Spotlight: Señor Casaroja's Noesis

[Darkfox]

Ah, alright, I see what you mean now. I understand that Noesis scans for viable Ninja headers as long as they start with either a Ninja Table or Ninja Chunk Model. The first set of files I sent were from a game called Death Crimson OX. The animations and bone count do not add up you are saying? That really actually explains a lot. You see, Death Crimson uses one animation batch for a number of similar enemies each having some variation, like extra parts being present or not along with the bones associated with them. It also explains what those two bytes after NMDM are.

As for Maken X, this wouldn't be the only time Atlus did some hacksy things in their games, so I wouldn't be surprised. A lot of the hacksy stuff they do is for performance, though. I'll check into it more and see if those missing parts are actually just scattered elsewhere in the containers.

[MrAdults]

I just did a small update (mainly because my stepdaughter wanted to use Noesis to make gifs), the textsprite format hadn't been paid attention to in years and it was somewhat broken in a few ways, and there'd been a bug in there that could crash on bilinear resizes that I'm pretty surprised I hadn't caught by now.

Steps for disassembling a .gif and reassembling it:
1) Browse to the .gif file in Noesis, click on it in the Noesis file list view, go to File->Export. Click the "Main output type" dropdown and select ".tspr - Text Sprite Set". Click OK.
2) After export is done, close the export dialog. Refresh the file list in Noesis. (click the little blue circle thing below the file list) There should now be a .tspr file exported from the .gif.
2.5) Optionally, go open the .tspr file in a text editor and make any desired modifications to it. You can also modify the .png format images exported for each frame, named whatever the .tspr is named but with _00.png appended.
3) Click on the .tspr file in the Noesis file view, go to File->Export. Click the "Main output type" dropdown and select ".gif - GIF Image". Click OK.
4) You now have an animated .gif file (probably named something like "[originalname]outout.gif") reflecting any changes you may have made to the .tspr or the individual frames.

brienj: The TIM2 code in Noesis was spec'd off of some random code I googled a long time ago, but I don't remember what it was from. Does Noesis load the files you have in mind, or does it fail too?

[brienj]

brienj: The TIM2 code in Noesis was spec'd off of some random code I googled a long time ago, but I don't remember what it was from. Does Noesis load the files you have in mind, or does it fail too?

It shows the 32-bit color TIM2s, but fails to show anything on the 256-color indexed ones. I could maybe modify the source code to work with those possibly.

[MrAdults]

Well, if Noesis can't load them and they're valid, send me some. I'll take a look next time I'm on a machine with the code. I also googled for the code I spec'd it off for you, but it seems to have magically disappeared from the internet. Much like the FF11 model+anim spec doc I casually came across years ago.

[brienj]

Well, if Noesis can't load them and they're valid, send me some. I'll take a look next time I'm on a machine with the code. I also googled for the code I spec'd it off for you, but it seems to have magically disappeared from the internet. Much like the FF11 model+anim spec doc I casually came across years ago.

Yeah, that's the problem I am having, all good TIM2 source code is not on the internet, nothing but bad links. I suppose since the PS2 is getting so old now, and everybody was just happy with Game Graphic Studio, and it is about the only program made for dealing with them. I know that the format is similar to other indexed image formats, like BMP, but I am not the greatest with image formats.

I can send you a bunch of them. I'll package up a bunch and put them on MediaFire, and PM you the link and you can look at them when you have a chance. I'll also include the images converted to PNG, so you can see what they are supposed to look like. I have both 256 color indexed with and without alpha. I'll send some of each, as well as a couple TIM2 images that work with your program. Thanks for your help on this. Much appreciated, and you can make it into my list of credits when I release my tool for KOC2. LOL

[MrAdults]

I had a backlog of 500 or so Noesis crashes that I just hadn't looked at. Turns out the bilinear resampling fix I made in that last release was pretty important, because it accounts for a good half of those 500 crashes. It was affecting things all over the place, because so many things do resizes, and it does resizes for power of 2 before uploading textures on hardware that doesn't support power of 2 textures. Which a surprising number of people are still running on.

[howfie]

i blame dell and compaq and hp for mass-producing even-below-shit-quality PCs; these manufacturers single-handedly killed PC gaming over the last 10 years.

[MrAdults]

The majority of the other crashes ended up being on .edgemodel files that someone (I think chrrox) wrote a script for. So I decided to finally add index bounds checking against vertex array sizes for Python. It's exposed to the native API by providing "Safe" versions of all the bind functions, and Python just always uses the safe implementations now. If you rpgCommitTriangles and the indices go out of bounds, it raises an exception telling you which buffer (position/normal/etc.) would've been read out of bounds.

I recommend everyone writing scripts upgrade to 4.06, it'll probably also make it easier to track down problems in your actual scripts with Noesis not exploding itself every time you feed it out of bounds indices. I don't expect the performance penalty of native-side bounds-checking will matter a lot if you've already bitten the performance bullet by going with Python to begin with, but if you want to disable it anyway you can uses noesis.RPGOPT_UNSAFE.

[MrAdults]

I'm getting a lot of weird crashes today. Someone just got a stack overflow from trying to put Lara Croft from the new Tomb Raider into an insanely-sized quadtree. I don't know what some of you people are thinking.

[howfie]

wasnt me what are you using quadtrees for? a simple model viewer doesnt need quadtrees.

[MrAdults]

Noesis isn't a simple model viewer. It has hundreds of options for data processing and optimization, and I've used it for cooking model and animation data for a number of projects now. All of those processing options of course need to be invoked by the user, which is why it's funny that someone explicitly tried generating a quad tree on Lara with tens of thousands of nodes. I suspect they thought it had something to do with triangle conversion.

[Devilot]

i wonder if the existing KH plugins will work for the new edition coming out, the one in HD!

[MrAdults]

I would imagine the answer to that is only yes if they're using the original untouched assets, and if they're using the original untouched assets, well, we already have those.

[Devilot]

the models, maybe. the textures would be different.

[MrAdults]

Both would typically be cooked per platform specifications. Unless they just used the native format, but they'd likely only do that if the assets were untouched. I don't see them making new assets and putting them through an ancient cooking pipeline.