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Only an idea for Stressed innovation: to make the car edition faster, it would be cool to have a special duplicating option which converts the new polygon to inverse X coordinates.

On that same line, one addition I'd propose would be vertex reordering in polygons, so it would be easier to flip their faces. Anyway, both major recent changes - culling data displays and weld coexisting vertexes - were really useful and help a long way in making Stressed a capable 3D editor for Stunts shapes, in particular for testing and experimentation.

Added both features in SVN, although this can already be done with existing 3d modelling software...

Just one small thing, Dstien: it seems you inserted back that 49x line on shaperesource.cpp which (tries to) export wheels as lines. Could you please revert it to r35 behaviour? Thanks in advance 

Hm, are you sure? It doesn't look like I reversed the change...

Now, on to further experimentation: after a lot of head-scratching, I have a reasonable, semi-functional, theory on how the four culling bit sets work.

Thank you! I'll need a little more time to digest it and do some experiments. I think we'll fully solve the mystery in time for Zak's submission deadline.

It's a hard track for a championship claiming to celebrate the unskilled. I'll see if I can get below 3 minutes.

I didn't have any trouble getting the shape in-game. Did your file include all the needed shape resources (car[0-2], exp[0-3]), and did you name your file correctly? Shape resource files saved from stressed must have the .3SH extension.

• The reason some vertices are in the wrong spot is due to the small scale of your model. The stock car1/car2 shapes are about 100 units long, your shape is 15. This means there are only 15 possible Z values beacuse Stunts uses integer coordinates. To gain precision your model needs to be bigger.
• Move your model along the Z axis so it's centered above (0, 0, 0) to align the model with the fixed collision box and the center of mass.
• Wheels are needed because they are subject to transformation.
• As described in my first post you have to use a fixed set of materials.

Hope this helps!

Stunts polygons are not nested in structures, so all edges are open. This allows you to use two-sided faces or remove unneeded ones.

And finally, a rather wild suggestion on how to make the displaying/editing of culling data more transparent (if a bit more complicated): Perhaps the program might read the unknown flags, display them as checkboxes and then display the remaining 30 culling bits as a pair of 5-digit octals. That way, each octal digit would amount to exactly three circle sectors, and thus one would be able to read/write patterns more easily.

Done.

As for the vertex list remarks, there is another relevant characteristic of Stressed 3D editor associated to that issue: when you pick a polygon and edit one of its vertex coordinates, what Stressed actually does is to create a new vertex and replace the original one in the chosen polygon, instead of updating the old vertex position. Not only that makes it necessary to adjust all adjacent polygons to displace a vertex, it also means large-scale edition of complex 3D shapes with ~200 vertexes (some of the more detailed car0 shapes, like Corvette and Audi, have about that number IIRC) is probably impossible under Stressed.

I've implemented a compromise, check the "weld coexisting" box below the vertex list to update all vertices with the same position simultaneously. Stressed doesn't save any duplicated vertices, so scaling existing models is not a problem.

After looking a bit more at the culling data displays, I realized I understood them less than I thought, so I decided to finally build a debug shape (a cute pair of multicolored giant dices) and watch the bits in action systematically. Some of the observations actually enhanced my confusion, but others were quite definite.

Thanks for the details. Some of the culling data makes perfect sense, and some do not. Maybe some of it was edited manually by the game designers?

Good to see you're still around, cody! Try the latest stressed build, I've fixed this issue. You may have to scale up your model a little, and you should use the predefined Stunts materials. To get the materials into your modelling tool just open a stock shape exported from stressed.

Reminds me of something from Carmageddon 1...

Points 3 and 6 define the inner radius of the wheel (or the radius of the wheel proper) on its internal and external faces, respectively.

This turned out to be complete baloney. It looks like all the points outside the center of the wheel marks the radius. As discussed recently in the Lada thread, the height:length ratio is not 1:1, so the wheels are actually elliptical. The tyre width is decided by the game.

Very ingenious scheme... After looking with a puzzled expression at all the colorful tiles for a while, I got to understand it properly... except it is still not clear to me what is the purprose of the negative direction half (mask 0x0001FFFC / the underside of the disks) of the culling data, as I (maybe for not looking that hard into it) could not find any example of in-game shape where one might identify which viewing directions are covered by it.

Look at polygons facing down, such as the bottom of a car body.

And finally, a rather wild suggestion on how to make the displaying/editing of culling data more transparent (if a bit more complicated): Perhaps the program might read the unknown flags, display them as checkboxes and then display the remaining 30 culling bits as a pair of 5-digit octals. That way, each octal digit would amount to exactly three circle sectors, and thus one would be able to read/write patterns more easily.

I was hoping we wouldn't need to edit this data manually, but I'll put it on my list.

(Edit: the original post mentioned dividing the 32-bit set by 4, rounding down, to drop the final bits, which is obviously pointless if you can just pick the 30 initial bits and do whatever you need with them...)

The usual way to this is to read the interesting bits through a mask and then do a shift operation.

Duplode, have you tried loading the blueprints into Anim8or?

Kevin Pickell - "High precision collision detection using integer arithmetics - A hands-on approach"
Zak - "The case for permanent settlement"
Krys TOFF - "The sophisticated world of contemporary pop music"
Duplode - "The ultimate guide to modern mainstream programming languages"
CTG - "Modelling vehicles from a free market era"
dstien - "Confident mingling in an alien on-line community"

could you change the 3D shape exporting function so wheels are exported as hexagons and spheres as lines?

Does it work as intended if you comment out line 484 of src/shape/shaperesource.cpp?

Dstien updated the Wiki solving the riddle of how the angular culling bytes (Unknown1 and Unknown2) work - a very cool find, I'd never have the insight of looking for bit-level data structures!

Finding the 18 seconds penalty shortcut in Z88 mentioned by CTG seems a lot tougher...

I've tried to come up with a way to visualize the culling data using four discs. The two outer ones in green (first facing up, next facing down) are part of what I've called "horizontal cull data". The two inner ones in yellow are "vertical cull data". This screenshot probably illustrates this better than my incoherent English:

Set bits are marked with red/magenta. The patterns are clearly matching the model's vertical or horizontal polygons. I'm not quite sure how it works for inclined surfaces, so I haven't attempted to implement an algorithm for generating this data yet. Maybe you can help me making some sense of it with your academic background?

1, Can you give labels to polygons to help grouping in Stressed (or are you planning to give an option like that?)? That would be a very useful aid for car designers!

We could make our own resource types for storing meta data, but I don't think it's worth the effort. Again, I'd like to stress that stressed is not supposed to become a high-level modelling tool. I'm too lazy to do that.

2, Is it possible to change the position of speedometer and RPM indicator sticks?

According to Duplode CarBlaster allow you to change these variables. Said pipsqueak have documented the car parameters very well, so implementing it in stressed should be straight forward.

I also have some questions: Do you know how to convert any downloaded pictures into Stunts compatible indexed 8-bit PNG to change the horizont or any other .pvs files? Have you thought on a user friendly CarBlaster with easier and more didactical handling? Is there any site for uploading and downloading new cars? What about the sound/music decoding? (sorry for asking too much but this topic is more than interesting! )

Thanks for the kind words. Stressed can import and export PNGs. As long as the original image dimensions and unknown values are maintained existing bitmap resources can be replaced. There aren't any addon repositories yet, but I'm sure the marked will respond when there's demand. I don't see much value in sound addons, but reversing the formats sure is an interesting challenge.

Here is the current situation: bodywork is done, color set will be changed. I still see some minor display errors in the game and it also has some wheels disorder. Dashboard edition is coming soon and the last step will be CarBlaster...

Wow, amazing work, CTG! Did you do all that by hand in stressed? Regarding the wheels, they have to be the first primitives in the list (see the stock cars for reference). For some details, like lights and multicolored surfaces check the Z-bias flag to solve potential z-figthing. Can't wait to see a new dashboard, but I hope you'll hold back the final release untill we have resolved the last unknowns in the shape format.

The Stressed view is promising, I miss only the 3D bumpers. According to the game pics bodywork is a bit too long and the rear lamps are overlapping with other elements.

That is a curious point: the shape always looks shorter/taller than it actually is when editing on Stressed or Anim8or, so CTG probably should overcompensate the height a bit. That left me quite puzzled while working on the Skyline (using near-exact coordinates grabbed from those 2D models), as the car looked way more boxy than it should on Stressed, but in game it looks almost perfect.

This is illustrated even better when using taller shapes, such as the truck. We could workaround the issue in stressed by changing the 3d viewport aspect ratio. Modifying vertices on the fly would probably be harmful due to Stunts' limitied coordinate resolution, I don't think we can do anything about it in external editors.

Have you a workaround to suggest me?

Open the file in the previous build, in the field called "Depth" assure that the value never exceeds 3. If you didn't modify those values yourself you may have found some new flags...

If you enter integer values, Anim8or will export them without adding decimal points, which in turn will make Stressed fail to import the resulting .OBJ (as it expects input with decimal points).

This may have been fixed now. I'm not sure what I was thinking when I wrote the original OBJ vertex regex.

You're right about Blender, my biggest beef about it is its lack of native ngons support.

PS2.: Dstien/Zak, could you please make this topic a sticky?

Hm, I don't know. Shouldn't we try to branch out into new threads now that we've got a whole new forum? This humongous thread contains some speculation and misinformation on my behalf, nobody should rely on it as a source of information for other than archaeological purposes.

[Latest build:]

Get the latest code from our Git repository if you want to compile the current version for your exotic platform of choice.

Latest build:

stressed-20210307-windows-x86_64.zip (2021-03-07 git 9827f7c1a88db5bf92f1ac9e752bb3f14bd378b3)

• Prevent flickering when switching between resources.
• Added more text resource ids from GAME.PRE/MAIN.RES/TEDIT.PRE.
• Safeguards against overwriting packed files when saving.
• Fixed ".sfx" unpacked extension.
• Improvements to resource size guessing.
• Default option for parsing unknown resources is to treat as raw data.
• Import and export of binary data of raw resources as binary data.
• Added a "move to" action to the materials list.
• Adjustments for building with QT 5.15 and MSVC 2019 (LowLevelMahn).
• Replaced old bugs with new ones.

Notes:

• The Windows build linked above requires having installed the Visual C++ redistributable. Here is a direct download link for its x64 version, and the relevant downloads page (it shows up under "Other tools, frameworks and redistributables" at the bottom).
• This binary is not statically linked, unlike the 0.2.1 one. That might change in a future, non-snapshot release.

Older builds:

stressed-0.2.1-win32bin.zip (2013-01-20 hg e0d96cd9b0b1/git d441c71db6b03adb4f8c0efffd231f6f6f477b49)

• Change order of shape paint jobs (Duplode).
• Raw binary editing of opponent path and car tuning resources.
• Opponent speed resource editing.
• Simple animation sequence editing.
• Link to user manual on the Stunts Wiki (Duplode).
• Ported to Qt version 5.0.
• Statically linked Windows binary.

stressed-0.1.0-rc5-win32bin.zip (2008-11-26 SVN r51)

• Automatic cull-data calculation.
• Y-axis ratio correction in 3d view.
• Improved material selection list.

stressed-0.1.0-rc4-win32bin.zip (2008-10-28 SVN r45)

• Flip and mirror primitives.
• Material selection list.

stressed-0.1.0-rc3-win32bin.zip (2008-10-26 SVN r41)

• Draw wheel and sphere primitive.
• Optionally weld coexisting vertices.
• Highlight vertices.
• Easier cull data editing.
• Visualize cull data.

stressed-0.1.0-rc2-win32bin.zip (2008-10-14 SVN r33)

• Change order/rename/duplicate/insert new resources.
• Partially open files containing unsupported resources.
• 3d view mouse picking.
• Fixed interpretation of primitive flags.

stressed-0.1.0-rc1-win32bin.zip (2008-10-06 SVN r29)

• Initial build.