[TOOL RELEASE] ps2ls (Planetside Tools)

Hey guys, a quick update for you.

Work has been pretty hectic recently so I haven't had as much time as I would have liked to add the model viewer. I have, however, been making a variety of UI improvements. Here's a screenshot of the new UI.



On the model extraction front, I've began to hack away at the file format and have made very good progress. I can now reliably extract all the meshes from a specific version (4) of the DME file. Some DME files are version 3, but I don't yet know what the distinction is. The next version will have a model viewer and will allow you to view and extract at least one version of the DME files.

Here's a few models to whet your appetite.

That's boss- looking at those models

It's stuff like this that lets you start to
understand just how much work the PS2 devs went throuhg for this game-

I'm just a Photoshop runner(I code also , but nothing like this) -and ...i only JUST (literally today) got into 3- modelling
(after someone did a design of a Vannu Sovergn Carrier using sketchup ,which i am now learning)...

Have you found the weapon data yet? In all data dumps I have seen the Battle Rifles are missing.

I personally am not really interested in the weapon statistics. If you're inclined to do so, you can use ps2ls to find anything in the raw data. Though this reminds me, I should add search functionality to the internals of the pack files, it will make it easier to do quick look-ups for specific things like the Battle Rifle stats.

I looked through all XMLs I could find but no data except muzzle flashes.

It's probably not in XML files then, there are loads of *.txt files that have CSV data pertinent to various stats. For example, look up Weapons.txt.

Weapon stats can be found in the .txt files. FireModes.txt gives details about refire rate, recoil, COF, etc. Weapons.txt is a list of all the individual weapons, however there's no indication of which entry corresponds to which gun in-game. Proectiles.txt seems to have damage information in it, as well as stuff like the number of pellets a shotgun fires.

Do you have an ETA for when the abiltiy to export models will be added? That's what interests me the most, particularly being able to preview vehicles with camo skins in 3DS Max

The 3d models seem a bit low poly,going to try remodeling them a bit in blender and rendering them with cycles.

I especially want to get my hands on the NC MAX model.

How did you get the models to open? I've tried using the 3D Model Converter v4.8 to convert them into a maya-readable format, but it says it's an unrecognized file type.

The issue is the game stores things as weaponids and itemids. If we can load models to correspond to weapons, then we can finish decoding the rest of the Rosetta Stone.

I wrote a python script to convert the models into a usable .PLY format. Right now it only extracts out position and face data, I haven't had time yet to try out loading in the UV information because work has been taking a lot out of me.

The script I'm using (and still working on) can be found here:

http://code.google.com/p/ps2ls/source/browse/trunk/extras/dme_export/main.py

I will be starting to maintain a wiki on the Google Code project which will document the formats of all the file types so others can more easily create tools of their own.

Hey Gelnika thanks for doing this you've done a great job so far. However I was wondering if you could explain how use that code snippet you posted for exporting .dme files? Unfortunately I'm still pretty code illiterate. I know my way around a variety of 3d graphics apps though and am interested in checking out PS2s models. UV's and texture info isn't important to me, I'm mostly interested in how they've constructed their models and what the poly count is etc. Thanks!

Here is what I did:

1 - Download python
2 - Create a text file with the code Gelnika posted and save it as "main.py"
3 - Put it in a folder (I called mine converter)
4 - In converter create a folder called "import" and export"
5 - put the .dme files in the import folder
6 - double click "main.py" (it should execute it)
7 - you now have .dme files that are usable by MeshLab
8 - you can look at them in meshlab, or export the model as a bunch of different file types (obj, dfx, dae, stl)

As a note the python script converts everything in the "import" folder with the extension .dme, whether or not it has been converted before, so clean out your import folder after running the script.

Thanks!

Once I get the UV coordinates sorted for the models I will definitely add the ability to preview camouflages patterns into ps2ls, and of course to export them to a variety of formats.

I recommend downloading Python 2.7.3 and NOT the Final 3.3.0 version if you use other languages in Windows. The 3.3.0 version returned some syntax error for me.

You, sir, are a legend.

-EDIT-

Or semi-legend. You're TR. TR are not worthy of being legends. Oppressive scum ...

I have updated the Python script so that it exports to OBJ instead of PLY.

http://code.google.com/p/ps2ls/source/browse/trunk/extras/dme_export/main.py?spec=svn43&r=43

You are a true hero Gelnika. Is it possible to search through all asset packs at the same time? They don't seem to be in any particular order. I wonder if anyone knows what the blue channel of the normal maps does? Some assets use it and some don't. Devs are free to chime in.

In ps2ls you can select multiple pack files from the pack file list on the left side to see all of the files within the selected packs. It occurred to me that this isn't immediately obvious, I might make a further UI enhancement to simply display the files from all the loaded packs since the individual pack files are pretty irrelevant to navigation.