Help with models for wz.

[lav_coyote25]

but did you change the extension of the file itself?

[J.Vaughan]

Hmmm I assume you mean in the texpages of the Warzone file. Do I have to convert them or just simply change their extension? But I thought in the new pie slicer the bmps included in the package covered that so that way the pie files were independent of their textures?

[lav_coyote25]

hmmm... now that you ask... i am not sure.

wait for grim to come on line.

[kage]

afaict, warzone no longer handles .pcx files. when you rename a file to have a different extension, the file contents don't change at all, and thus support is still missing. if you want to add/modify a texpage and work with it in pie slicer, then you'll need a 256x256 pixel pcx version of that texpage accessible to pie slicer, and a power-of-2 (256x256 or 512x512 or 1024x1024, etc) sized png version accessible to warzone, and if you have a higher resolution one for warzone, warzone will automatically scale the coordinates set in pie slicer to the correct size.

[kage]

It seems making a tutorial for Pie Slicer would be a waste of time. As far as I can tell the current direction of making new models will only be able to use blender, so there is no point using or writing a tutorial that will not be able to be used, and since I will not use blender, people should direct their questions toward Kage. I also will not be able to redo all the gfx for warzone because of this reason.  :-\ Oh well it would have been fun.

that's not true. since the 1.0 release of pie_import.py, adding old-style pie2 (using pcx textures) pie5 converter scripts has been on my todo list -- all you'd have to do is have python installed and run a script (in the windows case it'd be as easy as double clicking an icon). this means you won't even have to go through blender to make something that'll work in warzone regardless of whether the engine will continue to support pie2 or not. eikei has shown me what can be done with the current level of imprecision, even when i thought years ago i'd exausted the possibilities (the answer in eikei's case is texturing: something i was never good at), so keep on working in pie slicer: as far as i'm concerned, pie slicer will always be supported as long as we are using some version of pie for the model format, and even if we change formats, there should always be a conversion path available to pie slicer users. to further extend the realm of possibilities, i'll allow for conf-style configurability, including the ability to automatically scale points by a given factor, so if you want to take advantage of the extra precision in pie5, then make all your models in pie slicer 2x bigger for 2x more precision, 5x bigger for 5x more precision, etc.

the only outstanding issue with pie5 adds something "new" instead of improving something already there is the discussion on extending connectors, but i'm trying to make sure that connectors will be simple enough to tweak by hand after running a pie2 through the upcoming conversion script.

otoh, given that higher resolution models and textures are available, and pie slicer cannot handle those, i am working to make blender at least on par with pie slicer in terms of capability and pie compatibility. for those of you who like blender but find that its pie spec compatibility is very lacking, then know that by the time the next version of the import script is released, it'll have full pie spec compatibility including full team color support.

the point is, if you're not familiar with blender, but want to make pies, then just use pie slicer, since pie slicer is easier to learn and is specifically tailored to working with pies. if you already know blender, are used to full-fledged 3d modelling programs, or just want to learn blender, the learn blender and make pies that way: within the next few releases of the blender-pie scripts, blender will be able to do literally everything with pies that pie slicer can do.

[kage]

i was not aware that the pie slicer source was made available for modification, but even though that's the case, pie slicer is written in visual basic, which is all well and good for windows, but is wholly unportable -- without writing an equivalent app from scratch, windows, mac, freebsd, and others are shut out completely from forced-compliance editing, and atm their only option is something like blender, or paying for a copy of windows and running it and pie slicer through virtualization software.

i agree with you on many points, and i am one of the ones who knows what does and does not stress warzone (i asked for better point precision, which in and of itself makes no performance difference, and was perfectly content with a hundred or so polys for my very complex models), but once again, atm the desire to keep full pie slicer compatibility only benefits windows users, and by a wide margin, the percentage of windows users that notice open source projects is much lower than the percentage of foss users that notice open source projects -- granted, i don't know how the hard numbers divide, but i've noticed that most of the new people that got active in wzr seem to be *nixers.

modding for warzone has always involved more than one app, and, too be quite honest, it's several orders of magnitude better than it used to be, when you needed to go through extensive tutorials to figure out how to compile a wdg, and were either forced to use the command line (not a good thing for most windows users), or had to give up some control and go through at least 10 secs of point and click for the gui-frontend for the wdg compiler before you even fired up warzone each time you wanted to test a minor change. map makers had all kinds of hell with correct wdg packaging, and everyone had to go through wrf-hell when they wanted to introduce new content. most, if not all of these problems have been nullified with the conversion to zip-compressed wz's, and the conversion script i mentioned would be fully automatic -- you double click it and you're literally done -- it'll have created a sub directory with converted versions of all pies in the current directory -- you can't really call that part inconvenient. as for the extra connector data... well, there are ways around that with or without having to modify the pie slicer source. even if everything were to remain pie 2, you'd still have to deal with more than pie slicer -- you'd at least, in windows, have to open some zip archiver app and put all the files in it, unless you're using commandline tools, in which case you'd still have to dbl-click something to get it into a package.

when you hard code something like a 512 poly cap into a program like pie slicer, which does take a long time to create complex models given the way it clutters up exponentially with more polys, there will always be user frustration: modders always like to push the limits, and many using this theoretical update to pie slicer would be ignorantly aiming for a 1024-poly model, hit the 512 poly cap and get an error message saying that warzone doesn't support more polys in one model. at that point, since pie slicer can't handle mesh deformation or mesh simplification, that user who hit the 512 poly limit would have wasted at least 12 hours, most likely a lot more. the only way to prevent such a waste in time is to educate the user on what will and will not work -- this means that all tutorials and even pages with links to editing tools would need a "READ THIS OR BE SORRY" document on the same page -- the information learned within such a document would be all that an observant modder would need to make compliant models in either pie slicer, blender, or anything else; there's nothing we can do to keep unobservant modders from wasting their time no matter what app they use.

and don't take for granted that blender can't be scripted to monitor the number of polys being used and inform the user when it gets too high, or even if we were still working solely with pie 2, that blender couldn't be scripted to make all points snap to the nearest "valid location" each time a point is moved or created -- it can do all of these things, and it really could be scripted into a state where it's a complete pie slicer clone with better mesh manipulation and texture wrapping. however, i'm not going to code either of those things, and will just rely on modders reading the docs we shove in their face and notifying them of any invalidity in the model when they try to export, since holding the hand of the modder the whole way makes things more difficult for modders who already know what they're doing.

Next thing I would like to address, even though I love the things that are being done with the wz source I don't feel they are being done with the term "mod friendly" in mind. When modding a game, if it is to hard for the average hobbiest to pick up some simple tools and make changes and see them work now, then the mods become far and few between. More likely then not moders keep on walking so to speak.

i agree, and you're a good reference for this kind of thing, since you're admittedly either on or over that fence. there are no non-windows tools equivalent to wzck and the ai editor that modders could use for basic scripting tasks. all mod support tools for windows are even outdated, and without educating potential modders, editing a model with pie slicer alone will always result in something like a "cannot find sometexture.pcx" error. wzck has an "export to wdg" feature that would be misleading to users, not to mention there have been changes to the format of some stats files which would make at least some other aspects of wzck out of date, which means that everyone, regardless of their operating system, would be forced to dive into those files with a text editor, and since they're in comma-seperated-value format, it's completely unmanagable to mod them by hand. i don't even know if the map editor will work on anything other than windows.

imo, it's not the changes we're making to the source that aren't modder friendly -- it's just the lack of tools to support those changes, or in lieu of those, an easy to edit-by-hand plaintext format for stats files, such as ini files. what we really need is a "completely portable editing tools" initiative, possibly combined with an "easy to edit by hand" initiative. for the latter, this would be getting rid of csv formatted stat files. and most especially, that any new tools must be maintained -- the editing tools should support new features even before the game engine does, and all files should be given a version tag, from which editors should be able to chain-convert all data from one version to the next until it is in the current format -- each time a new format is released, you just add a link to the chain, so to speak, instead of rewriting the importer -- importing data would be much more inefficient, but code would be much simpler and file compatibility would be optimal.

further, documents are misleading now because enough has changed that there needs to at least be a "this is how you do it now" addendum to most docs on modding.

in short, the only people likely to mod for modern warzone are either src devs, or modders that were modding back when the source was still closed, and in some cases, only the subset of those people that run on windows.

one thing i've seen that would really help with constantly changing specs: if anyone has played recent versions of wesnoth, you may see "feature is deprecated on line x of file y. support will be removed in version z" messages as you play -- both players and modders see those messages, and it's a good way to notify modders of impending changes while not requiring much in the way of backwards compatibility (keeping code cleaner), and further it often motivates modders into action as it's much preferred that users of your mod don't see deprecation messages. such a thing could be immensely useful in warzone if provided as both in-game console messages and stderr messages.

This post is not ment to offend anyone or point any fingers it was just to express how I feel and to let people know that my time is valuable to me and I don't have any to waste. If I did offend anyone I am sorry for that.

i was not offended, and i, too, wish not to offend anyone, and am sorry if i did.

[Watermelon]

What you are saying here is missing my point.

The new connectors will not be supported by Pie Slicer at all and no one has the intention of adding this support to pie slicer. So all connectors will need to be done "by hand" so to speak, and if we are adding a name convention thats one thing but adding rotation and everything else....well that will just be a pain in the ass as editing in text editor will be required. I also feel that having to run multiple apps to achieve one goal is dumb, and a waste of time, not to mention it makes the process much more complicated then it needs to be. I feel that the solution that is being followed is a "more then needed" complicated process and a waste of valuable time.

I am aware of the chaos caused by the connector changes due to the multiturret stuff,and I am sorry for the inconvenience made.I already sent a mail to the mailing list asking for possible solutions to this connector problem.Hopefully such problems will get sorted out as soon as possible.

In short I have been doing 3d for 16+ years, I have been doing game modeling for at least 8 of those years, and I have learned that just because you can model in a highend 3d app doesn't mean you know how or what makes a good game model. Using blender will lead to people abusing polygons and vertices, which will lead to a wz that needs a super computer and a T3 or better connection to play. I have only seen an extremely small group of people that even remotely know what can and can not work for games like wz. Most of the stuff I have seen here (not all) will not work for wz.

Pie slicer forces people to not abuse the polygon vertices of a model, therefore making it the perfect app for wz modeling, aside from it not running on linux. I made a comment to Devurandom just the other day, he asked what I would like to see supported and I said .ma and .obj files for pie, only because sooner or later support for other 3d apps was going to happen regardles of what I want. I also told him to be honest I don't want to see Maya supported, even though this is my 3d app of choice. The reason I told him this is because even if people could afford/have Maya they would abuse the polygon vertices rules and it would just make a complete mess of everything. Now I know that someone will argue about what I have said and thats fine, I am just speaking from experience, and this is just my opinion nothing more.

I understand the importance of efficient modelling,but the artists have the freedom to choose their own tools,not to mention pieslicer is not available for linux,even if it's usable under linux,I think most ppl will not comfortable doing models with it.

The vertices and polygon abuses can be avoided if we have a standard for modelling,like a 'READ THIS BEFORE MAKING A MODEL' sticky topic,and when someone doesnt comply with such 'rules' when creating models,the problematic models will always get caught by the checks got integrated into blender->pie converter scripts.

Now I do not claim to know everything nor do want others to feel that I think I do. All I wanted to do is help with the project and to help others learn how to mod wz. The problem with me helping the project is the lack of leardership and a clear cut direction of what is going/will be happening. So in short I will not waste months of my time working on stuff that will be changed in the near future, I did that once with this project a year or so ago and back before the source was released. First time sucked, second time pissed me off, there will not be a third.

Yes,the miscommunication and lack of coordination can be disastrous.Subscribing to the gna mailing list might help a bit.Even though the changes themselves dont make any sense to non coders,but the changelog of every change(s) is usually understandable for non-coder and give them ideas of what developers are up to.

imo, it's not the changes we're making to the source that aren't modder friendly -- it's just the lack of tools to support those changes, or in lieu of those, an easy to edit-by-hand plaintext format for stats files, such as ini files. what we really need is a "completely portable editing tools" initiative, possibly combined with an "easy to edit by hand" initiative. for the latter, this would be getting rid of csv formatted stat files. and most especially, that any new tools must be maintained -- the editing tools should support new features even before the game engine does, and all files should be given a version tag, from which editors should be able to chain-convert all data from one version to the next until it is in the current format -- each time a new format is released, you just add a link to the chain, so to speak, instead of rewriting the importer -- importing data would be much more inefficient, but code would be much simpler and file compatibility would be optimal.

I agree with kage about the lacking tools,though it's a tough task to choose a easily portable language/write fully portable tools.

[iMac]

How I would love to have modding tools for a Mac! I know I'm apart of the small population of users here that use a WZ on a Mac, but I would be glad to contribute more in the way of mods/maps.

I know what some say "then make the tools yourself." & that is true. I will come December. I know nothing of programing, but I'm searching the net & going to bookstores for good tutorials & How-Tos. I have also been going over the documents/readmes/tutorials that lav_coyote has but I don't have a working Windows machine to try out anything.

I know that asking for tools to be made for other OSes is a VERY BIG task, & would take months, if not years to fully implement. Kind of like asking warzone to be ported to xyz. I think better/newer/multi platform tools would help the progress the project & help keep it alive.

- Scott

[kage]

How I would love to have modding tools for a Mac! I know I'm apart of the small population of users here that use a WZ on a Mac, but I would be glad to contribute more in the way of mods/maps.

in this case, you're really a part of the "i don't use windows" crowd -- any new tools would (and should) certainly support all platforms that warzone is supported on, if not more, and really the easiest way to make such tools is probably in an interpereted language, since ease of development is, in this case, infinitely more important than raw efficiency.

once i get the blender/pie related stuff to a level i'm satisfied with, i may start work on some cross platform modding tools for working with data, though what i ask is that anyone who changes any formats in even a small way update the wiki so that i, or anyone else, can piece together a full spec for any given version of that file.

I understand the importance of efficient modelling,but the artists have the freedom to choose their own tools,not to mention pieslicer is not available for linux,even if it's usable under linux,I think most ppl will not comfortable doing models with it.

i've tried it with wine, and it doesn't come close to working. even if it did work on linux through wine, it still wouldn't work on something like ppc mac osx.

The vertices and polygon abuses can be avoided if we have a standard for modelling,like a 'READ THIS BEFORE MAKING A MODEL' sticky topic,and when someone doesnt comply with such 'rules' when creating models,the problematic models will always get caught by the checks got integrated into blender->pie converter scripts.

the blender export script will do that within the next two version releases.

[Olrox]

Argh.

[Phoenix666]

Can someone help me with connectors of models!
i need to know types of connectors for:
Buildings, Bodies, Propulsion Weapons(only for tanks, not for cyborg)

Please help me

[lav_coyote25]

this information is still valid ( i think...no one has said different to me...) xD


http://docs.wz2100.net/Pie%20Slicer%20G ... t%201.html read both 1 and 2 of the guide... there are more resources besides these 2 pages.... just have a look. some is still current... if nothing else the history is still interesting. xD