Dissecting the Stunts files, trying to. Anyone know more?

[dstien]

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.

[Duplode]

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.

[dstien]

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.

[Duplode]

Curious...but now fixed

[dstien]

Added the ability to replace all references to a material within a paint-job. This makes skinning a little less tedious. Just right-click on an entry in the materials table and select "Replace" from the context menu.



No graphics testing without teapots.
Attached the 3SH file with four paint-jobs in case someone want to play with it.

[Paleke]

1- I'm not sure how to edit the dashboard to make it look like a truck.

2- I was never good at editing cars with CarBlaster (and a truck usually has more than 5 gears, so probably will be easier to use the same gear relations as LM002 with different weight, as Duplode said)

3- How about the cockpit height? I mean, when you are using the F1 view (from inside), does it look that you are at least as high as in the LM002? (again, I haven't tested it yet, so I don't know)

1. That would require exporting the STDA*.PVS/STDB*.PVS bitmaps, editing them in your favourite editor (of course using only the default palette available to Stunts) and importing them back into the .PVS files. With stressed, importing and exporting of bitmaps is trivial, so artistic skills are the only limiting factor...

2. Maximum number of gears for a car is six, if 5 vs. 6 really would make a difference. Anyway, I have no clue about how should a Stunts truck drive... but I could assist with the technicalities if needed (BTW, in case you're wondering about parameters, be sure to check the Wiki)

3.That's pretty simple, just question of modifying a parameter in CarBlaster (CAR*.RES). 

Ok, just two questions then:

1- Where can I download stressed?

2- Where can I download the truck files?

[CTG]

HUAHUAHUAHUAHUAHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!! EXCELLENT! You made my day!

[Krys TOFF]

Ok, just two questions then:

1- Where can I download stressed?

2- Where can I download the truck files?

1 : when finished it should be available there : http://code.google.com/p/stuntstools/ but so far only dstien and duplode have it, and it works only for Linux.
2 : check page 8 of this topic, 3SH file is attached to one post of dstien.

Marvelous funny teapot ! I love it too.

[BonzaiJoe]

I must say that also made me laugh a lot! The teapot looks like it's a bit worried about where it's going to fall down, but at the same time very fearless. It looks a bit like it's sleeping, or only half awake.

[CTG]

I wonder if it's possible to make a lot more detailed car skeletons for Stunts (~5000-10000 points polygon, like NFS PU cheat cars). Or more exactly: do you think Stunts would be able to handle more difficult polygons written in the same program?

[dstien]

I wonder if it's possible to make a lot more detailed car skeletons for Stunts (~5000-10000 points polygon, like NFS PU cheat cars). Or more exactly: do you think Stunts would be able to handle more difficult polygons written in the same program?

Unfortunately the shape format is limited to 255 vertices and 255 polygons. The teapot has 114 vertices and 96 polygons, so the limit isn't that bad. Remember that Stunts don't have lighting, shading is faked by preset colors. Without real-time shading high-poly details won't be visible. The low screen resolution and lack of floating point co-ordinate precision doesn't help either. Anyway, I think Dosbox would struggle when rendering such a number of polygons in an emulated software pipeline, and it would probably hit some arcane memory handling barriers as well.

Stunts' classic collision and dynamics simulation wrapped in modern, hardware-accelerated rendering is probably our holy grail. A man can dream though. A man can dream...

[Duplode]

The teapot looks like it's a bit worried about where it's going to fall down, but at the same time very fearless. It looks a bit like it's sleeping, or only half awake.

It just closed its eyes out of fright...

Ok, just two questions then:

1- Where can I download stressed?

2- Where can I download the truck files?

1 : when finished it should be available there : http://code.google.com/p/stuntstools/ but so far only dstien and duplode have it, and it works only for Linux.

@Paleke: if you really intend to start modifying dashboards at once I could mail you the exported .png files (their sometimes not very intuitive roles in composing the dashboard is described in the Wiki) .

I wonder if it's possible to make a lot more detailed car skeletons for Stunts (~5000-10000 points polygon, like NFS PU cheat cars). Or more exactly: do you think Stunts would be able to handle more difficult polygons written in the same program?

Unfortunately the shape format is limited to 255 vertices and 255 polygons. The teapot has 114 vertices and 96 polygons, so the limit isn't that bad.

Something pretty simple (now that we have .OBJ import/export) I really want to try soon is scaling down the car0 shape and using it as car1. If the resulting model still looks good without floating point coordinates we'll be able to race cars almost as detailed as the ones in the Car Selection screen, with potentially very cool results for some cars (Corvette, for instance) and much better possibilities for bi-colour patterns (and also it would make modelers able to worry with just one shape, and then scale it accordingly).

Stunts' classic collision and dynamics simulation wrapped in modern, hardware-accelerated rendering is probably our holy grail. A man can dream though. A man can dream...

Games won't really get much cooler than that...

[CTG]

My dream: using Big Foot/Monster Truck cars in Stunts.

[Duplode]

My dream: using Big Foot/Monster Truck cars in Stunts.

Graphically that is not hard to do, but the real fun would be if we got to modify the physics... Just imagine running over slalom blocks!;D
BTW, CTG: Several posts ago you mentioned some NFS Porsche colour scheme you'd enjoy seeing in game. Could you please point me to an image of it, so I can evaluate the feasibility of adapting it to our P962?

---

I performed the downscaling tests mentioned in my previous posts with promising results. Here are two shots comparing the regular car1 Corvette to the downscaled car0 (in the background, really a bad choice of angle for the images ):





The "new" Corvette has quite a number of cool new details... the overall shape is only very slightly different from the original one (a bit lower profile), and the downscaling is perfect, as all car0 coordinates seem to be multiples of 20 - as if the developers originally intended to use downscaled car0 models themselves but later aborted the plan (hardware limitations?). Implementing the downscaling was rather simple - export the shape, open the .OBJ in a text editor, copy the vertex table to Excel/OOCalc, divide all coordinates by 20, paste the table back in the .OBJ and import back in stressed. The only caveat to this procedure is that stressed, as dstien pointed out, exports just one paintjob per .OBJ, and thus the resulting new shape will have only one colour available. I suppose there is a simple workaround to this though, namely repeating the process for all seven paintjobs and importing them all to a single .3SH later on.
And now, I'll display the motivation to those tests: the large benefits to my American Blue colour scheme...

[CTG]

German style GT1...