Due to lack of testing material I missed one important change that was needed to make the vertex buffer work. This was the first mod ever I've seen that used a DMD model.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2014 18:02
by Revilution
Nice to see that my mod are reminding you of minor things to change with the all other things in the renderer LOL.
Btw, to do some help by my side about the new vertex buffer code, i'm going rip all the Doom 3 monsters again using a single mesh for each monster instead of one mesh for each animation-set as i previously did.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 16:28
by Nash
Graf, just as a curiosity... do you think a skeleton model format would reduce RAM overhead costs for models? The reason why these MD3s are taking up so much space is because vertex animation just produces a truckload of data.
Binding skeletons to an actor would theoretically be done the same as it is (mapping states to the skeleton's frame number), and a MODELDEF property would be used to skin the skeleton to a mesh.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 16:39
by Graf Zahl
Sorry, but I have absolutely no experience with skeleton models. But they surely need a lot of additional coding to get displayed properly.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 23:34
by Nash
I'm certain a later iteration of the MD3 format added skeletal animation. Perhaps that would be a good base to get ideas from, if it's decided to be done one day. Anyway, this isn't a request but a curiosity so nevermind. :D
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 11:02
by Revilution
If i remember well, Evolution Quake 3 had that support for that at certain point, then it moved everything with skeletal animations to MD5 which is better to handle, however that Source Port was discontinued due to many issues caused by the overuse of GLSL shaders and other reasons i don't remember.
Well, i'm no source port developer but when i was trying other engines, i noticed they have a common behavior for skeletal animation set, id Tech 4, Unreal Engine 3 and CryEngine 3, for players, all them need make use of preset animations to check where the player is looking, and for enemies, it is kinda even more complicated like in id Tech 4 which creates a real time rotation on bones of the head to make the enemy look to the player properly.
Seeing these things really makes me think that Graf will need literally include a new section of code into GZDoom to make use of all that things that skeletal animations are really meant for, otherwise just having the same limitations as the vertex ones have now, theres no advantage besides memory optmization.
Anyway, needing any tests with OpenGL features, i can try them in my mod to see if works properly.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 6:47
by Nash
All of that other stuff like head rotation and procedural limbs isn't necessary, and as a matter of fact will not even translate to ZDoom's actor state concept anyway. And of course it has a huge advantage: storing data for skeleton animation is only limited to storing the bones' rotation data per frame, therefore much smaller files (and therefore less data that has to be cached into memory).
Vertex animation is so bloated because for every frame, every single vertex's coordinate has to be stored and it will blow up exponentially with models that have a higher poly count. That is why you're getting models that weight 10 - 15 MB or even more.
With bone animation, the mesh is only 1 static frame and the bones are going to deform the mesh on runtime.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 9:02
by Graf Zahl
Correct, but unlike vertex animation where you just push out a frame you have to take care of all the rotations yourself so it's not just replacing the model loader but implementing a completely different way of rendering.
In any case: What format is good?
Where can I find documentation?
Where can I find some models?
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 11:57
by Revilution
Right then.
Well, judging by the tons of models and formats i have them in my computer, seems like the id Tech 4 is still the good for that, MD5Mesh and MD5Anim, since now that id Tech 4 is even open source they seems the best format and well, is still a id Tech segment of engines heh.
There's no official documentation about MD5 model format, however the best place i found about to make use of this is here: http://3dgep.com/loading-and-animating- ... th-opengl/ it provides codes to get the meshes and animations.
Btw Nash, many models have less than 3MB with all animations in Hunter's Moon, mainly because half are from Quake 3, others from Doom 3, these Doom 3 models commonly have 80+ frames in their animations so the heaviest part of the mod is them, and mainly because i didn't ripped them from Doom 3 in the right way, i mean, one mesh with all animations.
EDIT: i downloaded and tested Hunter's Moon with the 175 build, apparantly GZDoom is handling the mod as it did normally back on 1.9 builds, thanks Graf , still i'll not forget to do my part which is optimize the model handling inside the mod.
EDIT2: tested mod at full capacity (using the map i'm doing for it which almost makes GZDoom looks like id Tech 3), still i get low fps due to my shitty computer, around 20fps, but much better than the complete freezes i got for 2-3 seconds in the 1.9 versions.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 18:33
by Nash
Good to hear the performance improvements in your mod.
Graf: as Revilution has pointed out, it appears that the MD5 format would be most suitable, if you'd like to take a look. "MD3 with skeletons tacked on" (as I like to call them) seems to be really rare... I wanted to work with the format once for another non-Doom engine and I just couldn't find much info about it on the internet. That page Revilution linked to would be a good start, has a test model link for download at the bottom... and there's also id Tech 4's source too. It also appears to me that the MD5 stuff are in text format (correct me if I'm wrong?) which would mean they'd compress nicely inside a ZIP/PK3. :D
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 18:59
by Revilution
Yeah Nash, if you try open a MD5 files into Notepad or any other text file reader you will see that header as explained on the site i pointed and after that just a pile of numbers and informations without any special broken character that spams in 90% of other files when you try open with Notepad.
In a Nutshell, MD5 is kinda a model inside a Text, they was meant to be compressed along with the pk4 packages.
Well, the subject already came out of the problem i previously had with Hunter's Moon, for this case of a new support of model format, isn't better someone create a specific topic about it?
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 18:25
by NeuralStunner
Revilution wrote:[...] and after that just a pile of numbers and informations without any special broken character that spams in 90% of other files when you try open with Notepad.
After all, every file type is text, just that a lot of them use funny letters for no reason.
... More seriously, if you want to investigate the contents of arbitrary file types, you should use a hex editor. Notepad is going to break binary content horribly, and you'll have no idea if there is actually more to the file.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2014 16:55
by Gez
NeuralStunner wrote:... More seriously, if you want to investigate the contents of arbitrary file types, you should use a hex editor. Notepad is going to break binary content horribly, and you'll have no idea if there is actually more to the file.
I remember my first hacking attempt as a little kid. I couldn't ever manage to finish this game, which was very frustrating.
So I opened the exe in edit.com. I was sure I'd find source code (because I had seen some examples of Basic programs in a science magazine my dad often bought) and it was just a question of finding the value for the number of lives and increase it. Instead I found unintelligible garbage (obviously), accidentally saved while quitting, and destroyed my game copy forever.
The lesson here is: never open any strange file in your OS's default text editor, be it edline, edit.com, or notepad.
Re: Having problems with my own mod :/
Posted: Fri Oct 31, 2014 12:41
by Revilution
NeuralStunner wrote:After all, every file type is text, just that a lot of them use funny letters for no reason.
Well, what i mean is that looks like they are really meant to be text-read, like this is the start code of Vulgar just for example:
Also editing the MD5 files with a text editor and then saving seems to not break them as it would do as Gez said, so mistakes with Notepad saves can be forgiven with this format.
The MD5 model format comes from id Software's Doom 3 first person shooter, released in august 2004. The mesh data and animation data are separated in distinct files. These are ASCII files and are human readable.
, still i'll not forget to do my part which is optimize the model handling inside the mod.