Wing Commander Toolbox
- Thread starter UnnamedCharacter
- Start date
UnnamedCharacter
Captain
I figured they would be and I am working on them right now. I don't know if I will have them ready for the next release, but they are coming.
Bitterman
Commodore
it would be interesting if its possible to replace the models and textures and textures of WC4 with higher res ones from WC3
as for WC3 if its possible to replace the blue space skybox with the PSX and WC4 ones
Pedro
Admiral
For me it's just really useful to have a good file structure reference for the WCIV remake.
Surprisingly a lot of file formats changed from WC3 to 4, 4 broke a lot out into seperate files which had been baked into one with 3.
So thank you UnnamedCharacter, whenever it comes I'm sure it will still save me many a headache.
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Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
I believe the models and textures are the same resolution in both games. They had tried to update Wing Commander IV to display higher resolution textures but cut the feature late in development... which meant that the new textures for the ships had to be reduced back to the WC3 level which left them comparatively muddy looking from the hoped-for higher detail going away.
AD
Finder of things, Doer of stuff
Yeah, the WC4 textures actually look decent on their own, but there's something about the way they get displayed in-game where they kind of have a gritty low quality look to them. By comparison the WC3 textures come out cleaner looking but mainly because they have simpler textures moreso than anything to do with resolution.
100% the toolbox already runs on Linux. I don't have any windows PCs anymore. I am extremely interested in an MVE encoder. The two resolutions it will need to support are:
320x165 - For cutscenes from movies.tre / cdXmovie.tre (Assuming someone wanted to make a WC3 engine mod/new game with a new story)
126x106 - For Comms Videos stored in cdXmiss.tre (for adding Colour Comms Videos to WC3 PC edition)
It's the second resolution I'm more keen to get a compressor for, since I think Wing Commander 3 can be hacked to play movies in the same way WC4 DVD edition/WCP does it (e.g with a different codec and maybe an external player), I think full colour comms videos is a better goal to aim for than modding in new cutscene files. Looking at WC3's movies,and the first thing I noticed is the Movie files are very similar in naming to WC4's cutscenes.
sc_0010a.vob - WC4 DVD VOB
SC_6.MVE - WC3 MVE
My suspicion is that WC3 PC has Green Comms videos to keep it consistent with WC1/2. I notice also that the space background is blue in WC3 PC which also keeps it consistent with WC1/2. Yet on the 3DO console port space is black and comms are in colour.
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Bitterman
Commodore
i still went on to look at armada with CRT Dithering filter the results are far impressive
which kinda makes me believe that WCIV textures were made with those in mind due to the Console releases too, since PS1 and N64 games took advantage of the TV's of its time to make texture more detailed thanks to its video output.
i wish that someone could take a screenshot of PS1 3 and 4 using a TV to make a good comparison.
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
Console was more of an afterthought on Wing Commander IV, the Playstation conversion didn't start until after the PC release had wrapped. There was a 3DO version in development earlier but it didn't get very far.
What happened on WC4 is pretty well documented: a major feature planned for the game was higher resolution textures... but the team responsible for updating the engine couldn't pull it off in time. The feature was cut very late after most of the art had been generated and so the higher quality textures had to be reduced to the same size as those in WC3... which resulted in the super cool details turning to mud.
I've found some fun things just tinkering with the toolbox. A lot of WC3's ingame audio is able to be read in Audacity as raw audio in unsigned PCM 8-bit Mono 11025hz format. I've been able to extract all the sound effects for in space, as well as the speech audio. There also appears to be text information for German/French/English subtitles encoded in the IFF next to the Audio data as well. I also found that the PC Datafiles seem to already have code for handling the TCN News updates, so I'm not quite sure why those aren't in the game. I wonder how hard it'd be to add those back in if we could encode them to .MVE format.
Pedro
Admiral
That's really interesting, thanks. WC4's audio was easy (it's just a wav file, header and all) but I hadn't looked at WC3 yet. I'll add support for that now.
Interestingly video seems to be the reverse, where WC3 has the complete header and WC4 has only frame data.
Pedro
Admiral
I sent a PM but I thought I'd bump the thread.
What was the code you used to turn the shape files into PNGs? HCl's site documents the RLE encoding for WC1/2 and WCP but nothing for WC3/4.
Are the WC3/4 shapes documented anywhere that I may have missed?
This tool lets us get started with the assets but it would be really helpful to have the code (a lot of the images for WCIV in particular don't seem to be tied to the preceeding palette file, I'd like to make a tool to test each image with the various palette files, saving the correct one, in order to match them up, I'd also like the ability to use the original files from the TRE so that would be really useful).
What was the code you used to turn the shape files into PNGs? HCl's site documents the RLE encoding for WC1/2 and WCP but nothing for WC3/4.
Are the WC3/4 shapes documented anywhere that I may have missed?
This tool lets us get started with the assets but it would be really helpful to have the code (a lot of the images for WCIV in particular don't seem to be tied to the preceeding palette file, I'd like to make a tool to test each image with the various palette files, saving the correct one, in order to match them up, I'd also like the ability to use the original files from the TRE so that would be really useful).
Bandit LOAF
Long Live the Confederation!
The news segments weren’t a new thing for the console version, they were part of the first unit shoot and were cut very late in the process when the decision was made to support early 1X CD-ROM drives that could only read 63-minute discs.
UnnamedCharacter
Captain
More extraction support for WC3, this time adding the ability to extract movies. The result is in the AVI format using uncompressed frames; therefore the file sizes can be quite large, especially for the opening movie: about 1.5 GB.
From the command line:
This release also includes all the reversed hashes for WC4 tree file names. Thankfully, the hashing algorithm used for WC4 was improved, and therefore greatly reduces the number of collisions; making my life a lot easier.
The tree format for WC4 is identical as WC3, so you can use the WC3ToolsCmd console application.
As usual, see the first post for an updated download.
From the command line:
WC3ToolsCmd.exe exmovie DATA\MOVIES\END.MVE
This release also includes all the reversed hashes for WC4 tree file names. Thankfully, the hashing algorithm used for WC4 was improved, and therefore greatly reduces the number of collisions; making my life a lot easier.
The tree format for WC4 is identical as WC3, so you can use the WC3ToolsCmd console application.
WC3ToolsCmd.exe extree wc4\GAMEFLOW.TRE /hashes:external\wc4-hashes\GAMEFLOW.TRE.txt
Code:
DATA\GAMEFLOW\BRANCH.PAK
DATA\GAMEFLOW\KEYCODEE.DAT
DATA\GAMEFLOW\KEYCODEF.DAT
DATA\GAMEFLOW\KEYCODEG.DAT
DATA\GAMEFLOW\LOADGAME.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\LOADOUT.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\LOOKMISN.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\LOOKMOVI.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\LOOKSCEN.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\PROLOGUE.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\SCEN_A1.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\SCEN_B1.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\SCEN_B2.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\SCEN_B3.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\SCEN_B4.IFF
DATA\GAMEFLOW\SCEN_C1.IFF
...As usual, see the first post for an updated download.
wiese.hano
1st Lieutenant
Does that mean, we are able now to create custom missions für WC3 and WC4?
UnnamedCharacter
Captain
No, for WC3/4 the toolbox only supports extracting game data and not creating or updating files.
Pedro
Admiral
Nope but there is an old HCl tool that will let you.
The CIC has a list of mission commands and their arguments, I could match them up to their binary codes if anyone fancied making a new mission editor though. The work we’ve done to run the missions is equally useful for making a new editor.
GuybrushSF
2nd Lieutenant
Hi
3DO files extracted with Phoenix emulator : http://dl.free.fr/sGAri4gEe
3DO files extracted with Phoenix emulator : http://dl.free.fr/sGAri4gEe
AD
Finder of things, Doer of stuff
Thanks, I'll take a look at these. Overall reading the disks isn't the biggest challenge with the 3DO files. Do you have more info on what process is used with the emulator to do this and how this compares to just reading the files directly with something like Opera decompiler? We also have a thread going here (mostly focused on the WC3 video but covering all 3DO stuff really) discussing video file formats. Does the phoenix emulator let you actually convert the source videos or does it just let you capture from it's output?
Pedro
Admiral
WC3 PSX also contains .MVE files for the com videos; sadly wctoolbox can't handle them (FAILURE; Array dimensions exceeded supported range.)
The file extension could be misleading, but if they are basically the same same it would be really useful to have support for WC3 PSX comm videos, ODVS was hoping to do some tests combining luma and chroma from PC and PSX.
WC4 would be far more useful but those comm files seem to be buried in a .STR file whereas these look like they *might* be an easy win?
The file extension could be misleading, but if they are basically the same same it would be really useful to have support for WC3 PSX comm videos, ODVS was hoping to do some tests combining luma and chroma from PC and PSX.
WC4 would be far more useful but those comm files seem to be buried in a .STR file whereas these look like they *might* be an easy win?