XMP-Alcazar (U2)

GreatEmerald · Jun 29, 2009

I've began working on XMP-Alcazar for Unreal II: The Awakening. So far I have ported all necessary sounds and textures to U2, and all I'm missing is Static Meshes (help needed! If you have UT2004 and U2 and have some time, you could help!).

So far, this is what it looks:

The terrain isn't working for now because it was saved in myLevel... I hate people who use myLevel to store things!

But I'll port it anyway, all I have to do for it to work is figure out which alpha maps are for which layer...

So, if you can help with Static Meshes, please say so!

Zeji · Jun 29, 2009

Wow, that was fast. I'll be able to help in a few days once I reinstall Unreal 2 on my desktop.

Leo(T.C.K.) · Jun 29, 2009

Well I have those installed, but I never worked with extracting static meshes and such....

GreatEmerald · Jun 29, 2009

Well, what you do is rather mechanical, just time consuming. I've wrote a guide about that here:
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=186724
Shouldn't be hard to follow, the pivot part is probably the hardest and most confusing, but hopefully clear enough. If you can't set it precisely, it doesn't matter, while remaking maps we'll fix any pivot errors in maps themselves. For now, I'd need the Arch_BuildingsM package converted. Here are all the textures I converted from XMP to U2 (and notes; for now, you have to note that one texture, that should be in ScottT, isn't there, so instead it is in XMPScottT).
Most of the textures that I've converted can be downloaded here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?xzzkqm5jzgn
The only left ones which I'll be sending later will be from myLevel packages.

Leo(T.C.K.) · Jun 29, 2009

GreatEmerald said:
Well, what you do is rather mechanical, just time consuming. I've wrote a guide about that here:
http://forums.beyondunreal.com/showthread.php?t=186724
Shouldn't be hard to follow, the pivot part is probably the hardest and most confusing, but hopefully clear enough. If you can't set it precisely, it doesn't matter, while remaking maps we'll fix any pivot errors in maps themselves. For now, I'd need the Arch_BuildingsM package converted. Here are all the textures I converted from XMP to U2 (and notes; for now, you have to note that one texture, that should be in ScottT, isn't there, so instead it is in XMPScottT).
Most of the textures that I've converted can be downloaded here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?xzzkqm5jzgn
The only left ones which I'll be sending later will be from myLevel packages.

The static meshes should be able to be extracted as well from mylevel somehow (there are many methods how to do that in original games, but I have lack of skill doing anything in Unreal engine 2, even engine 3 seems more fammiliar to me strangely), anyway I have rather lot to do for now, so I cannot promise I will look into it, so far any new project is slowing me down right now.
Try asking some more people around...who even worked with this in past.

There is one method of exporting the meshes etc, maybe this can apply to staticmesh too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdiMpoHU2Do&feature=channel_page

Many commands can do I guess etc.

GreatEmerald · Jun 29, 2009

Yea, I've posted this for anyone who can help

By the way, screw the pivot points. Place them on the vertices somewhere approximately near where they should be, and that'll do. The scale is pretty much off and map-side positioning will be needed anyway, so don't worry about pivots too much.

GreatEmerald · Jun 29, 2009

More visual goodness coming up! I managed to port some Static Meshes (from myLevel, from now on they will be in AlcazarM and AlcazarT) and port the terrain. And footstep sounds work just perfectly!
There are some strange collision problems, though. It seems that the engine takes settings in Collision tab too seriously, even up to the point that one actor has two types of collision - complex and cylinder. So while walking on ledges, you can run into some invisible obstacles... But guess Select All Brush -> Properties -> Collision -> bColideWorld False should do.

So here are the images from the Alpha 2 version:

(GR)Killer · Jun 30, 2009

Haxxorz everywhere!

GreatEmerald · Jun 30, 2009

Shots from Alpha 3! I've ported all textures from myLevel now, as well as around half of the Static Meshes needed for Alcazar. And my images now have proper size, too

Here you can see the lava and demon heads. The problem is that there is an incompatible texture type that is used from U2XMP, and it's not present in U2, so this might be a problem... Meanwhile the engine decided to make those demons golden.

Here you can see Mukhoggs and that teleporters now have the textures.

More Mukhoggs and the waterfall.

Ice crystals and a waterfall.

GreatEmerald · Jul 2, 2009

Alpha 5! (Alpha 4 had no interesting screenshots).

GreatEmerald · Jul 5, 2009

Alpha 7! We're getting very close to the end of Static Mesh conversion!

GreatEmerald · Jul 21, 2009

I'm continuing work on the map, now porting particles. There are some issues with them, though. The particle engine was slightly modified, and that means that you can't see some particles without certain hacks, like, you can see the clouds only if you look directly at the ParticleSamander. Solved the issue by setting the DrawScale of the Salamander to 300, but as you can see, it's a huge hack. Also, colours don't work as expected, so you get a lot worse lava than you get in U2XMP; however, I could solve that by using coronas, and it looks even better that way; however, they horribly slow the game. So not sure what to do.

Without coronas:

With coronas:

Leo(T.C.K.) · Jul 21, 2009

Better do it without or find some way so it doesn't lag....cannot really help there, I know nothing about particles at all.

GreatEmerald · Jul 22, 2009

Yea, I think that's the right thing to do as well... I could remove one particle template and make the other emit less particles, so that it looks more like lava pieces shining while falling, it might be an interesting effect that way. I'll have to examine this...
There is one more issue, and a rather annoying one. The huge spire tower doesn't collide! At all! You can shoot and go through walls... I have absolutely no idea why material collision fails. How can that be at all?

Leo(T.C.K.) · Jul 22, 2009

I have no idea, perhaps when you converted staticmeshes to brush etc, perhaps you should have intersected it first or something, I had simmilar problem with a mover in that Unreal 2 to Unreal remake map I tried to make, when i just copied polygons to brush and made mover out of it, the mover had no collision while the brush had....

GreatEmerald · Jul 22, 2009

The problem is that the exact same thing happens if I don't use the convert to brush trick, that is, when I use UT2004 to convert that mesh to .OBJ and then use Blender to convert it to .ASE and import that. Still no collision.
But the brush itself does have collision, yes... If I add it somewhere without converting to a static mesh, it works. But if I add it instead of the static mesh, all of the level gets BSP cut. If I add the brush as a BlockingVolume, it feels like the collision expands by 2048 units to both sides from the real edges, so you can no longer get out of the building and such...

I'll try the intersect tip and see if it works here. It's still very, very strange that material collision fails...

GreatEmerald · Jul 26, 2009

Intersection didn't do anything, and I think I know why. That Static Mesh is too complex - it had 5200 polygons! Probably anything over 4K polygons force Material Collision to give up

Now I fixed the problem by using another, less polygon mesh from U2XMP's myLevel. It seems that you can convert them to brushes, but it sometimes works, and sometimes doesn't. It worked when I made a COD (Cube of Death), placed the StaticMesh inside, rebuilt geometry and then converted to brush.
So, with this problem fixed, I can continue my work on emitters. The red base emitters are mostly complete (only torches are missing), and now working on the blue base, water and smoke.

GreatEmerald · Jul 27, 2009

Alpha 10, and I'm getting very close to the graphical completion. I'm missing ~4 ParticleSalamanders and some StaticMesh placement is off, and with that fixed I'll move on to pathing and item placement.

GreatEmerald · Jul 28, 2009

Completed all the ParticleSalamanders. There's a small issue, though - you won't get to see those fiery rocks falling from demon heads, because U2 doesn't have a ParticleSalamanderForce. Ah well, at least it's good for your framerate. Once I finish positioning the Static Meshes and ParticleSalamanders, I'll move on to naming zones and adding EAX effects.

Leo(T.C.K.) · Jul 28, 2009

What about porting it over? The class, that is unless it is native.

XMP-Alcazar (U2)

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I did something m0tarded and now I have read only access! :(

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I did something m0tarded and now I have read only access! :(

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Khnumhotep

I did something m0tarded and now I have read only access! :(

Khnumhotep

I did something m0tarded and now I have read only access! :(

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Khnumhotep

I did something m0tarded and now I have read only access! :(