models? Anyone ever try this?
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  5. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh


    This may have been missed from an earlier post of mine, it was a late edit.


    Also of note, that poster got a like from EQDev. I hear the new thing is tacit acknowledgement through likes. Though I wouldn't call it 'supported'.
  6. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    I don't think we are allowed to modify data-files in the eq-directory, it is probably against the eula and might be interpreted as "cheating", even if it was intended as an innocent "gfx-mod".
    I would advise against it.
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  7. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh


    All kidding aside, you sure can't go wrong with this advice.
  8. Treage_Imminent Elder

    Something I noted while watching the video is around the 1 hour 17 minute mark where "Chris" informed them that the files still exist.

    I enjoy watching all of his videos, and this was another one well worth my time.
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  9. MasterMagnus The Oracle of AllHigh

    After watching a little more. Here's some more detail about it.

    TTobey is talking about PROJECT files as opposed to the final MODEL and TEXTURE files. He mentions the original project files are in 'Max' (3DS Max). They are now using Maya, which isn't able to open the specific (old) version Max Project file. There are often converters for these things, he may not have known that at the time, or lots of other possibilities.

    TTobey (or anyone including myself as I mentioned earlier) is capable of opening any of the MODEL or TEXTURE files (that we see when we play) and edit them directly without a Project file.

    What I am talking about is basically the 'reverse engineering' aspect, of Models and Textures, as this topic was about Textures and became about Textures on E m us.

    TTobey is fantastic, but he misspeaks several times here. We're all human. And when we relay third and fourth hand, things get garbled.

    And most importantly, as Treage_Imminent notes: The 'lost files' story is once again debunked.
  10. Pizzanomicon Augur

    You can use the same HD files from p99 mods on Live but for whatever reason after the 64 bit update I find they don't work as well with mouselook as before the update. Not sure why this is, but also it's not against the EULA becuase you aren't interacting with the client.

    Update: The 4x HD files work fine, apparently it's something with Classic HD files that was bugging tf out of mouselook. Investigating this currently.

    Just read the dev post " what constitutes cheating." It uses very specific language and graphical mods absolutely don't apply to that because it has 0 interaction with the client.

    Ya'll need to brush up on your tech knowledge and jargon and general understanding of things.
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  11. Shillingworth Augur


    Even ignoring converters and being able to load file formats. There is always the option of running the old 3DS Max to open them and export into another format. Even running it in a VM of an old copy of Windows at full native speed thanks to modern virtualization that's present in almost all new CPUs produced. Just had to do that not too long ago for the exact same reason, all my old models were in 3DS Max but my current tools of choice (Blender and FreeCAD) couldn't read that old of a 3DS Max file and the plugins to do so do not read in all that data (just the common stuff).
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