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Hello there, I am currently working on a totally new set of W3D tools that will support all 3dsmax versions (yes Gmax included). So far I got some of the tools working in latest 3dsmax 2019 release and tested in Gmax as well: - W3D Flags Helper: This tool lets you select all nodes in scenes based on their flags as they were originally exported. That way, you can set all the flags in the renx tool so the model can be re-exported correctly. - Textures Browser Let you browse, any textures in selected folder including the ones in .big, .mix, .dat and .pkg files, you can also extract them from these files. - Big & Mix Tool View, extract, modify, add files from/to any C&C game's mix, big, dat, pkg files or create new package file supported by the games. - Hierarchy Builder (work in progress) Lets you fully build Hierarchical Models, by selecting any w3d file, you get a list of all the possible models that can be added to it's hierarchy and so on, basically you start with the parent and add any child that are available for it, then do the same for each child, LOD, skins etc... so you can experiment building different models. It's kinda reversing the process, instead of importing the w3d files required by a certain w3d file, with this tool, you get a list of all the files that depends on this particular w3d file, so you can pick one you want to add and then get a list of any files depending on this one as well... (Kinda hard to picture it, but will try to provide some screenshots or videos soon when I get a stable version of it. Worked fine till I messed it all up... ) - W3D Importer V2.0 (work in progress) My latest W3D Importer, like all of the tools now imports straight from pkg, mix, big... no need to extract anything. Supports C&C Renegade, C&C Generals / Generals Zero:Hour, Earth and Beyond, Battle for Middle Earth / Battle for Middle Earth II, and probably RA3 that I haven't tested since I can't find it in my old games cds which I probably lent to a friend and never got it back... For hierarchical models, LOD, Skins emiters etc.. it will list any dependencies before importing a w3d file, and import every w3d files required by the model, you also have an option to search for these files before importing to make sure you have them all (if its from the original games then you have them, but for fan made stuff, at least you get a list of all the w3d models you need in order to fully import the complete hierarchy.) Some model names not always reflect their file names, so having this tool to scan your folders to find them is very useful. EDITED (2019-03-05): Deleted the part where I was asking for maxscript help files, as its now irrelevant since I found a better way of making sure the scripts supports any 3ds max versions, and gets the maximum performance from each known versions to date. Abjab

I see where you're coming from, and believe it or not, there are times I still feel the same way, even with how many recommendations I have. To be honest, recommendations don't really amount to all that much other than letting others know who's good and who's yet to prove themselves. The secret is in learning the weak points of units, what units/weapons counter what units. Using the correct unit against another can pretty much shut down another if you know where to strike. Another key, is trying to be efficient with the money you have. Do you put what you have into researching upgrades at the cost of not having much to defend the base with? Do you buy the most expensive units in the hopes of doing some permanent damage to the enemy base? Or do you go for something in the middle of the two? No one unit is good against everything. There are some that come close to that, but at a great cost in some way for it. Try to experiment with different units and where you're striking the enemy. Who knows? Maybe you'll have an ahha moment.

Today is February 26! And you know what that means! Today we celebrate the anniversary of C&C Renegade, the game that started it all for us. Check out the tribute video made by Havoc89 and the Renegade X team![blurb]February 26! Today we celebrate the anniversary of Command and Conquer Renegade, the game that started it all for us. Come check out the tribute video made by the Renegade X team![/blurb] [thumb]custom_thumb_ren.png[/thumb]

Join us tomorrow for the IA Testament Birthday Bash Game Night! 7PM CST/1AM GMT on the best IA server, don't miss it! [blurb]Join us tomorrow for the IA Testament Birthday Bash Game Night! 7PM CST/1AM GMT on the best IA server, don't miss it! [/blurb][thumb]thumb_ia.1.png[/thumb]

These players were just recently team hampering GDI on the map Mt. Pass by spamming dynamite and even beacons to break open an incredibly large hole within the walls surrounding the base. Personally, I find making any holes within the walls questionable at best, but to the degree this went was far beyond just getting the team faster access out of the base and into personal trolling territory. Here are some screenshots and the chat log of that round. client_3-1-2019 (Edited).txt

haha you guys broke the forums

Thanks, glad to hear it, but at the same time I feel so sorry and ashamed of myself for letting you guys work with such an obsolete tool for so long while I had a much better one for myself that I wasn't even using. And worst I ended up messing it all up. So for that reason I think you guys all deserve to get what you should have had since a long time ago.

Hi thanks, and yeah I spoke to Jonathan. I still have lots of catching up to do, but right now my main goal is to finish/fix that latest w3d tools script I never released. Over the time I kept adding more and more stuff to it, especially when I realized, after installing Battlefield for Middle Earth II, that it used the later w3d engine (sage) and that my importer worked well with those (after just commenting some line where it was checking the w3d model version and preventing it to import). Then, has it was getting pretty voluminous as I was implementing all the newer chunks for all the latest games using the w3d engine, I started to rewrite the whole thing in a much better C like fashion overwriting the only working script I had at this point (yeah that was pretty dumb). And then had my son, family life and work took away most of time I had for gaming/programming. Plus the wife hated everything that had a screen, just spending 5 minutes in front of my computer would start endless arguments that lasted for days every-time. So I ended up leaving the script in a real big mess. And as for what brought me back to this, well first of all, its winter and freezing cold here in Quebec. I am a concrete pump operator and construction is pretty quiet right now. My son is now 13, lives with his mother and I only have him on weekends, consequence, I have something I didn't had for a long time: spare time for myself. A few days ago after spending a few hours watching some videos on youtube , I see this video appears in the suggestions: Who killed Command and Conquer (Like if the answer to that was a total mystery for anyone...), and going through the comments I spot one from Jonwil! That triggered the whole thing , I decided to take a look at what happened to this community and if anything was still going on. I googled "C&C W3D" and first result got me here, downloaded the launcher browsed through the forum topics a bit, and I have to say, I am pretty amazed by all the great work that has been done over the years and by projects still being worked on. 2 years ago, around the same period of the year as right now, I received a request to release another importer for 3dsmaxI made for Omikron The Nomad Soul (Another absolute great classic game from 1999 staring David Bowie by Quantic Dream). I based that importer on my w3d-importer script and from what I learned back in the days after spending hours studying maxscript in Gmax and that one single w3d header file that Greg Heljstrom had shared to all of us with the Renegade modding tools. I knew nothing about 3d before Renegade came out, and now just opening any 3d file in an Hex-editor I can quickly spot the major components like what vertices, triangles chunks look like and etc... That is how I actually manage to reverse engineered the 3DO format (Omikron game) then I successfully decrypted the compression algorithm used in their textures file format (3DT). I just made all this stuff for my own usage just for fun, and it has now just become an habit to peek into 3d files just to see how they look like. And now over 15 years later after I wrote my first w3d importer, I am quite surprised to see that it is still one of, if not the only way to import w3d files today. Of course thanks to Jonwil who put a lot of efforts maintaining and fixing it, so it still can work. But that script I actually shared to Thomas Anderson before I left the Renegade modding community for good was just a basic version of the real big gun I had that I couldn't release back then because it was making some people very mad at me and would have got me real big sh**t.. Yeah you all know of which Egocentric Assholes I am talking about. Not mentioning all the hate I was getting from the growing w3d modellers community, some very talented creators, who were just pissed by the idea of having a tool out there that could be used by anyone to "steal" their work. I could fully understand their point even though I am more of a sharer than a keeper and would actually be flattered to know that others would use my creations to learn. Hence the many tutorials I wrote for a ton of stuff over the years. Like this one I found in here for example: So instead of creating any drama and risking weakening this evolving creator community I simply left and never looked back, till now... But all of this is far behind now. And it is now the time to finally get this thing out once and for all, so here I am, back at it. Abjab

Thankyou for including the GMT time, muchly appreciated. Terms like EST and CST tend to get re-used in different countries. (1AM GMT = 12PM noon in eastern Australian time Sydney).

HI! Thanks for looking, what about a search for *.chm in your 3dsmax folder? Though it might not have been included with the installation, there might be some "advanced" function during the setup to select more features that are not installed by default, but I have no clue, I went from Gmax/3DSmax5 to 3dsmax 2017 so I don't know anything about versions in between. I just installed 3dsmax 2019 which like 2017 all users stuff like scripts, UI, etc. are in user's appdata\local\autodesk\3dsmax\ENU\... instead of 3dsmax root folder in program files, there's actually lots of 3dsmax paths all over the machine now. Nothing like older version that would just install by default to C:\ I have looked everywhere online for hours now, (even translated some Korean pages...) and I am stunted to see that I can't even find old cached pages of earlier maxscript docs... Well thanks again for looking. Its not like I totally depend on it, but I'd like to write a final fully working script that would work no matter what version the user have.

Updates to "launcher crashes 15 seconds after login" and cpu core pegging I've now tested extensively on my desktop (Radeon HD 6850 with 'radeon' in-kernel drivers) and my laptop (Intel HD Graphics 405, Braswell). Both exhibit these problems reliably. A few posts ago I mentioned these two problems being miraculously fixed, it seems that was pot luck that day. I have not been able to reproduce it again. My best guess is I had some part of dotnet or the launcher still hiding away as another sleeping process. Anti-aliasing deep dive All of my statements about AA not working are wrong, it's my eyesight that needs checking. From the best I can tell: the launcher's AA setting is proper old-fashioned MSAA and the in-game FXAA setting is the crappy 2D filter AA. Each setting is only accessible from the afore-mentioned places, so it takes a bit of searching and discovery. FXAA immediately makes me unhappy. Small objects in the distance (vehicles, people) go blurry. The AA settings don't seem to have any effect on close foliage (where texture pixels >> screen pixels): Some further away and overlapping foliage with different in-game texture filter settings (both MSAA and FXAA turned off): I'm trying to read up on supersampling; but I'm a bit confused. Some sources refer to it as a generic category of AA methods that MSAA sits into (where MSAA usually uses a square grid); others suggest it's a more spacial interpolation/filtering thing (ie filtering of textures on planes inclined to the camera). Screenshot reference: Wine version=wine-4.0, Card=Radeon (BARTS) HD 6850, Driver=in-kernel radeon Linux 4.19.18_1

Hi @ganein14 thanks for the heads up. I will look into it and talk to him.

>Pokémon Off Topic >not opening with best starter of the Galar region

Best? You implying that there's more than one FRAYDO? Last I checked that's Heresy in my book.

Happy birthday Renegade! Thank you Westwood guys for creating it. It made me get into serious modding and get a RL job thanks to the experiences gained from it.

I can't believe I've been modding the w3d engine for more than half my life 😮

Well, we've hit another snag, so I guess its probably a good thing that I didn't actually make a bet on this Not to worry though, you'll get it as soon as its ready! In the meantime though, I can tease something else that I've been playing with! (which may or may not ever see the light of day) Ladies and gentlemen, I give you......the first ever......*drum rollllll* 1080p screenshot of "Renegade Alert" version 0.900!!! Yes... I, for some reason, felt it was necessary to dig this dinosaur up and give it the 2019 TT scripts treatment. What you're looking at, believe it or not, is none other than "Keep Off The Grass", officially the oldest public map in APB (and the only map included in version 0.900). However, it bears almost no resemblance to its 17-years newer self. Why am I showing you this? Good question. Guess I'm just a nerd who enjoys playing with old forgotten games