Texture packs for Rice Plugin & Jabo's D3D8 Plugin

[dutchMasta]

The majority of the high res texture packs out there are for Rice's plugin, and other than the few on this site for download, I couldn't find any that are for Jabo's plugin.

Just wondering, is it possible to convert them easily, without finding and renaming texture images one by one? Really want to use Djipi's Majora's Mask Pack (http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t=33664) but on PJ64 using Jabo's plugin. Mollymutt's Super Mario 64 Pack (http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?t=43773) also looks good.

It doesn't seem like the texture packs have been updated with the latest releases at all. Is it possible for you guys to do a mass update?

Thanks.

[rswedlow]

Retexturing is experimental for Jabo's Direct3D because that version is a beta.

Retexturing archives are privately hosted in the Project64 beta forum. Reading the other conventions was declared impossible, but Jabo wrote an experimental tool just to help beta members who wanted their work to be available to Jabo's plugin.

[dutchMasta]

Is this tool available anywhere? If so, can you send it to me or give me a link? Thanks for the reply.

[rswedlow]

That would be up to Jabo. He wrote the converter, but he never released it since it's experimental. It was only designed for beta members in service, so the topic died quickly.

[dutchMasta]

Oh right, thanks for the info.

[Jabo]

Oh right, thanks for the info.

Hey I got your PM but it's better to post information here, the tool was pretty crappy it basically made a "database" of what a image was named in "rice land" and another database of what it was named in "jabo land"

once these two databases were complete then it could correlate back and forth, but this tool really does suck, it requires you to basically have every dumped texture in both plugins in order to make this "database" .. it's not a releasable tool really as it's command line driven and written in a scripting language (Tcl)

I'm not sure what is going on with the texture packs, I know we have members here like Kerber2k that are submitting fantastic ones, and I spent a shitload of time converting ones (sometimes without permission sadly which wasn't very nice) we really need an admin to manage the texture pack uploads to this site, I was doing all the work but given how busy I am these days that's not really a great use of my time quite frankly (i'd rather work on the software) so I feel somewhat responsible, Smiff if you are around I wouldn't mind hearing from you about this. I'd gladly hand over the scripts that I wrote but I don't want to be in the middle of writing up documentation on how it works and supporting it!

[Smiff_]

ummm sorry i think i've got enough to do.. texture packs are a whole project in themselves.. who do we have that can manage this (needs to be someone we already know sorry!)

[Jabo]

ummm sorry i think i've got enough to do.. texture packs are a whole project in themselves.. who do we have that can manage this (needs to be someone we already know sorry!)

ya was more asking for your opinion lol not for you to do it !!

we need help ;-) in more ways than one, anyone willing to volunteer please step forward

[dutchMasta]

I actually did a bit myself, tried converting Djipi's Real Majora's Texture pack, but I had problems finding the corresponding textures at times, plus, it takes AGES. No permission and incomplete, so I guess it wouldn't be worth it to release it. Out of the 1800 or so texture files, I've done about 500. Another problem is I mixed it with some other texture packs as well as added a few of my own...

Also, thought this might be a good idea to help organise texture saving, is it possible to have a hotkey, say like F11 or something (or you can customise it), which brings up a little dialog box and you type in what area you're entering, and it'll save textures into textures-save/<folder name>, where folder name is whatever you typed in. Of course, it won't be 100% accurate, but it'll help a lot I think. And you can leave it blank to reset it to the textures-save folder.

[rswedlow]

That sounds intense, but I'm not exactly sure on the procedure. Regardless may I step in with some outside work I did?
http://forum.pj64-emu.com/showpost.php?p=3508

Basically I went through the 1964 hi-res forum and searched for signs of retextures intended for download over at EmuTalk. I also checked my list with MasterPhW's list stickied in that forum; both of us had some details not in the other. Hopefully this will be a valuable resource to whoever's up to the job; it should be up-to-date.

I'll also budge in with my opinion .. that this really sounds like something the individual retexturers should be up to. Maybe that one doesn't need to give permission for us to move their work to another plugin (not that they'll care unlike me), but what I'm getting is that this converter is essentially to simplify the process once the textures have been dumped. Either way you must dump all textures before converting--manually or through Jabo's script. So it's hard to find someome who's had the most experience with every game for the conversion job,

But I think I'm a candidate because while I'm doing that I can fully test games using both plugins for my support project--If I'm right that it's a matter of replaying them. Screwing that middle paragraph there translation: "This should be the job of a team instead of an individual."--maybe like the language support for Jnes? I did waste a lot of time trying to dump every texture from SSB in Jabo's plugin to a resourceful archive.

[zilmar]

Hey I got your PM but it's better to post information here, the tool was pretty crappy it basically made a "database" of what a image was named in "rice land" and another database of what it was named in "jabo land"


Since it is the same texture .. how hard is it to generate the same crc to name it the same as in rice's plugin ?

I know that means you will generate your own crc and then have the extra work of generating another crc, which is a performance hit. But just wondering how hard it is to do ?

[Jabo]

Since it is the same texture .. how hard is it to generate the same crc to name it the same as in rice's plugin ?

I know that means you will generate your own crc and then have the extra work of generating another crc, which is a performance hit. But just wondering how hard it is to do ?

What I originally planned on doing is extending our texture pack format to indicate the type of CRC it wanted to use, where Rice's CRC32 was an option in that, so I don't foresee a performance hit as much as compatibility issues because I doubt with all the inconsistencies between plugins it would work 100%, it's not always the same texture.

The other big problem with texture packs in PJ that frustrates me at the moment is the lack of interest, I think that is mostly attributed to the lack of packs available from us in the beta downloads area. If we could bring someone on the team dedicated to this, both uploading existing packs (and there are quite a few) and converting some that would be great and would encourage me to put more effort into the feature. It's no secret both of our time is very sparse at the moment and I was the one originally doing all the indexing, uploading and converting which given how many other things there is to do was slowing down things.

We need someone dedicated to this, otherwise the feature itself while great will never be popular as it could, and any effort put into it like compatibility will still be useless to most people who just want to download packs from us and can't. It sounds like Iconoclast wants to contribute, and I'm really looking for some volunteers to make this happen, any thoughts on that?

[zilmar]

I should probably make a wiki page or something because we get asked this quite a lot... here's the full answer,

Using the same crc is an easy option that I do want to take a look at more to see if it's possible, it's not a great solution because each plugin might have inconsistencies maybe 75% of the textures would work correctly. So I plan on doing this

I am just looking at loading compatibility, how useable this is another question entirely.

Another thing is that we have to differentiate providing a good feature with providing compatibility for an existing solution that is out there. The existing "packs" aren't really that, they are a collection of images which makes using them rather difficult, Djipi's pack is almost 200 megs with thousands of images that have to be decompressed, not very friendly.

Lastly the biggest issue I have right now is that the existing 'packs' use PNG compression, which if you are downloading an image from the internet is great, but for gaming sucks, a 400K PNG image requires 2-3 megs of video ram, which means it will require the same amount to decompress, again it becomes a question of scale, this won't scale very well as a feature, no commercially available game would ever use this. We use DXT which has none of these downsides and is unique to us at the moment. So it's more I'm avoiding this because at the moment we have the best usable solution and I don't want to fuck it up more or less.

I agree a lot better to use DXT .. if we want to use up a lot of the users HD .. then I would say when you load a png, convert it to a dxt (which I am assuming it is possible). Then save that out again. That way first load is slow, but second load is quick .. also if someone played from beginning to end. They would end up with a complete native one by the end.

A native plugin pack is going to be a lot better .. but to be able to support both is good to

[Jabo]

Sorry I didn't realize you were replying and rewrote my answer, this isn't a technical issue (unless I can't do the CRC'ing) but I need an answer about finding a volunteer to organize this stuff before that. Please edit/delete your response if you get a chance sorry Zil!