UT sp: Project shinjigen

Posted: Wed Sep 21, 2011 6:17 pm Post subject: Re: Project Shinjigen

Its on hold for now, but I might pick it up again at some point in the future

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I hate it when someone does something with very high potential, pimps it in front of everyone, then keeps it to themselves if they never finish it. Come on guys, it's perfectly OK to drop 'spare parts' into a download. You never know, someone might just make something spectacular.

gopostal said:

I hate it when someone does something with very high potential, pimps it in front of everyone, then keeps it to themselves if they never finish it. Come on guys, it's perfectly OK to drop 'spare parts' into a download. You never know, someone might just make something spectacular.

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Disagree.
I've shown off a few of my mods and maps and about 99.9% of them I've never released officially. If it's not finished it's exactly that! People strive for perfection and I'm sure modders/mappers (Including myself) don't want to upload "Spare Parts" because hey, nobody likes a shi**y half finished version of a mod they once looked forward to.

If you remove the betas, the early versions, and the 'imperfect'....well there's not going to be much left in UT.

Honestly if you are correct in saying 99.9% of your stuff you've never shared then I guess I feel sorry for you. That's a lot of enjoyment for others you have denied because you seek only perfection. Players don't care if it's perfect, they only require "is it fun?"

gopostal said:

Honestly if you are correct in saying 99.9% of your stuff you've never shared then I guess I feel sorry for you. That's a lot of enjoyment for others you have denied because you seek only perfection. Players don't care if it's perfect, they only require "is it fun?"

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It's not that I "Denied" others the use of my content because I'm striving for perfection. It's more that I try to make a "Quality" mod over a "Quantity" mod (Meaning I'd rather have 1 weapon that works bug-free rather than 25 that are total crap) and the following reasons:

• Once I think i've finished, I instantly think of new ideas that end up breaking/complicating things further
  
  
• I code on my own, only seeking help when I'm REALLY stuck, so my shit takes a hell of a long time to work on
  
  
• I only work on the U1 scene, not with UT so the audience for any mod is quite a bit smaller and I fear that nobody would appreciate my
  work
  (Although if anybody knows why exporting .MDL files as Unreal.3D causes their animations to wobble around and if exporting them as skeletal meshes cuts half the mesh off, along with breaking texture coordinates then feel free to help me and I'll gladly make a 227/UT Non-Wobbly SkeletalMesh version of CSWeapons)
  
  
• Most of my mods are simply proof of concept and indeed personal entertainment (Like UT3Weapons, CounterStrikeSourceWeapons, Postal2Weapons etc etc...) and contain only enough code for basic functionality* and not enough quality code for a release
  
  
• I get bored of working on 1 thing for such a long time

I've already almost finished CSWeapons and Shivaxi managed to recover the source to DoDweapons (Day of Defeat) AND my port of NightsEdge and Klingon Honour Guard to U1. There's also some of my MUCH older stuff floating around on my freewebs site that I just found the other day too

*Read: maHOOSIVE hacks, messy code and glitchy shit

I totally agree with Gizzy on this one due to the fact that i'm more of a perfectionist then what he mentions he is. Because of this, I have never released any of my mods to the public. I'm always seeking for the perfect code, conversions, workable functionality of what I work on. Just because I started and then stopped working on a project doesn't mean everybody else should get their hands on it, when I know I will work on the project again once I figure out the problem and keep working on it if possible.

When a person works hard on a mod to be bug free and complete it isn't because they're seeking popularity by sharing it around. As we've seen some people coming here that rip other people's work for that reason, the ones that suffer the consecuences are the ones that use them and host them publically without them realizing that it was a buggy-half-assed-stolen-mod that could even bring harm to their hardware. If people that are this way would stop this non-sense we'll probably be seeing better and more completed mods by modders that do know what they're doing, but instead we're seeing the other face of the coin and losing the good modders that we all want to see. To tell you the truth, this is the reason why I stopped working on all my mods, and now I just do whatever someone needs for their server that I know I can do, or work on stuff for myself.

From what you say, I understand that you're dissapointed of people keeping their work for themselves, so heres a few things I worked on that might make you grind your teeth...
-I converted with MS the mesh of 5 Quake3 weapons and all the pick-ups and animated the weapon by myself. They came out pretty much perfect except for the uv map being off a bit.
-I converted some SeriousSam stuff like weapons as well and same reason as the above.
-I converted a few of CounterStrike weapons with their original models and animations and even added the Down weapon animation to complete them. I found out and fixed the glitches that Gizzy mentions and was able to import them in UT with no problems. The reason they crash UT is because UE1 only supports 1 bone tree and those weapons have 2, and some weapons use more than 8 materials as well.
-I converted all of UT2k4 animated weapons and can easily fix any psk/psa file with MS by Unmerging and then merging the model with their SmoothingGroups set (mistake that pretty much everyone makes when they convert ut2k4 meshes).
-I have converted and have a very workable version of the DoomPawns to work on UT and will not release it because it isn't mine.
-I can export any vertex mesh (.3d file) from UT to perfection (unlike UModel which messes them all up) by using Unreal 227h patch with an edited Engine.u file that allows me to open UT,DeusX,TacticalOps files to export these type of meshes with ease. Ya, I do have the TWT_Zombies meshes exported to perfection lol.
-And there's a lot more then just that.

You see, I have all those mods to work on but I also get bored working on one thing so I wait until I just happen to find or figure out a fix for a mod to start working on it again. When, if I ever finish a mod and want to share it, I will not go and release it publically because I know that there are wolves trying to rip my work and take credit for it. I know this for a fact because someone warned me about a couple people trying to rip the script from my FBFMac10, and I know those 2 people don't ask for permission or give credit for what they've taken. You know what I mean?!

So, all in all, it isn't the good modders being the bad guys of the movie here because they want to release a quality mod then quantities, like Gizzy said. It is the wolves getting desperate to get into other people's work to rip it apart and take credit for it instead. Maybe some people just need to grow up, like someone mentioned at another thread (that showed he was the biggest inmature little kiddy of all instead... lol.), and actually get their hands on their own projects so they know what its like to spend time and money working on these things even when it is just a hobby.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean and it proves my point: 'Your' mac10 code was built right on the back of existing clan code and not from scratch. And then you obfuscated your (minor) changes. Did you make the model? What about the firing code? From what little of your work you've ever shared I see this a lot. You complain that people 'steal your stuff' yet I see whole blocks of code in yours that came directly from someone else. That's how things improve and people learn. No one person can do it best, it often takes a collection of people to move something towards it's best release. Your work, no matter how <droll> INCREDIBLE </droll> is taken from other places just like everyone else. Hell, look at the list of models you claim to have extracted. I'm sure you got permissions for all that seeing as how it's a huge issue for you? I mean that work was done completely by someone else and if you borrowed it then aren't you directly guilty of what you claim is the worst problem? Asinine, just asinine.

And no, I'm not really impressed with the model stuff. I can use UnrealFX too.

Look, in the end obviously no one can make you share anything but it's about as self-centered a thing to do as possible to say that you've done something nice, maybe show a few pics, but then not share anything because you feel like it's entirely you and not anyone else's. Not one single dev in this community does everything from scratch and not use other people's work as base. There is not one thing wrong with releasing partial stuff and allowing others to use it somewhere else.

I don't think there's anything wrong with withholding early versions of content when doing otherwise could come back to bite the original author in the ass. Look at Zachary Barth. He released an early version of his game (Infiniminer), and then Notch started working on a clone that eventually became Minecraft. Now Notch is rolling in money and Barth didn't get anything for his work.

War_Master said:

-I converted with MS the mesh of 5 Quake3 weapons and all the pick-ups and animated the weapon by myself. They came out pretty much perfect except for the uv map being off a bit.

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I ported some Quake2 models (With anims) a while back but I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to fix uv maps at the time :/ I might try it again when I can be bothered to get 3dsmax, quake2 and the right plugins again

War_Master said:

-I converted all of UT2k4 animated weapons and can easily fix any psk/psa file with MS by Unmerging and then merging the model with their SmoothingGroups set (mistake that pretty much everyone makes when they convert ut2k4 meshes).

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I remember us discussing the Xan2K4 model a while back! I also had all the models/textures/sounds ported at one point but I only sent them to one person iirc and we've both lost it since then

War_Master said:

-I have converted and have a very workable version of the DoomPawns to work on UT and will not release it because it isn't mine.

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Was this the UT mod that caused a stir when ID sent them a Cease and Desist?

War_Master said:

-I can export any vertex mesh (.3d file) from UT to perfection (unlike UModel which messes them all up) by using Unreal 227h patch

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yeah there's a Rand(1337); different ways to export models from UT/U1 nowadays I exported a few DeusEx models a while back but origin/scaling/offsets/whatever were weird as hell.

gopostal said:

And no, I'm not really impressed with the model stuff. I can use UnrealFX too.

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The process of importing/exporting models and fixing uvmaps requires much more than UnrealFX (And I've never used that either) This is the process I use to port the csweapons:

- Extract .MDL files from the CS .GCF files

- Decompile with milkshape

- Import the reference models into Milkshape

- Import each animation sequence, noting the length of each anim and writing the import code for each animation as I go

- Resize the textures to powers of two (If required) and fix any masking issues that pop up

- Export the whole thing to Unreal.3D and compile using UCC

- Make any origin/scaling adjustments in the .uc if I need to and recompile again

- Repeat this process for the other 51 models. Each model (1st & 3rd person) takes about 20-30 minutes (Taking into account random crashes and other stuff) which is a VERY tedious process (Including imports for every_single_sound and texture)

- Code all 26 weapons

- Rage, realise my code sucks and start coding all over again

gopostal said:

Not one single dev in this community does everything from scratch and not use other people's work as base. There is not one thing wrong with releasing partial stuff and allowing others to use it somewhere else.

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My first mod (PwnPack..yeah I was 16, don't judge my mod naming system) was all my own code. The new version of CSWeapons used my own code as a base and I got help with features as and when I needed it. A lot of the new features in patch 227, while not a mod, were created from scratch too. I'm not saying there's something wrong with releasing work for others to base their own work on (It's a good thing really!) but I think it's better to work from finished, quality-made mods than half-finished mods.