Abjab

But not for Renegade models, right ? I know the version I released was limited compared to my personal version, but I don't remember making the public one that bad before releasing it. Anyway, its just a question of days now, I have fixed and finished writing lots of missing parts of my new scripts now and, I am attacking the importer section of it.

Huh ? why would it break those triangles apart ?, lol I think I should have a look at this script you guys have, because originally it didn't do that, anything relating to the base geometry of the model was 100% working, also animations didn't get imported per-frame... not at all, that I know for sure, I spent so much time figuring out animations back then. I was pretty excited when I had got it to work perfectly, in fact I would import some animated models, and after just setting the flags back manually as they were exported, I could reexport the files and both w3d (original from the game and the one re-exported) would be exactly the same. Or are you using coolfile's w3dimporter ? I heard something about his didn't support animations. OH ! Perhaps you are talking about later Models from Generals/ZH or BFME I/II ?, Yeah those models used compressed animation if I remember correctly, and the original w3d-importer didn't support those till I re-wrote it a few years after. But as for that triangles breaking up, I've never seen anything like that happen even on those later models.

Just wanted to let you know that you can still get a working Identification Code online through TurboSquid website here: https://www.turbosquid.com/RegisterGmax/Index.cfm Just create an account if you didn't have one already in the past. Then copy and paste your code.

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

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.

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

Wow, talk about a blast from the past ! Great work guys, keep it up.