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Reinstalling from scratch didn't do the trick. Strange how this popped up only after the Friday revisions, as the program was loading all colours just fine well before... anyway, at the moment, I'm using qt4 and qt4-devel latest revisions (4.3.4-11) under Fedora Core 8 / KDE.

Delete "~/.config/Unknown Organization.conf" as well. The creation of this file stems from an earlier bug in stressed. Why Qt still gives this file precedence is beyond my comprehension.

Materials are stored in a config file, and since the program is in active development the default settings are changed frequently. When upgrading you should delete the old one (~/.config/stuntstools/stressed.conf) to force re-generation.

Well, I tested it quickly and it doesn't seem to be the .conf... I still have to try erasing everything on the stressed folder, though.

Did you run "svn update" from the project root directory? If you ran it inside the src/ dir you missed the some files. Also, if the source tree is polluted with old object files and deprecated sources the easiest solution is to just delete and do a fresh checkout.

And then, as a natural consequence, polygons, bitmaps and colour labels are not painted properly on stressed, but are just displayed all in black. I wonder if it could not a bug, but my system/Qt's fault... in that case, is there anything I should look for?

Materials are stored in a config file, and since the program is in active development the default settings are changed frequently. When upgrading you should delete the old one (~/.config/stuntstools/stressed.conf) to force re-generation.

But what about parameters of the truck ?

I tend to use the Indy setup when testing. I'll leave the tuning job to someone more competent in that field.

the only doubt I want to check is whether Blender still decomposes n-gons into triangles for n>4.

Blender has an internal primitive, "fgon", for storing composite faces. I don't know if it's accessible through the Python API, the OBJ importer will create them, but the exporter can't read them... I'll have to investigate it further.

does Truck pass under the bridge...? 

Yes, and it can jump half-way through the ceiling in tunnels. It's an interesting question because we don't know how custom vehicle collision is handled, or if it's even possible to modify.

I gave the OBJ format a shot, and I think it suit our needs just right. Materials are stored in an external file with fixed names in the range of Stunts000 - Stunts255. Just import these materials into your modeller. When exporting a shape from stressed the currently selected paint-job will be used. Sources are available as usual. It has only been tested against Blender's OBJ loader/writer...

Here are some screenshots from a fully drivable "truk" shape, slightly modified. The 3SH file with two paint-jobs is attached to this post.

Added the ability to manually edit primitives. Right-click on the primitives table to add/remove rows. This makes it possible to create simple debug shapes by hand.





Next up is import/export...

[Duplode]

Duplode - Nice work! Speaking of materials, I just tried altering the number of paint-jobs. It turns out vehicles can have anywhere from 1 to 127 paint-jobs. In other words, the counter is a signed integer, but 127 should be sufficient. I've added a widget to stressed for setting the number of paint-jobs. Since altering this number can be destructive, you'll have to explicitly hit enter or move focus to another widget before the change takes effect.

hmm, what format dose stressed inport/export out of?

None yet, but it'll have to be a simple, text-based format with widespread adoption and support for n-gons. The biggest obstacle is how we should handle the limited amount of materials.

Aside for the little quirks unimportant at this stage, the significant point I noticed was the "Unknown" data being stored as an 8-byte sequence - we had found there are (at least) two separate blocks of data in the Unknown region, with 4-byte sequences associated to each polygon. I'm trying to investigate those sections but the observations still make little sense to me.

I just needed a place to stash the values while testing. I've been away for a few days, but I have now checked in some updates. Unknowns are correctly parsed according to our current knowledge. Unknowns, depths and vertex co-ordinates are now editable for easy testing.

At a second look it seems like Unknown1 holds a range of angles from where the primitive is visible, used for advanced culling. This is what makes a bridge polygon visible from all sides, while, for example, the tunnel ceiling is only visible from beneath.

it would be nice if we could export an individual material list for each paint job on a shape to an external file and then import it later on, so that we can select and distribute paint jobs for custom colour sets easily.

Hm, wouldn't it be easier to just swap 3SH files? Of course, patches are welcome.

That reminds me of something I always forget to look by myself: is the light blue sky rendered as a "3D" shape as well?

Not that I know of.

Is there any way I can get that editor? I couldn't find it in this topic...

I'll try to whip up some Windows builds soon*.

*) Definition of "soon" is subject to change.

I love the dark clouds!

Good catch! The clouds are in fact 3d shapes as well.

stressed can now open and display shape resources. Only materials are editable, and saving is still highly experimental. The 3d view doesn't draw wheels and spheres yet. If you're editing GAME1.3SH the truck animation won't work because stressed rebuilds the vertex list, animation transformations are performed on fixed vertex indices. Also, the game may crash because Stunts' shape parser is very picky about the 1-3 last bytes of each shape resource. We'll have to solve this riddle first...

To upgrade your local copy:

Code Select Expand


# Delete old config
rm -f ~/.config/stuntstools/stressed.*

make clean
svn update
make
src/app/stressed &


When you select a primitive in the first table, its vertices and materials will appear in the other two. The primitive in question will be highlighted in the 3d view. Use mouse buttons + move to control the 3d view. I have no idea how Duplode managed to make all those skins in a hex editor, but this approach will hopefully make it easier...

My problem with this editing thing is similar to church vs making clones.

Don't worry, installing game mods is voluntary. Unlike unborn clones, you actually have a choice.

Wow, that 3D editor looks sweet!  I have a number of feature suggestions boiling in my head but I will leave them for later, after we actually get to play with the thing.

I have some ideas as well, but most tasks should be left to a real modelling tool. First priority right now is to fully understand the shape structure.

Shape support in stressed is shaping up. I've compiled a list of the shape materials, and the patterns seems to match the originals:



Also, here's how animation is done, it's just cycling through the paint jobs:



I have to do some more debugging before checking in the code...

Is it you on the picture ?

Hehe, I'm not that cool.

It works like a charm!

Swell, thanks for the feedback. I'll start working on shape support.

My recommendation: As stressed will probably soon result in an huge amount of different modifications made by the community, it should also contain later some kind of a "theme and resource switcher", where you can select the available mods from an internal database and load them into the stunts files before playing. Like we have 40 cars in the database, and with stressed-switcher you can select the 12 you want to use in the game, it renames/loads the resource files for you, and then you can start stunts

We tried to standardize the deployment of mods in the Midtown Madness 2 community to avoid incompatibilities. The problem was that nobody cared to make the effort of merely naming their file soup correctly as long they just got their mod loading...

while playing noRH FTT yesterday I realized we only need one modification in the game code to eliminate RH: just need to make the "continue driving" menuitem disappear. Problem solved.

I suppose this would only block yourself from unconsciously RH-ing? You'd still have to trust the other pipsqueaks?

Howdy cody! We've just figured out the 3d shape format, there's more information on the wiki: Car files, Resource file format. I'm adding 3d shape support to my resource file editor, so your car may very well go into the history books as the first user-made vehicle.

You can't use custom textures, Stunts offers only a fixed set of materials. You're limited to 256 vertices and polygons, but a wheel only occupies 6 vertices and 1 polygon. Further, polygons can have up to 10 sides, so try to use triangle fans or n-gons instead of triangle strips.

With a little patience I think we can get this shape in-game.

Just added bitmap import/export. When will we see the first custom dashboard?

Added support for loading, displaying and writing bitmap resources. Only the unknown header values are editable at the moment, but stressed can now open all PSV files. Here's the VGA palette used.