^ - -^ Origin's original documentation.

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Looks like you're on a roll. Haven't installed DosBox yet; I was working on this texturizing software, and then this morning took a break to start greebling up the Concordia.
By the way, if you come across any Ripper/Bossman dialogues (or monologues), could you save those to a text file? We need to characterize this character.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^- - ^ LOL! Wedge009’s Wing Commander : Script

^ - -^ Also, I've cracked a 'compression' scheme used in Privateer, evidently the game uses an multiple palettes than can be loaded asymmetrically (and with offsets) to access 2^8/2^24 colours at a given time. This is why HCl found the palette unavailable, the palette does not exist! Pity he abandoned developing greater PR1 support after painstakingly piecing together one pallet by hand.

^- - ^ I'll mail him the details.

edit I forgot to add:
LOL! Wedge009's : Wing Commander Academy Animated Series

edit:
^ - -^ Great, I how have a 'central' library of 40 palettes and each .pak may contain as many palettes as there are frames, however I have not discovered how these elements are separated; oh. and to complicate things further the .pak, it's IFF mate, the exe and script all hold, call and load palettes 'independently'.

^- - ^ I'm going to bread.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

LOL indeed; I'm going to mine all Bossman dialogues from there, and stick them into the wiki. I had that Burrows interview, already; but I have a question regarding it: Where, in WC canon, does the Avalon sector appear? (Besides Baruda and Sheol in Callisto, mentioned in the interview, and where apparently Burrows came from...). My question is what games and/or books constitute the info sources for the Avalon sector map? I need to read up on Avalon, to find a good system for the Menesch saga to have happened. I need a system that 1) would have been settled early, so probably towards the south-east of Avalon, so that it would have above average population; 2) That has at least one planet, and 3) that hopefully had a confed shipyard, or that could have had one without conflicting with anything else.

I still haven't got dosbox or tried playing WC, I'm totally into this texturizing program I'm writing. Got it to open a PNG, translate it to floating point RGBA, and then write it back as a PNG, so the real work can begin now. First of all a power of two scaling algorithm with edge detection and de-aliasing...
I found this idea interesting:
http://www.compuphase.com/graphic/scale2.htm
But it could be improved by identifying and storing the angle of the gradient axis for each pixel, then do a selective blur on the angles, and then do angle-based, color interpolations. I don't care how long it takes, since the software will have two modes: test and final. In test mode there's no up/down scaling at all. For the final textures you could leave it running all night, if necessary.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^ - -^ Unfortunately I don't have Privateer 2, I'll see about getting a local copy.
^- - ^ oh, and I'll see about unpacking the Privateer dialogs.
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Post by AzureSky »

@snow_cat

I've been working on extracting the Privateer 1 images for Privateer Gemini Gold. I've got most of them done, with the correct palettes. What images specifically are you looking for?
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

snow_Cat wrote:^ - -^ Unfortunately I don't have Privateer 2, I'll see about getting a local copy.
You can find the full privateer dialogues on the net, same as you did with WC.
Why Privateer 2? Totally unrelated to the rest of WC. Avalon has nothing to do with it, if that's what you thought.. Priv 2 happens in like another universe; a place called the "TriSystem".
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Post by BradMick »

that would be incorrect. privateer ii is a part of the wc universe.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

"That would be incorrect"... Mr Authority spoke... Watch out! :lol:

It is so perhaps by decree; but not by facts.
In fact, the only reference in Priv 2 to anything else WC is an easter egg: A wrecked Talon you find somewhere.
Don't get me wrong; I intend to make links between Priv, WC and Priv 2, within WCU's Priv3 project. But as of yet, or until we do so, there's nothing connecting them.
Except perhaps meaningless dictums and decrees I don't give a rat's ass about.
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Post by BradMick »

privateer 2 takes place in 2790, roughly 100 years after prophecy. the game actually started out as a direct sequel to Privateer which is why the talon is in there, but when chris roberts decided he was going to do a P2, the version we actually became "The Darkening", and when chris stopped his P2 project, the one we have now became P2: The Darkening.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^- - ^ It would seem the my enemy, a Warner-sysop, has been hacking my workstation and deleting files- again.
^- - ^ I have forwarded applicable logs to my Alliant-sysop who will be stonewalled by suit-wearing jackasses babbling on about DCMA and public hysteria instead of punishing their frustrated employee or challenging the union's archaic rules that has created this entire conflict in the first place.
^ - -^ But this is not a concern of yours.


^ - - ^ Thanks AzureSky, I've got most of the palette problem sorted out, I just need to reproduce the palette grabbing routine for .pak files and do some mining. Feel free to post what images you have though. The main focus is station interiors and prewar ships/structures.

^ - - ^ I'll post the WC2 images as soon as I have completed the game (that I can put the images in the correct context) in a week's time.
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Post by ace123 »

snow_Cat wrote:^- - ^ LOL! Wedge009’s Wing Commander : Script

^ - -^ Also, I've cracked a 'compression' scheme used in Privateer, evidently the game uses an multiple palettes than can be loaded asymmetrically (and with offsets) to access 2^8/2^24 colours at a given time. This is why HCl found the palette unavailable, the palette does not exist! Pity he abandoned developing greater PR1 support after painstakingly piecing together one pallet by hand.

^- - ^ I'll mail him the details.
edit:
^ - -^ Great, I how have a 'central' library of 40 palettes and each .pak may contain as many palettes as there are frames, however I have not discovered how these elements are separated; oh. and to complicate things further the .pak, it's IFF mate, the exe and script all hold, call and load palettes 'independently'.

^- - ^ I'm going to bread.
EDIT: There is one palette per scene... the animations within those scenes must use the same palette.

I did this 3 years ago, so my memory on the subject is a bit unclear... (I don't remember how I got a screenshot of every base in the game in order to extract palettes, for example)

I congratulate you on your work with that. I was the person who extracted all the base textures and animations... the way I found palettes was by going through DosBox and taking screenshots... those screenshots contained the necessary palettes...

In addition, I used his DOS version of wcnav to browse the palettes, and then I took the ID numbers and passed those to the Linux command line util along with the palette screenshot in order to create a .ani or a background.

His source had a huge number of bugs, memory leaks, etc... some of which I attempted to fix.

I attached my zip file from October 2004... ask me if you want to know how to use the scripts there.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^ - -^ The cutscene-palettes are stored in the .pak files in sequence with the images. I altered one (deleted) copy of wcnav to each palette it would otherwise 'skip'.

^ - -^ The stage-palettes are stored in two parts, the base-palt is found in optpals.pak and the sub/ovelay pal is in the accompanying .iff (id CU.pak uses CU.iff).

^- - ^ In-game scripts call for a specific palettes (ie: options.iff) .
err.... got o go.

^ - -^ Also, some scenes call multiple palettes to achieve minor colour-cycling effects, for example blinking lights and traveling glare.

(incompletee, wil answer to seperate post.)
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Post by AzureSky »

Privateer base interiors
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Post by AzureSky »

I keep getting a "Tried to upload empty file" error when trying to u/l the rest of the base interiors. I'll try again later.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^ - - ^ Good work.

(continuing what I was saying.)
^- - ^ In-game scripts (ie options.iff) call for specific palettes that form the back and foreground. For example shpdlr_2 uses a base palette of 256 colours from optpals.iff and a 'back' palette of 128 colors from cu.iff. The 'base' palette is loaded into memory then the 'back' palette is loaded ontop of it creating a palette of 256 colours that form the shpdlr_2 background.

^ - -^ Additionally by using 'moving colours' Privateer (like other MCGA/VGA titles of the day) accomplishes minor animation effects like blinking lights and traveling glare by cycling the palette colours responsible for those pixels.

^ - -^I this is also how eye, hair, skin and (some) costume changes are effected as well. This is not represented in my efforts and is why all minor/reused characters have with light brown hair and dark blue eyes in white-grey clothes in my files.

^ - - ^ Also, I have altered my WCNav to use 0,150 and 120,150 that I not lose 50 horizontal pixels to buffer overrun.


^ - - ^ In summary. Your efforts are appreciated and encouraged, extracting the palettes from the running game and grafting them into WCNav is no small feat. But I will continue my efforts for the benefit of my own experience.

(interrupted again.)
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Post by ace123 »

From what I remember, I stopped when trying to get talking pictures to work when I got stuck trying to get movement of different parts of the head.

One of the PAK files is full of different face features, many of them off-center by some weird standard.

If you can figure out how to get talking heads that would be really cool.

Now, you mentioned palette changes for blinking lights. Most bases just use animations for that... look at Perry for example.

You are probably right about doing costume changes using palettes, however... it makes sense that it would use one set of faces for everyone.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^_ _ ^n off center... by the afore mentioned 50 pixels :|

^- - ^ I could convert the portraits to .mng or .gif format, but I'm most inclined to get 'reference' material of the stages and props.

^ - -^ And I have a few .pak files that contain 'faces' including randfeml and randmale, what version of Privateer are you reading?
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Post by ace123 »

Well the way I got the extracted animations into Privateer Remake was by generating .ani's (i.e. a folder with a description file and a series of png's)...

The randmale and randfeml were the ones I was talking about with the faces.

I actually remember having to hack up the code in some cases when the pictures were off center, but I just did it arbitrarily and then fixed them up with GIMP afterwards.

I'm wondering if you know how Privateer knows where to position things... those numbers must be stored somewhere... the way I did it was just moving layers around in GIMP until the animations worked out, and then copying the pixel coordinates.

I was using the CD version of Privateer for DOS... I believe RF was also installed.
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Post by snow_Cat »

^- - ^ the afore mentioned (center) 120,150 for stages and actors :|
^ - -^ I too am using the 1996 cd-rom version.
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Post by AzureSky »

ace123 wrote: If you can figure out how to get talking heads that would be really cool.
This is why I originally started helping out with PGG; I wanted the talking heads. I ended up redoing the commodity exchange and repair bay instead, but I'm still planning on returning to the characters. I've gotten all the heads extracted to a semi-usable state. I just need to generate a bunch of .spr and .ani files, and rewrite a few python files.

(I say semi-usable, since the eyes/mouths shouldn't each take up a 512x512 texture when they only cover 8x16 worth of pixels. :( )
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Post by AzureSky »

here are the zips I couldn't upload before:

http://deeplayer.com/wcplanet/AzureSky/interiors.zip base interiors, landing pad ships

http://deeplayer.com/wcplanet/AzureSky/APPEARNC.zip in-flight ships, all views
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

What a great resource to have! Privateer 3D bases are imminent. Where's Kangaroo? I've also just realized that my Demon model is missing parts underneath; and the engines are made of a more reflective metal than the rest of the body. I'm also going to model those cargo objects, body parts and other space garbage, and maybe make an asteroid model that looks exactly like privateer's.
Last edited by chuck_starchaser on Fri Apr 13, 2007 10:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by snow_Cat »

Try recording the number of leading 'dead lines' and then cropping the images, remembering to restore that offset when rendering; or use a container format like mng that will restore that offset for you automatically.
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Post by AzureSky »

chuck_starchaser wrote:Privateer 3D bases are imminent.
You might want to talk to John Cordell first; I think some of the new screens for PGG were rendered from 3d studio files.
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