XeNTaX

If a game's textures is known to use RGBA32 for their pixel format, and I can determine that by just width*height*4, and then when I look at some of their other textures but the size of the pixel data is (a lot smaller than) width*height*4, is there some clue to what kind of pixel format it might be?

if size is dx*dy then could be dxt2-5. if size is dx*dy/2 (or was it by 4 I forget offhand) then could be dxt1. if size is a little larger then maybe mipmapped. other than those if size is not predictable then I look into the various tga or see if data deflates. but if they do use crap like png or jpg they usually include the header. after that then I give up lol.

Kinda depends on the platform. For 360/PS3/PC, DXT will be common, and the common sizes are as howfie just said. Sometimes you'll also see custom normal map formats like BC4/BC5, which correspond to noesis.FOURCC_ATI1 and noesis.FOURCC_ATI2. There is also a custom variant on DXT1 that I came across for normal storage which explicitly uses the full range to describe 2 color channels and the B/Z is calculated on the fly. I don't know if there's an official name for it or if they just rolled their own by decoding it in a pixel shader, but it's decodable with noesis.FOURCC_DXT1NORMAL. (I arbitrarily named it DT1N internally because I was too lazy to go digging to see if it was a standard) PSP games will also sometimes (but far more rarely) use DXT1-5.

Then there are other platforms with proprietary/less-common texture formats like PVRTC and VQTC. (which both come in 2bpp and 4bpp, VQTC being not quite exactly that due to the existence of a codebook which can also vary in size based on whether or not it's a mini-VQ image) And there's always the possibility that they're using a custom form of RLE or some other image compression or even a more elaborate custom wavelet-based compression or something. Those kinds of things are pretty much impossible to nail down based on size alone.

Otherwise you can look for r5g5b5p1/r5g6b5/etc., or 4bpp/8bpp paletted images are common across many platforms although not so much so with current-gen/next-gen data. Checking arbitrarily ordered/compacted color data is made easy with imageDecodeRaw, or imageDecodeRawPal if you have separate palette and pixel data.

finale00 wrote:If you want something supported upload samples in the relevant forum and maybe someone will look into it.

oh yes... I have the files, but where may I send them?, can you provide me the link to that forum?

In Señor Casaroja Oasis page I can't find any forum. the only one I know that have any relevance with Noesis is this one...

Something's weird with MD3 export. Vertex order? Normals? I don't know for sure.

Open Q3Team Arena's models\powerups\obelisk\obelisk.md3 and resave it as MD3.

The autoSprite2 planes break!

He was referring to the 3D models/archives/etc. sections, whichever is appropriate to your request, here on Xentax. The Noesis thread isn't for requests, short of perhaps stuff related to core Noesis functionality, but even then whether I entertain those requests is up to my whim.

This does bring up an issue that I think should be addressed. As Mr.Mouse noted, the reason Google ad's were pulled is apparently because some Mass Effect thread from 2007 still had links to some game data on some file hosting service. Maybe those files got reported and that flagged Xentax because it had been linking to them, or maybe it was the other way around, who knows. But we need to stop linking to game data out in the open.

This is a tricky problem. I can't say I really condone passing game content around, but at the same time it can be convenient and not necessarily unlawful, because it's a lot easier to look at a few small files than it is to rip the entire game yourself, and making those links available to our members makes it easier for all of the programmers here to grab them instead of having our inboxes privately spammed with game content that we may or may not legally have access to already. Often, some of us may legally own the game but be out of town, be too lazy to go find/unpack the disc(s), or not have hardware on hand to view/extract the contents of the game, as is often the case with myself. I legally own Hyperdimension Neptunia for example, but would've been way too lazy to go rip files out of it to try untiling its pixel data, and the only reason I addressed that in the thread here the other week was because someone had thrown up links to a few of its textures.

I think that first and foremost it should become forum policy that no links to game data of any sort should be publicly visible. I'm not saying I condone the links at all but I think this is a huge step forward from where things stand now. It may be a good idea to just make all domain-external links visible to members only. I can't think of a good reason most links should be visible to non-members anyway. Second, it may be appropriate to direct first to an intermediate disclaimer when following links out to any known file hosting service, maybe even to any external link at all. This disclaimer can put responsibility for the download on the users themselves and force them to agree that they have legal right to be downloading whatever it is that they're downloading. I don't know if that's even possible if you consider the EULA and various regional laws, but the more important thing is removing the responsibility from Xentax. At the same time though I don't want this to come off as being merely a "covering our asses" attempt, as I personally think that we should strive to be compliant with various digital copyright laws as best we can as a matter of simple principle. There are various legitimate organizations coming forth these days with the goal of understanding and preserving the content and technology behind videogames (which is so often lost when companies get bought or go defunct), and I think Xentax has potential to have a legitimate and respected place among them if we can make more of an effort to prevent abuses in what we're actually trying to accomplish here. It's just a matter of trying not to destroy actual programming/development productivity while doing so. I also don't think it's a bad idea to set time limits for games and say that no content may be uploaded at all for games that are newer than x years old. I don't see that this would hinder modding attempts for new games in any way, because let's be honest, who is going to be writing an exporter for a game if they don't already own it? How else are you even gonna test your exported results?

On top of that, we should probably make links expire or something at some point. We don't need 5 year old links biting us in the ass, and if no one's looked at it and written tools after so long it's quite unlikely to happen that long after the fact.

I also understand that many of our users come from places where there is no real digital copyright law to speak of, but I think as a community and organization it should be our goal to strive for general legal compliance in as many places as we can, particularly as the propagation of digital copyright in various forms to many of those countries that haven't yet adopted it is in many cases inevitable in the coming century.

leilei: Autosprite2 planes? Is that dictated by some kind of surface flag or is it mangling actual geometry?

Edit: Another idea I like is to flag users as trusted coders, and only make files/file links available to them, or have a special tag for file links that only they can see. If you can prove that you wrote some useful tool for doing something or other with some data, you get to be flagged. Otherwise you have no place doing anything with that data because you aren't going to do anything productive (in the context of this forum's goals) with it. I'm sure there would be some resistance to this idea, but I see it as being very potentially effective.

MrAdults wrote:leilei: Autosprite2 planes? Is that dictated by some kind of surface flag or is it mangling actual geometry?

deformVertexes autosprite2 in the shader would make a plane appear rotated towards the camera by its length. Jedi Outcast of course, had a ton of these.

A mangled improper autosprite2 looks like a triangle.

Blender can't export a model with working autosprite2's either. Right now my only real business in using autosprite2 is producing muzzleflashes (along with autosprite) and rocket trails, since crossing two planes together seems ugly

I'm rather asking... screw it, just talk to me on Steam.

Sounds good to me... there are only less than a dozen of us actively looking at games anyways so why post samples out in the open? people who want to request a game, instead of posting links to samples, can just make the request and say if anyone's interested pm me or something. Even I've posted a sample file here and there, mainly to jap games since i live in jap town... too lazy to go back and edit my posts though . avoiding association with mediafire and the likes might be good thing.

@MrAdults. : Agreed. We will try and make this happen.

Feature Suggestions:
#1 LightWave LWO2 support
#2 Left-Right arrow key recursive-folder decent model preview mode.

Why:
#1 Croteam uses lightwave, and so do a lot of japanese developers. It's an easy chunk format. I can provide samples and the most recent SDK docs, which are kind of outdated a little. There are also some undocumented chunks (like for per-vertex normals).
#2 I am currently working on batching One Piece, which, after ripping, has like over 6,000+ models in several thousand directories. Man it would be nice to have a program where you can just say: here is a directory, load the filenames for all models in this directory and all its subdirectories and when you press the left or right arrow key it moves to the next (or previous) model preview. Kind of like Irfranview does with images but without that annoying dialog when you come to the end of the current directory. I can give you my subdirectory scanner code written in win32 if you want it to save you some time.
#3 He he he I'm lazy... I should probably coding this myself lol . Every time I start programming with D3D, COM makes me want to kill myself.

I see a lot of sites make it impossible to directly link to external content and rather link to a redirecting service such as http://anonym.to/en.html this one is a really good one and combined with no non members seeing links I think we would be good.

like porn sites?

chrrox wrote:I see a lot of sites make it impossible to directly link to external content and rather link to a redirecting service such as http://anonym.to/en.html this one is a really good one and combined with no non members seeing links I think we would be good.

How about a page that every outgoing links gets directed to, which will control who can access what links.
And then slap on some ads there lol

In anonym.to they have this java code to protect all the links you have:
I don't know if this could be useful.

Also there are services like this where you paste your links and you have to open the page, copy the adress and paste it in your web browser adress bar:

http://paste2.org

Edit:

Why not using the code tag to wrap the link??