Entity 1.5 Preview

theycallmechad · Post by **theycallmechad** » Wed Dec 20, 2006 9:40 am

Dude, if you can pull the injection off, you are a champion. I will forever use Entity as my skinning app from this point on. Best of luck to you, and if you need any help or testing on this, feel free to ask me.

trepdimeflou · Post by **trepdimeflou** » Wed Dec 20, 2006 10:00 am

poke has it almost completed. we were able to inject bungie's normal maps back in, but he's got to fix something for injecting custom ones. It may have something to do with the blue channel of the normal map, but I'm not positive.

Jubakuba · Post by **Jubakuba** » Wed Dec 20, 2006 10:42 pm

wait...i thought poke was done with entity?
Thats what detox insisted on anyway...
but ya, will that be in this version?

StalkingGrunt911 · Post by **StalkingGrunt911** » Wed Dec 20, 2006 10:50 pm

I do hope you guys will get the bump map injection/extraction working. =D

ScottyGEE · Post by **ScottyGEE** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 2:53 am

Thats a normal map though...
I thought it converted it in game...Although your glock proved to work otherwise...

Anyway, I look forward to it...
I still want to see what Talin64 churns out though.

edit: ooh, is it still in p8 dxt format though? If so, I gotta fix my photoshop as it freezes trying to save in that format...Else I'll stick to DXT1

Geo · Post by **Geo** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 2:57 am

My photoshop also freezes when trying to save as P8, anybody know why?

Also, can't wait for bump map injection... look's cool!

trepdimeflou · Post by **trepdimeflou** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 10:03 am

ScottyGEE wrote:Thats a normal map though...
I thought it converted it in game...Although your glock proved to work otherwise...

The bump maps are in P8 (palletized) format. Since it is palletized, it references a color lookup table that contains the color data. This enables the bitmap to be smaller, but become bigger when it is decompressed in real time through the game engine. Here's how that works.

The color lookup table for the palletized bump maps is in the halo 2 .xbe (executable). For every byte of the p8 bump map, there are a corresponding four bytes in the color index that are the correct colors for that byte. I'll make a small example:

P8 Bitmap:

00 FF 0F B4 ...(etc)

Color Index:

00 11 CC 4C 08 F8 9C 8D 3F 4E 55 6C 7A 8B FC B3 ...(etc)

Well, the bytes in the P8 bitmap reference a byte in the color index like this:

the first byte (00) references the first four bytes of the color index. The second byte (FF) references the four bytes found at 0xFF from the start of the index, and so on and so forth.

Palletized bitmaps let the map load times be much shorter, but still contain the same amount of detail.

Once the Color Index was found in the .xbe, it was just a matter of pokecancer writing the color reference part of Bitmap.cs .

ScottyGEE wrote:edit: ooh, is it still in p8 dxt format though? If so, I gotta fix my photoshop as it freezes trying to save in that format...Else I'll stick to DXT1

The game engine converts all bitmaps to a8r8g8b8 in real time, so you will most likely be saving to that format instead of P8.

ScottyGEE · Post by **ScottyGEE** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 2:04 pm

Wow, nice explanation and understanding.
At least I can save in a8r8g8b8 format

Talin64 · Post by **Talin64** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 2:32 pm

I am baffled, this looks a write up I gave to Gren a month ago

trepdimeflou · Post by **trepdimeflou** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 2:37 pm

=o!

I just wrote that off the top of my head, based on what we found in the past few days.

Tural · Post by **Tural** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 2:43 pm

iGeo wrote:My photoshop also freezes when trying to save as P8, anybody know why?

Tural wrote:I use Photoshop CS with this plugin. I can read and write every format of dds file.

kornman00 · Post by **kornman00** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 4:54 pm

trepdimeflou wrote:=o!

I just wrote that off the top of my head, based on what we found in the past few days.

trying to take credit for the vector palette are we ;p?

Takes me <5 minutes to find something I don't even know exists.
Which is why I don't believe in coinicdence.

And since when did you start reverse engineering Talin?

trepdimeflou · Post by **trepdimeflou** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 4:59 pm

Nah, I was just saying that I wrote that post without looking at anything. Not taking credit for your work :O

Digital Marine · Post by **Digital Marine** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 6:53 pm

Don't know if its posted:

How about a window that you could see your guns effects, projectiles, textures, hear the sounds, etc with a short animation demonstrating it.

CptnNsan0 · Post by **CptnNsan0** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 6:58 pm

hahha good luck with that man

StalkingGrunt911 · Post by **StalkingGrunt911** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 6:58 pm

Digital Marine wrote:Don't know if its posted:

How about a window that you could see your guns effects, projectiles, textures, hear the sounds, etc with a short animation demonstrating it.

That would be pretty cool, but probably pretty hard to code also. Just use RTH it's sorta what it's for a easier and faster to edit effects etc. and then see them right in game. No need to FTP etc.

-DeToX- · Post by **-DeToX-** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 6:59 pm

Jubakuba wrote:wait...i thought poke was done with entity?
Thats what detox insisted on anyway...
but ya, will that be in this version?

I never Insisted anything.
On the IRC I said Poke has some other projects to work on at the moment. And the moment was months ago.

Yes, Pokecancer has proper bumps, as I have tested it, and as Trep just said.

But it wouldn't have been possible without Kornman... And his Xbe skillzz.
=p.

Tural · Post by **Tural** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 7:06 pm

Get me some proper normal maps from those and we'll talk. =x

-DeToX- · Post by **-DeToX-** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 7:26 pm

Tural wrote:Get me some proper normal maps from those and we'll talk. =x

Ah, But you are already talking.
;p.

(Don't reply to this saying that its a figure of speech or something, because I know).
Or do you? *Dramatic music*

ScottyGEE · Post by **ScottyGEE** » Thu Dec 21, 2006 10:59 pm

Well...Thats the thing, you've already stated that a8r8g8b8 is the format that the normals get converted into, so thats all I need right?
I can just inject a normal map as a a8r8g8b8 and it'll all be dandy? Or is there that xbe stuff that I;m missing?