News W3D Hub 2018 Roadmap

[OWA]

Hi everyone!

Now that 2018 is in full swing I'd like to just take this opportunity to recap on what we managed to achieve last year as well as what we are aiming to do with W3D Hub this year! 

2017 Retrospective

2017 was a productive year for W3D Hub! We outlined our roadmap in this thread last year:

 As you can see, we pretty much achieved everything that we set out to do, which is great!

• Work was started on fixing Tiberian Sun: Reborn and is proceeding as planned.
• Development work on Red Alert 2: Apocalypse Rising continued at a great pace (especially in the latter half of the year)
• Expansive Civilian Warfare saw a release on the launcher, which has been mostly a great success!
• Red Alert: A Path Beyond saw a plethora of updates that steadily iterated and added to the gameplay over the course of the year.
• The stats system has been significantly upgraded since the beginning of last year, but the new stats website hasn't been pushed live just yet. We didn't put together the planned media pack that we talked about, but I feel that we are slowly building the player-base up to a good number.
• The download manager went live, but hasn't seen too much use just yet. Hopefully this will change over the course of this year.
• Discord has been running for a while now and has been a great success!
• Integrated chat via IRC was implemented into the launcher! Hopefully we'll look at tightening this up a bit more this year as well!
• The bug tracker is back up and running. If you have issues to report, please submit some bugs for us!  We'll be making this more visible in the coming months.
• Advanced Tags and Prefixes was reinstalled and works as intended!

So with 2017 being a success as far as our plans were concerned, here's what we have planned for 2018!

W3D Hub Roadmap 2018

A New Look

First off, we have decided that the W3D Hub logo was due a freshen up for 2018, so we've updated it a bit. the layout is still the same, but it is now a lot crisper with flat colours on the text that make it look a lot more contemporary. Here's what we have decided to go with.

Over the course of this month, we shall be updating the logo across all of our games, services, and channels; so keep an eye out for it!

New Development Tools (SDK)

Mammoth Tank Assembled

We're proud to announce Mammoth; a brand new tool that we're hoping to develop and build on throughout the year. Mammoth is a full replacement for the venerable Commando Level Editor (that shipped with Renegade) that will allow for a much higher degree of flexibility when creating mods and maps on the W3D Engine. Here are a couple of screenshots:

 

It may look a lot like level edit and that's because it is currently being developed as a reverse engineering of that piece of software, however once that is complete, we can then begin adding some more outlandish features. The viewport controls have already been improved, allowing users to use the RMB and WASD to navigate the viewport and LMB to select objects without changing between view and select modes!

Special thanks to @jonwil for spearheading this project as well as @saberhawk for laying some of the initial groundwork.

If you're a mapper and would like to help us develop this new tool by providing feedback on all aspects of the functionality, interface design and user experience, please get in touch with us. (@Raap and @Timeaua we'd especially like to hear your thoughts!)

3DS Max 2017 W3D Export Plugin

After years of using Gmax and 3D Studio Max 8, a new 3D export plugin is finally within our grasp! With this new plugin anybody will be able to export their models and animations from new versions of 3DS Max that are 100% compatible with Windows 10. This is really big for all of us, because it allows us to make use of software that has newer features that are much more powerful (than Gmax and Max 8 are) and easier to use.

Here's a screenshot of the new plugin in Max 2017. It's not quite ready, but we hope to release it sometime this year!

 

Also, because the new export plugin has been built from the ground up, we can consider the possibility of porting it to other 3D modelling programs. We know that not everyone can get their hands on a copy of 3D Studio Max, so we are also looking at integrating the plugin to work with Blender, which is a popular free software package for 3D modelling.

Big thanks to @cfehunter for making this pipe-dream a reality! 

Launcher Updates

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the W3D Hub launcher has been receiving a steady stream of updates! Here's what we're looking at this year! As always, big thanks to @danpaul88 for fighting OpenReach in order to help us improve our lawn chair!  

User Interface

After the addition of the Chat tab, work began on re-vamping the launcher's UI to make it more user-friendly and generally nicer to look at. This project is still ongoing and we hope to improve the user interface further over the course of 2018.

Here's a shot of our latest internal mockups:

The final design won't look exactly the same, but this is just to show you the direction we are moving forward in.

If you have any feedback on the UI, please let us know in this thread or make a new one in General Discussion! 

Single-Client Packages

Currently W3D Hub is the only download source that the launcher connects to when downloading packages. This is problematic because if we suddenly go viral, our servers will get rammed pretty hard. So to counteract this, we will be working on single-client packages!

A single client package is simply the launcher bundled with one of the games. The installer will install the launcher and the packaged game, then the launcher will update it to the latest version.

There are a number of free game websites on the internet that frown upon the use of launchers, so another reason to do this is so that we can get more players into the games as well. Hopefully we'll be able to accomplish this task this year too!

Renegade Support

Even bigger news is that we've been talking about the idea of Renegade support. Since Renegade isn't free, we'd have to get the launcher to detect a Renegade installation and then manage it that way. With that done, we'll be able to update Renegade with the latest community patches through the launcher and offer a full comprehensive listing of all currently hosted Renegade servers.

If we can pull it off, it will mean that the W3D Hub Launcher will truly be the one and only Renegade launcher to serve the C&C community, which is quite exciting! Please bear in mind though that this is a pipe dream, so it may not happen. But we figured it's good to tell you guys that we're playing around with the idea anyway.  

Infrastructure Updates

You guys may also be interested to know that we have been updating our infrastructure as well! Here are a few points of interest.

Stats & Ranks System

Work has continued on our W3D Stats system this past year, with a new website being developed to display all of the awesome data! This website will be mobile compatible, so that you can check your ranks on the go! Big thanks to @rantanplan, @Silverlight, @moonsense715, @danpaul88, @triattack and others who I may have missed for making this happen! Here's a small preview:

We'll also be looking into the general presentation of achievements at some point to see if we can make the requirements more visible in-game. Watch this space!

Forum Skins

The APB skin is well underway now and should be finished fairly shortly! Here's a small work-in-progress shot. There's still some colouring to work out, but it is nearly ready!

Keep your eyes peeled for the classic look around the forums soon!

We're also aiming to develop more forum skins in the future for the other mods (starting with ECW) and then also one that mirrors the theme that's featured on Renforums (just for those people who love a bit of nostalgia!).

You might also see that there are two new buttons for H2 and H3 on the post editor. If you highlight some text and click one of these buttons it will turn it into a cool heading, just like the ones featured in this thread!  

Keep posted for more news on this!

Confluence

After a few emails back and forth to the good folks over at Atlassian, we have managed to secure ourselves a licence to their documentation tool, Confluence.

What does this mean? Basically it means that we will be able to port all of our scatted design documentation into one centralised location so that we can work much more effectively as a team.

We might be able to make parts of it public in the future so that you guys can keep up with our design decisions as they happen, but we'll be evaluating it closely first!

Downloads

Sadly C&C Files isn't coming back anytime soon, but over the course of this year we'll be uploading some more files to our very own download system! This includes some old mods for various C&C games that we've been hoarding along with some, Renegade-specific files, rarities and more!

Hopefully we'll get this stuff online as the year goes on for you guys to play around with. More news soon(tm)!  

Freelancers

Do you want to work on content for any of our games, but don't want to have the responsibility of being a full time staff member? Then our new Global Freelancers Initiative (GFI) is right up your alley.

What we want to be able to do is open a more fluid communication channel between mod leaders and people who enjoy making cool stuff for the games, so that any content that's made by fans can be picked up by us and made official even easier than before.

What we aim to do is setup a channel on our Discord server for Freelancer and Devs to collaborate with no expectations or pressure. Just nice environment where you can share images and files of what you're working on, as well as collectively pool knowledge, so even if you don't know how to mod the games, we can give you some tips and tricks!

Check back for more info on this soon, once we've ironed out the details!

Events & Prizes

This year we want to try and run more events and competitions! We have stockpiled a number of C&C posters in the W3D Hub vaults that need winning, so we'll have to organise a way for people to win them! Hopefully we'll scratch our collective heads and launch something soonish!

Big thanks to our printing comrade, @CCHyper for these wonderful prizes!

Game Roadmaps

Here's a brief rundown of how the games are doing currently!

Battle for Dune: War of Assassins

More updates for Battle for Dune: War of Assassins are on the way! @TeamWolf recently posted up an update on BFD's new Emperor Worm mode map where you and several others take control of masterfully well simulated Sand Worms! Check it out below!

Keep an eye out for more exciting updates!

Expansive Civilian Warfare

With ECW's release last December as well as launcher integration, @Jerad2142 is looking to expand on the game and add more features! He's currently working on a new mission system into ECW due to multiple player requests. It's going to be pseudo-random and be mostly assassination or fetch quests with some branching objective paths (like save the person instead of killing them sometimes). 

Keep an eye out for that in up and coming ECW updates!

Flyin' high in San Casina!

Also, if you're getting lost in the sewers, our new pal @Veyrdite has your back.

Red Alert: A Path Beyond

Nothing too big is planned for this year with APB. Updates will continue to roll out with @Pushwall at the helm which will further tune and refine the experience. There was an update posted last Saturday, so go and check that out!

Infantry maps should be getting some overhauls at some point and there are still a few units to implement, but that requires artists that we currently don't have spare.

If you are a 3D Artist or know other 3D Artists who may be interested, please get in touch!

Red Alert 2: Apocalypse Rising

Apocalypse Rising had an incredible second half of last year and we're hoping to keep this up with more gameplay iteration and more of a conscious thought about what maps we actually want to release with. To quote the Chinese Dozer from Generals "We have big plans!"  

Here's a quick shot of some Tesla Tanks playing in the snow!

Stay tuned to the forums and Discord for more info as we progress through 2018!

Renegade: Interim Apex

Interim Apex (previously Imperial Age) is set for a new and updated release this year as well as some other big news so stay tuned! @Kaskins has been working hard on some new maps as well as a full compliment of naval units! Check out the latest update from this massive project here!

Keep your eyes peeled in the coming months, because the new release will definitely be something to watch out for!

Tiberian Sun: Reborn

Reborn 2.0 is coming along steadily and is due out this year! There are some changes to a couple of GDI buildings that are being worked on currently and a major re-balance is planned, pending spare time to work on it.

Also, Nod's very own femme fatale, Oxanna Kristos, posted in the forums at the start of March. What can this all mean? 

2018 Is A Go! That about covers it for what we have planned this year! I know it's been said a lot in this thread, but stay tuned! There's even some stuff that we aren't brave enough to mention just yet, so there are plenty of irons in the fire, as they say!

Thank you everyone for continuing to support us and may 2018 be a year to remember! Bring on the future! :D

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[blurb]Big news for this year! Come and see what W3D Hub's plans are for 2018! Read about updates to the community, infrastructure, tools and of course the games![/blurb]

[ChopBam]

Here's to another year of amazingness. ?

[Mojoman]

No Art Deco look for the new logo, maaaaannn.

[NodGuy]

Awesome! 2018's going to be exciting.

[Raptor29aa]

Wow... 2018... I gave up map making after my last computer kicked the bucket, but with the announcement of new tools I think I might give it another try. 

Looking forward to all the amazing stuff!

(Reborn roboot sounds Epic)

(RA 2 is making excellent progress!)

(keeping fingers cross for soviet migs)

[JigglyJie]

Reborn... Reborn this year? Colour me excited. I do generally hope there will be more media updates this year, if possible.

[Wyld]

Very impressive and exciting!

[TIberiumGhost]

I am looking forward to what is ahead this year. I wish you all at W3D the best of luck in getting those plans and goals accomplished.

[CMDBob]

The roadmap is looking really good, and I can't wait to see some of the new stuff in action.

I'm really glad that there's tools being worked on to replace the ancient LevelEdit and Max 8 W3D exporter, should make modding W3D a whole lot easier with the more modern toolchains (especially 3ds max, it's such a pain building stuff in a newer version of Max and having to backport it to 8... not fun.)

[Raap]

Great roadmap guys, and yes I am absolutely interested in new tools. I might not have mentioned this, ever, so this may come as a surprise to some, but I actually, really, bloody hate the current tools and their bucket full of issues! I figured I'd mention it, you know, in case I never have before.

A new W3D asset plugin would be great as well. Saberhawk was dreaming big, too big perhaps, when he intended to effectively change how materials and meshes are set up. Sure, we need additional material features such as normal mapping and so on, but surely this can be achieved by updating the tools and engine separately rather than making some giant unwieldy mega system akin to current-era, massively funded, engines? The only merit I saw in his proposals, was making sure the engine didn't call materials of the same name more than once, which would mean materials would probably best be made in a universal collection, stored somewhere, and referenced through the 3D modelling plugin.

I'd also be interested in a Blender version. As mentioned, Blender is "free", while current-era 3DS Max is "holyshitthatsexpensiveeverymonth" and realistically only accessible to students these days who get free access. From a purely financial perspective 3DS is making itself obsolete, which is a darn shame.

Lastly, the "freelance" work style is more or less what me and Pushwall already arranged in not nearly so many words. I am currently working on a different project which has some slight urgency attached to it (here is a small preview of that, this is a demonstration level background, and not an intended play space), but I fully intend to do further contributions for APB/W3D after that.

By the way, you are missing something in your roadmap: We found a way to clone Jonwil&Team!

Edited April 5, 2018 by Raap

[Mojoman]

@Raap working on No Man's Sky 2 confirmed.

[Raap]

29 minutes ago, Mojoman said:

@Raap working on No Man's Sky 2 confirmed.

I don't know that game, so no. 

(Edit: I just realized that cactus's in real life always grow straight, woops!)

Edit2: I have long intended to make a project of my own, and while my current focus is merely a prototype on another engine, if I could find a dedicated C++ programmer to help me out then I wouldn't shy away from using W3D as a platform over something else. There are a few 'ifs' linked to that though, aside of locating a programmer. My main concern with W3D, as always, is the network code and specifically the infantry component, as well as the severe limitations of how W3D handles infantry meshes. But I think we can all mostly agree that W3D has a pretty strong heavy ground vehicle departement, in contrast.

Closing note; Working with a non-W3D engine has benefits, but I've certainly learned to appreciate the open-book nature of W3D by working with something that is not W3D. If only the platform had more hands on deck to push it forward.

Edited April 5, 2018 by Raap

[OWA]

6 hours ago, Raap said:

as well as the severe limitations of how W3D handles infantry meshes.

What limitations are you referring to here, if I may ask?

[Raap]

4 hours ago, OWA said:

What limitations are you referring to here, if I may ask?

I think Pushwall summarizes it pretty well so let me quote him on this;

Saberhawk's perfdocs insists that WWskinned meshes should have "as few polygons as needed to look right" because they are deformed and uploaded to the video card every frame, so we may be looking at considerable performance drops if we get a bunch of more modern character models with like 10000 polys instead of the current 500-1000ish.

It was a big pain getting the current infantry to hold their weapons in a remotely sensible fashion (remember pre-Delta spies/thieves/RS doing kung fu with their pistols? Rocket soldiers with floating LAWs? Medics with broken wrists? All that?) I'd hate to have to redo that on any new infantry who have a different hand structure, arm length, arm position, and 20 times as many vertices :/

(...)

Every part of the infantry needs wwskin or else the unskinned parts will just float in the same spot no matter what animation your character is in. 

(...)

A bunch of separate accessories = more draw calls. Combined with the mega polycounts and high texture resolution of more modern models, that'd probably be disaster combined with the way wwskin works. A spam of accessories with different textures are kind of a problem that the oldest infantry in the game suffer from (allied sniper has separate meshes/textures for body, head/hands, bandolier, holster and pouches... and really I can get rid of the holster now that they don't have pistols) but the performance problems of that would just be exacerbated with high polycount wwskin models that are made out of dozens of different accessories, for every infantry instead of just the oldest ones (the new ones like Allied inf and engineers have a mere two meshes/textures).

TLDR: Infantry handling in terms of literally every aspect on W3D is just plain horrid.

[Raap]

And this is why I hate this forum software: I cannot edit the above post properly anymore... The "Edit" isn't what Pushwall said but something I added below the quote, but this forum added it to the quote post-submission and in a form that is completely un-editable. Just to clarify, I hate miss-quoting. Try moderator editing that TLDR line... You cannot even access it because it is embedded into the quote frame itself. This is what I asked source view for a while ago!

... Anyhow, infantry models are a pet annoyance for me. I consider it the doorway into any W3D game, it is the first thing players get to see. In a perfect world, WWskin is removed and a new animation system entirely is created. With WWskin out of the way, the door is opened for much more infantry detail and mechanics.

Edited April 6, 2018 by Raap

[OWA]

5 hours ago, Raap said:

And this is why I hate this forum software: I cannot edit the above post properly anymore... The "Edit" isn't what Pushwall said but something I added below the quote, but this forum added it to the quote post-submission and in a form that is completely un-editable. Just to clarify, I hate miss-quoting. Try moderator editing that TLDR line... You cannot even access it because it is embedded into the quote frame itself. This is what I asked source view for a while ago!

... Anyhow, infantry models are a pet annoyance for me. I consider it the doorway into any W3D game, it is the first thing players get to see. In a perfect world, WWskin is removed and a new animation system entirely is created. With WWskin out of the way, the door is opened for much more infantry detail and mechanics.

I've found a fixed a bug that was preventing members from editing their own posts, so that should be working now. We did investigate adding source view, but with IPB deprecating BBCode and the only way to enable a source view is to expose the HTML viewer, then it could be a bit of a security risk.

You'll be delighted to know that WWSkin has been completely annihilated by the new exporter. When the new tools are ready we will be using Max's native skin modifier for rigging, which is a whole lot better. Currently WWSkin allows us to interpolate between two bones, but the Max Skin modifier could allow us to interpolate between more than that which could be really good for characters.

As for performance concerns, AR uses high poly (for the W3D Engine) characters for the Conscript and GI and the performance impact is negligible.

Posing infantry has always been awkward because we lack animators, but if we were to recruit just one competent animator, then a lot of our weapon pose issues would be solved.

[Raap]

6 hours ago, OWA said:

I've found a fixed a bug that was preventing members from editing their own posts, so that should be working now. We did investigate adding source view, but with IPB deprecating BBCode and the only way to enable a source view is to expose the HTML viewer, then it could be a bit of a security risk.

You'll be delighted to know that WWSkin has been completely annihilated by the new exporter. When the new tools are ready we will be using Max's native skin modifier for rigging, which is a whole lot better. Currently WWSkin allows us to interpolate between two bones, but the Max Skin modifier could allow us to interpolate between more than that which could be really good for characters.

As for performance concerns, AR uses high poly (for the W3D Engine) characters for the Conscript and GI and the performance impact is negligible.

Posing infantry has always been awkward because we lack animators, but if we were to recruit just one competent animator, then a lot of our weapon pose issues would be solved.

How do you intend to solve character animation in W3D though? From my understanding using video card memory is a very outdated method and newer cards don't care for it much - correct me if I am mistaken here. As for the actual animations, well by eliminating WWskin on the modeling side, and utilizing a more mainstream solution, wouldn't that, theoretically speaking, open the door to motion captured animations?

I'm also not grasping how you can make W3D understand non-WWskin animated meshes, I presume that engine-side developments are to be paired with this?

As for the forum, let me show you the bug I hit consistently:

Post-submission anything below certain quotes become embedded into an area within the quote that cannot be edited or touched, or not even deleted, the post is just completely broken when this happens. Using Chrome.

Edited April 6, 2018 by Raap

[OWA]

6 minutes ago, Raap said:

How do you intend to solve character animation in W3D though? From my understanding using video card memory is a very outdated method and newer cards don't care for it much - correct me if I am mistaken here. As for the actual animations, well by eliminating WWskin on the modeling side, and utilizing a more mainstream solution, wouldn't that, theoretically speaking, open the door to motion captured animations?

I'm also not grasping how you can make W3D understand non-WWskin animated meshes, I presume that engine-side developments are to be paired with this?

I'm not sure about the memory-allocation stuff, so I can't really answer that one.

So as far as I'm aware, W3D looks for skinned meshes within the file format and WWSkin is used to translate skinned weights into the W3D file format. So if the Max Skin Modifier is able to be exported and translated to skinned weights within the W3D file format, we eliminate the need for WWSkin. This does open up W3D for motion capture, CAT rigging, Inverse Kinematics and all of that good stuff.   Basically the key is how the skinning data is exported to the W3D file format rather than how the engine interprets it.

I could be totally wrong, though. @cfehunter knows more about the technical side of things so I'll try and get him to comment.

[Raap]

3 hours ago, OWA said:

I'm not sure about the memory-allocation stuff, so I can't really answer that one.

So as far as I'm aware, W3D looks for skinned meshes within the file format and WWSkin is used to translate skinned weights into the W3D file format. So if the Max Skin Modifier is able to be exported and translated to skinned weights within the W3D file format, we eliminate the need for WWSkin. This does open up W3D for motion capture, CAT rigging, Inverse Kinematics and all of that good stuff.   Basically the key is how the skinning data is exported to the W3D file format rather than how the engine interprets it.

I could be totally wrong, though. @cfehunter knows more about the technical side of things so I'll try and get him to comment.

I will take your word for it! Ultimately only the end result is most relevant to me, not the road taken to get there (unless said road is a muddy trench through which traversing is difficult).

I look forward to testing the new editor... The W3D plugins will have to wait since I'm still stuck with 3DS Max 8 for now.

[Jeod]

@OWA Surely someone out there has developed a plugin of sorts to have a source-code viewer without the security risk?

[cfehunter]

20 hours ago, Raap said:

How do you intend to solve character animation in W3D though? From my understanding using video card memory is a very outdated method and newer cards don't care for it much - correct me if I am mistaken here. As for the actual animations, well by eliminating WWskin on the modeling side, and utilizing a more mainstream solution, wouldn't that, theoretically speaking, open the door to motion captured animations?

It depends on the workload. For renegade GPU skinning is probably the right choice as the GPU isn't the performance bottleneck and most skinned objects are using common skeletons.

We can always move to CPU skinning, but our min-spec is a single core CPU and in that particular case it would absolutely murder the frame rate.

[Raap]

Very fair point on the CPU usage, and I imagine we'll not see any changes there, anytime soon.

I have two more comments regarding the plugins and editor. Firstly, could you suit up both the plugin and editor with as much informative tooltips as possible? If you want to attract new contributors to W3D projects, it would help if they knew what the various material settings did. Good tooltips often include examples such as saying "enabling this causes X and disabling this causes Y". Maybe make a pass on obsolete features as well. AFAIK "shininess" and "translucency" both do nothing, and in the shaders/texture tabs there is a trainload of settings with dubious purposes.

Secondly, the editor itself, would it be possible to upgrade the script attachment window? Search function, easier to use input fields, the ability to link objects in reference directly instead of using ID's (meaning as well to add 'go to object' and 'add selected as reference' buttons), easier translation database references (we really should end the practice of adding strings as script parameters), etc.. All mostly to make scripting easier and allow for bug tracking from one window frame instead of script attachments on several individual objects... Hell, maybe make scripts smarter in general by detecting bad input and flagging it before you can export a level.

It wouldn't be visual scripting by any means, but just general QoL improvements.

Edited April 7, 2018 by Raap

[cfehunter]

I can't really comment on the the editor.

 

Shininess is supposed to impact specular intensity, but when the engine was moved over to DX9 with a DX8 emulation shader, instead of being actually DX8, the specular was broken and it hasn't been fixed since.

Translucency likewise actually should work, but it'll only effect specific material types.

[Raap]

Having such things fixed and better documented would help, like what types of materials are affected by translucency? Not even I know that and I worked with this engine for literally over a decade.

[saberhawk]

On 4/5/2018 at 8:27 AM, Raap said:

A new W3D asset plugin would be great as well.

A new asset plugin is somewhat required.

On 4/5/2018 at 8:27 AM, Raap said:

Saberhawk was dreaming big, too big perhaps, when he intended to effectively change how materials and meshes are set up. Sure, we need additional material features such as normal mapping and so on, but surely this can be achieved by updating the tools and engine separately rather than making some giant unwieldy mega system akin to current-era, massively funded, engines? The only merit I saw in his proposals, was making sure the engine didn't call materials of the same name more than once, which would mean materials would probably best be made in a universal collection, stored somewhere, and referenced through the 3D modelling plugin.

Let's dig in on the engine details a bit before we call things giant unwieldy mega systems with no merit, shall we?

On 4/5/2018 at 9:34 AM, Raap said:

My main concern with W3D, as always, is the network code and specifically the infantry component, as well as the severe limitations of how W3D handles infantry meshes.

So, skinned mesh rendering? The engine originally shipped with CPU-side rigid (i.e. one bone) skinning. It was stuck at this for a while because the contemporary exporter only supported rigid skinning, which doesn't work great for actual skin. The BFME version of the exporter added support for two-bone soft skinning by duplicating the rigid skinning system and storing an extra set of vertices optimized for rigid skinning along with the extra bone IDs and weights required. This is incredibly memory bandwidth and space intensive and doesn't scale very well to soft skinning with more than two bones. It does look better though, and the engine was updated to read and use this "new" type of skinning data.

On 4/6/2018 at 9:34 AM, OWA said:

So as far as I'm aware, W3D looks for skinned meshes within the file format and WWSkin is used to translate skinned weights into the W3D file format. So if the Max Skin Modifier is able to be exported and translated to skinned weights within the W3D file format, we eliminate the need for WWSkin. This does open up W3D for motion capture, CAT rigging, Inverse Kinematics and all of that good stuff.   Basically the key is how the skinning data is exported to the W3D file format rather than how the engine interprets it.

I could be totally wrong, though.

You are. The purpose of WWskin was to make the content in the content authoring tool behave like content in the engine does. Things like inverse kinematics (i.e. feet following terrain) require engine level support when not faked via baked hierarchy transform animations. Which is what mocap data generally is, until you get into facecap, and already supported by the engine.

4 hours ago, cfehunter said:

It depends on the workload. For renegade GPU skinning is probably the right choice as the GPU isn't the performance bottleneck and most skinned objects are using common skeletons.

We can always move to CPU skinning, but our min-spec is a single core CPU and in that particular case it would absolutely murder the frame rate.

k. PS: Whatever you do, don't log how long MeshModelClass::get_deformed_vertices(Vector3* dst_vert, Vector3* dst_norm, uint32 stride, const HTreeClass* htree) takes as it hits the slow weighted skinning case many times each frame in a multiplayer match. 

2 hours ago, Raap said:

Firstly, could you suit up both the plugin and editor with as much informative tooltips as possible? If you want to attract new contributors to W3D projects, it would help if they knew what the various material settings did. Good tooltips often include examples such as saying "enabling this causes X and disabling this causes Y". Maybe make a pass on obsolete features as well. AFAIK "shininess" and "translucency" both do nothing, and in the shaders/texture tabs there is a trainload of settings with dubious purposes.

Getting rid of confusing features like the W3D fixed function emulation übershader generator would really help.

1 hour ago, cfehunter said:

Shininess is supposed to impact specular intensity, but when the engine was moved over to DX9 with a DX8 emulation shader, instead of being actually DX8, the specular was broken and it hasn't been fixed since.

Translucency likewise actually should work, but it'll only effect specific material types.

An audit was performed on a large library of .w3d files and per-vertex specular lighting wasn't found, so I didn't bother to both create test cases and implement accurate emulation of those test cases to prevent the übershader from exploding much more than it already had. 

23 minutes ago, Raap said:

Having such things fixed and better documented would help, like what types of materials are affected by translucency? Not even I know that and I worked with this engine for literally over a decade.

I wish I knew what all the various material settings really did. The options in the exporter GUI don't always match up with the data contained in exported files. Old exported files need to keep working, they don't just disappear. Exported files contain lots of features not exposed by the exporter, such as alternative materials. The rendering system runtime data is very different than the stored data. For example, all texture coordinates are stored upside down and need to be flipped. Why? Because Renegade originally used SurRender 3D which followed OpenGL math conventions instead of Direct3D ones. These quirks in the file format can't really be fixed without updating all the required related tools, like the level editor. Which we couldn't really update because the GUI used MFC6 which is now two decades obsolete and incompatible with newer compilers. The engine also performs plenty of fixups for "oh noes, we exported the file but the settings are wrong and we can't export a new version" and fog.

After all of that, the post-processed mesh finally makes it to the step of generating #defines for the shaders that it needs to compile to render triangles with that particular combination of settings. This happens with the source code found here. https://gist.github.com/saberhawk/199235c38a2b1051f06f0340cec9b5b4#file-ff_generator-cpp-L22. The rest of the gist contains the übershader code. There are some optimizations to prevent compiling a particular shader twice and to load compiled shaders instead of compiling them as required, but there are still a ridiculous number of combinations. 

And then the actual D3D11 rendering engine just uses whichever shader (i.e. compiled .fx code, not the "shader" in the W3D exporter) and a combination of constant buffers and textures, some static and some dynamic. Which is so much more powerful than the limited options from the exporter, and what those options eventually end up in anyways so they can work. Is it really that much of a dream for tools to just use that directly instead of maintaining the fixed function emulation übershader generator?

[Raap]

I think it's safe to say that if W3D hub had the manpower/resources, a "redo" would have been pursued on quite a few things. 

All I can do is highlight my own issues as a user of the tools. The inner workings, put simply, are well beyond my skill set.

But then again, this is why updates like this should occur more frequently. I doubt that there is no one out there that would be willing to contribute to W3D as a platform, as long as things remain clean and controlled.

So perhaps "W3D Hub" should promote a development platform for non-profit multiplayer games more aggressively than just the games themselves. The games can be a showcase of engine flexibility, but to attract the right people, you got to change your strategies. 

Edited April 7, 2018 by Raap

[cfehunter]

Just now, Raap said:

I think it's safe to say that if W3D hub had the manpower/resources, a "redo" would have been pursued on quite a few things. 

All I can do is highlight my own issues as a user of the tools. The inner workings, put simply, are well beyond my skill set.

But then again, this is why updates like this should occur more frequently. I doubt there there is no one out there that would be willing to contribute to W3D as a platform, as long as things remain clean and controlled.

Frankly, it would be easier to port the game code to a new engine than re-write the core game systems *and* keep them compatible with stock renegade.

That said, there's plenty that can be tweaked.

[OWA]

20 hours ago, saberhawk said:

You are. The purpose of WWskin was to make the content in the content authoring tool behave like content in the engine does. Things like inverse kinematics (i.e. feet following terrain) require engine level support when not faked via baked hierarchy transform animations. Which is what mocap data generally is, until you get into facecap, and already supported by the engine.

I figured as much. Though fake bake was generally what I was alluding to, since the artist would still need to export with a skin modifier in the stack. It's just a lot easier to convert IK to be used with the much more broader-used Skin modifier rather than W3D engine-specific WWSkin.

[thedisclaimitory]

YES FINALY TIBERIAN SUN REBORN 2.0 AND IT MAY COME OUT THIS YEAR ITS LIKE CHRISTMAS IS ALL YEAR ROUND FOR ONE HOLE YEAR  GREAT JOB WITH THE GAMES COMING OUT AND IN IMPROVENTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! great logo as well 

[GraYaSDF]

If you wish some new music for Tiberian Sun Reborn 2.0, I can help =) By the way... keep working also on W3D-import and WWSkin, that would be incredibly cool! Nice updates for CLE too, I am always waiting for some new tools for C&C Renegade in general after I joined modding community in 2006.