IWTE - World editing - (General Discussion)

[makanyane]

urrgh, sounds like the last fix we did for 3dsmax shading broke milkshape version. Do you still have the earlier version of IWTE to use at the moment? If not let me know and I'll try and find one to post.


actually please explain what your creation process is using milkshape and 3dsmax? which do you do the final export from to convert via IWTE? collada from max to import as anim, or ms3d to anim?

[AriovistusSuebus]

With other animations I had no problems. I used the same programs and same methods. Everything worked well. I am confused too.

[AriovistusSuebus]

I also tried with the both earlier versions (I never delete them). The same problem.

[makanyane]

I'm now confused... when you said

I always created some animations, until now I had no problems.

what were you using to get them in game?

[makanyane]

Please could you send me (upload and pm a link) the files, e.g. the .world/collision/animinstances plus the .anim and the your original 3d program animation files that you imported?

[AriovistusSuebus]

Hi Makanyane, thank you for your help. I already foud the reason for the problem; I used two static objects in 3dsmax. Obviously IWTE does not like this. After I merged the both objects, everithing works again. Again, thank you very much.

[makanyane]

Hi Makanyane, thank you for your help. I already foud the reason for the problem; I used two static objects in 3dsmax. Obviously IWTE does not like this. After I merged the both objects, everithing works again. Again, thank you very much.

Thanks for letting us know! Obviously IWTE is not meant to be doing that... I'll try and test to see if I can duplicate the problem, but if you have the Collada.dae file from max for the version that caused the problem it would be useful if you could send it, please.

[AriovistusSuebus]

Thanks for letting us know! Obviously IWTE is not meant to be doing that... I'll try and test to see if I can duplicate the problem, but if you have the Collada.dae file from max for the version that caused the problem it would be useful if you could send it, please.

I already deleted the files. But I will reproduce the problem and send them this afternoon when I am home again.

[AnthoniusII]

I don't get it. My less vertuces Byzantine_large_city.cas has 825kb size.
But our Constantinoplehas 1250 kb size and in our folder we have (propably from other MARKA mod) rus_fort.cas with 4205kb size.
The game loads perfectly with those but not with my Byzantine_large_city.

[AnthoniusII]

The MARKA models of Rus cities with more than 4k kb sizes can not be opened by IWTE.
They were placeholder models any way.
I started to replace them with TGC's settlement common style with sizes that are from 560kb to 838kbs max.

While the style (almost round cities) is the same every culture's model has some differences like an extra gate house or smaller or higher houses.
Here is the Roman (Byzantine to those that do not know history) version.

Nottice the citadel closing the barracks and the administration houses.

[makanyane]

The MARKA models of Rus cities with more than 4k kb sizes can not be opened by IWTE.

I've had a look at them in your released mod. The rus cas's seem to be a slightly different .cas format which includes a load of irrelevant stuff from the 3dsmax status (like last user and full file paths, settings etc. you can see that visually if you open them with a hex editor) M2TW will just be ignoring all that stuff, and wilddog will have a look at getting IWTE to ignore it too so it can open them.

I don't think they're actually large models, that kb size is just due to the extra irrelevant fluff. So you replacing them with your 500kb+ .cas's which do have a lot of poly's will probably be making things worse not better.


I also looked at the released mod's campaign:



On Milano, where I've pointed, you can see that version has the shadow glitch due to having verts too close together in the plane of the light direction.

On Novara and Como you can see you don't have any cast shadows generated for the settlement models. That will be because they're further down the descr_cultures processing path and the game has already run out of the power/memory it needs to generate the shadows, due to accumulated size of the residence models. A lot of mods have launched with this issue, but it's a bad sign that you're overloading things, so as well as losing the shadows you could be causing mod instability further down the line.


If you really want to get bigger models in you probably need to be talking to the memory editing project and not us!

[AriovistusSuebus]

A remark: the recent version does not change the animation time. The second to last did it.

[wilddog]

A remark: the recent version does not change the animation time. The second to last did it.

Can you clarify it doesn't change the animation time of what exactly?
As it now supports changes via collada/blender as well as the milkshape bits plus cas animations as well as world animations?
Just want to be clear as it helps me to find the issue.

[AriovistusSuebus]

In .ms3d file, in comment you enter the texture and animation time. After converting to the .anim file the time stays unchanged.

[wilddog]

Hi, Thanks for the confirmation. Will look into that. Wasn't sure anyone ever used that. I will try and fix for next release though would also recommend possibly trying Blender as its a lot more advanced than milkshape particularly for animations.

[AriovistusSuebus]

Thanks a lot for your work

[wilddog]

In .ms3d file, in comment you enter the texture and animation time. After converting to the .anim file the time stays unchanged.

I was trying to figure out what had happened here. Basically the old process used a fixed number of keyframes and the animation time was needed to understand the total time those frames were spread over. I think we then noticed some animations were having objects flip tied to where the actual frame was v the interpolation to match. We then changed it so that the frames were aligned (which stopped the flip). In theory this meant the time was now worked out from the number of frames. Unfortunately I had forgotten that milkshape doesn't really store the frame time. It has a field but it doesn't get populated right so all you know is how many. The timings should still work but relies on having a keyframe set for each expected frame. Not sure I can easily change back as blender requires an animation frame or it doesn't interpolate correctly and blender is far more advanced on animations than milkshape. I may try and fix again later but suggest you just keep the old exe around in case its a problem you need to use it for.

[AnthoniusII]

Not all animations need fixing. The vanilla animations hide some treasures like the javeing throwing without the "extra" javelins holding as resetve to disapear (99.9% of mods do not nottice that).
The solution they found is to place in milkshape model the javeling spearhead look backwards (downwards in idle position in game) to point to enemy before they throw it away.
By placing the javeling like a spear but assign it in bone_weapon_weapon01 by 100% you have these results.
See the three phases of javeling throwing,

The horsemen in the middle aims and gets ready to throw., the one infront already launched his javeling and the last of the three is about to take a new javeling.
But there is a catch. The decorative javelings in the left hand tent to disapear when javeling launched UNLESS you will follow our example Koultouras found . Decorative javelings disapear only when sword or in their case lance is used.
Open our Pelastoi model and see our group comments and bone assignment. Also nottice that all sword scabbards are -as possible- looking to the ground (gravity).


Those were about to be published in my Realism/Gravity tutorial years ago but never had the time to write it.
Inorder to have gravitation for the body accesories open our cavalarii and our scutatoi models and see carefully the distance from their body the scabbards are and the bone assignments and their position in the two axis they have in the start.

[henryVI]

Hi there - new to modding. Trying to fix the ole CTDs from custom settlement sieges in the not-to-be-mentioned DAC. Playing on a MAC, game looks geourgous and campaign and field battles work - its the custom settlement problems.

I am following the tutorial here http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...5#post15256985

but I have run into a bottleneck - I cannot run the IWTE on a MAc - I have been trying WINE with the wineskin and all that (I have used wine before on many other .exe) however cannot get the latest version of IWTE to work.

Does anyone have a workaround? I.e. a Mac version of this .exe or even an older version of the IWTE.exe file I can try running?

Thanks in advance so much!

[henryVI]

IN regards to above post if anyone has got IWTE working on Mac through WINE, please let me know how !