Jul -- SM64 Hacking (Archive): Toad's Tool 0.6.0 (On hiatus for an indefinite amount of time)

Hectamatatortron
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Posted on 09-15-09 04:31:07 PM

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Figures someone from GSCentral would be promoting piracy.

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Lyskar
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Posted on 09-15-09 05:22:43 PM

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They'll be promoting being banned if it doesn't stop.

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OmegaGT
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Posted on 09-16-09 04:18:37 PM

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OMG very good VL-Tone, the release will be issued approximately when?

luigiman1928
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Posted on 09-17-09 10:27:38 PM

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He said that he wont anounce the exact date. But he did say that it would be this year.

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Adrian2000
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Posted on 09-28-09 01:12:43 PM

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Originally posted by luigiman1928
He said that he wont anounce the exact date. But he did say that it would be this year.

This I woud like to know too. Just 2009 isnßt enogh for me...

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messiaen
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Posted on 09-28-09 02:41:26 PM

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Just check out every month or subscribe to VL-Tone's YouTube page. Your eagerness for information is legit, however there's no need to pressure him as he has already made it very clear that he doesn't have much time to work on TT64.

By the way, VL-Tone, I'm wondering how do you deal with the limitations of the vertex cache when importing .obj data? For the collision format, it's very simple because there's a master index of vertices, but what do you to get a polygon when each face references to vertexes spread very widely (ie, 64, 3, 293) ? Do you have to make very redudant small chunks of vertex data loaded with the 0x04 command ?

VL-Tone
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Posted on 09-30-09 05:45:52 AM (last edited by VL-Tone at 09-30-09 02:47 AM)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

I would love to give you guys a release date, but I can't. Sorry.

Here's some little progress update though.

Nothing much, but it will get me going on finishing the rest. As I explained in a previous post, Director 11.5 has some pretty buggy built-in scrolling text fields. I had problems with the coloring and underlining of specific lines, as well as other glitches, like text lines being chopped off.

I had to create my own custom scrolling field widget anyway for the material/texture list in the importer which features little preview icons, so I decided to create a more universal scrolling list/menu field from scratch so I could replace the buggy lists in the main level editor interface.

So here's the result:

I've programmed the whole scrollbar/list mechanism myself, which gives me much more control and helps me get around bugs and limitations of the built-in text fields. Unlike the built-in scrolling fields, mine have proportional scrollbars and live scrolling. Also, as you can see I can have "real" highlighting instead of having to use underlined text like I did before. The actual scrollbar graphics are a little ugly, but that can be easily changed.

I'll try to work on TT64 more in the next few days. Someone just donated $1 today, which is not "a lot", but it means a lot to me., symbolically. (Just so you know, I don't do this for money but I really don't get donations often, I actually only got three donations in 4 years so this one was a nice surprise.)

messiaen: I deal with it in a pretty "dumb" way.

1) The code reads/decode from the .obj file, storing in a list variable (array) the information about each vertex (xyz position, texture coordinates and normal coords), and face data (triangles) in another list variable.

2) Another routine creates an intermediary version of this data that takes into account the cache limitation, re-indexing the triangle data while grouping it in smaller chunks. This "new" data is then ready to be encoded in GBI commands.

2a) This second routine first creates an equivalent to the vertex cache.
2b) It loops through the triangle data.
2c) For each of the 3 vertex index number for each triangle, it checks if the corresponding vertex info (xyz, texture coords and normals) is found in the current vertex cache. If it is found, the corresponding index position in the cache is added to the "new" triangle data item. If it's not found, a new entry is added to the cache containing the vertex info, and the last index position is added to the "new" triangle data item.
2d) If the cache is full (more than 16 items) then the cache data and its corresponding re-indexed triangle data is added to a list.
2e) The process repeats until the end of the triangle data is reached.

3) The third main routine converts the intermediary data into GBI commands.

This method creates a highly unoptimized output. Sometimes it will save space by not storing the same vertex twice if its used by triangles that happen to be in the same chunk, but sometimes, vertices may be stored multiple times.

You can't totally avoid repeating vertex data when you have a small vertex cache. There are ways to optimize the conversion, but optimizing data for small vertex caches is almost a science in itself. Complex algorithms exist to achieve some optimization, but last time I checked they were too complicated for my tastes. Search for "vertex cache optimization" on google to see how complicated it can get.

By rearranging the order in which the triangle data is feed into my second routine, it would be possible to generate a smaller output. The challenge is to find what would be the optimal order. Many completely different sequences might produce the smallest output, and there are so many possibilities.

Luckily, the results produced by my "dumb" method might not be that bad, as 3d programs tend to save triangle data in a certain logical order, putting connected triangles one after the other.

Anyway I hope it all makes sense, since I'm a little tired

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The Ultimate Koopa
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Posted on 09-30-09 09:20:57 PM

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So about the release date... would the basic answer to the question "Why aren't you announcing a date?" be something along the lines of "I (as in you) don't actually know myself when it'll be finished"?

Lyskar
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Posted on 10-01-09 06:05:43 AM

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I can't speak for VL-Tone, but I am pretty sure that's the reason why, having programmed things with unknown release dates before.

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VL-Tone
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Posted on 10-02-09 04:00:55 AM (last edited by VL-Tone at 10-02-09 01:02 AM)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

I've I said previously, I work a lot at my "real job". Outside of my job I don't have much time for myself. When I do have time off, I may decide to work on TT64, but I may also decide to relax and watch a movie or some TV episodes, surf the net, or see my friends on the weekend. Considering how much I work at my job, I don't think anyone could consider that laziness.

If I set a release date, I will be "forced" to work on TT64 to meet that schedule, even when I'm tired and I feel like doing something else.

I'd rather not set any date and have people wondering when it will be released, or maybe even lose interest, than set a date where hype will be built, the pressure will accumulate, and have a possible huge disappointment if I don't meet that date.

It will more than probably be ready before the end of the year, but I'm not giving any guaranty, and I don't want to see anyone waiting december 31st for a release if it's not out before then.

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messiaen
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Posted on 10-02-09 04:22:32 AM

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Thanks for the explanation about the process. Today I tried setting up a minimalist .obj importer. It doesn't use any kind of optimization, meaning there will be three vertices for each face, even if they share the same vertex/normal/texture coordinate data (right now, only vertex data is used).

That was supposed to be a sphere

.

VL-Tone
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Posted on 10-02-09 05:04:11 AM (last edited by VL-Tone at 10-02-09 02:06 AM)

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Time: One second ago - Date: Tomorrow - Weather: Sunshine - Mood: Moody Answer to the universe: Yes

Hey that's a nice start messiaen, it reminds me of my first few experiments since I had some similar results at first. I like some "healthy competition"

, it will probably give me some motivation to work more on that thing.

Does your .obj file only contains triangles? Looks to me like it contains four sided polygons too which would explain how a bug could cause half the triangle to not appear.

You must separate these 4 sided polygons into two triangles. Maybe that's what you already did, but I'm guessing that you got the vertices order wrong. I remember struggling a little to find the right vertices order needed to split the four sided polygons into two triangles.

TT64 0.6 BTW will support .obj files containing 3 or 4 vertices per face, but not more than that (some exporters will also export some 5-6 sided polygons). Note that most .obj exporter include an option export only triangles.

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messiaen
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Posted on 10-02-09 01:51:52 PM (last edited by messiaen at 10-02-09 12:07 PM)

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Whoops, indeed each face in that cylinder has 4 v/vt/vn entries

. The free 3D modelers I'm trying doesn't seem to have an all-triangle export feature, so I guess I'll have to deal with quads. From what I've read, the first vertex is shared so that [ q1, q2, q3, q4 = f1 f2 f3 + f1 f3 f4 ]. I'll try to use that and see what happens.

After some bug fixing, models built only by triangles are working ok:

I'm having trouble with some trivial things. First, when converting the floats in the .obj file to shorts, I just multiply it by a random scaling number in the hopes of not losing too much precision. Is this how you do it? It seems to be working. To deal with texture coordinates, I multiply "vt" values by the same scaling number and then by * 32, which will move the number 5 bits to the left to get the appropriate float format. Not sure how well it works, I haven't found yet a triangle-only nice .obj file with vexture coordinates.

Adrian2000
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Posted on 10-02-09 05:43:35 PM

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It looks good the new menu.
http://homepage.mac.com/qubedstudios/TT64scroll.png
But I think, the yellow doesn´t fit(passt nicht...)

But you dont have to give it us now, you can wait. But I asked because I will know it.
But of course, you cant say it because you have an real job. Toads Tool is just a free program and you dont get something for it. We give you just a credits in our games. But you make a goog program.

@messiane: Hod did you insert the objects?

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The Ultimate Koopa
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Posted on 10-03-09 01:18:07 AM

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Originally posted by VL-Tone
I've I said previously, I work a lot at my "real job". Outside of my job I don't have much time for myself. When I do have time off, I may decide to work on TT64, but I may also decide to relax and watch a movie or some TV episodes, surf the net, or see my friends on the weekend. Considering how much I work at my job, I don't think anyone could consider that laziness.

If I set a release date, I will be "forced" to work on TT64 to meet that schedule, even when I'm tired and I feel like doing something else.

I'd rather not set any date and have people wondering when it will be released, or maybe even lose interest, than set a date where hype will be built, the pressure will accumulate, and have a possible huge disappointment if I don't meet that date.

It will more than probably be ready before the end of the year, but I'm not giving any guaranty, and I don't want to see anyone waiting december 31st for a release if it's not out before then.

Some people are like that. I mean if something is announced for say, Q3 2009, people will wait until the very beginning of Q3 2009 (June 1) and pester the person to release it, everyday, from then on

... and I'm aware of the multiple failed release schedules you've made

-- take the first public beta released June 21, 2007 for example, originally, you planned to release that as early as January 2006 according to this...

messiaen
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Posted on 10-03-09 02:08:14 PM

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Right, got the models to work in-game:

Gourd (showed in last message).

One thing I noticed is that Mario's collision detection works very poorly on models which aren't very low-poly (too much change of angles), which is something to keep in mind when modelling. Scaling is also a pain to get right, so the preview function in VL-Tone's importer will be essential.

Since any kind of vertex cache optimization is beyond the reach of this proof-of-concept crappy importer, I have come up with an alternate optimization method for display lists. The vertex cache is always set to that the triangles will be always 1/2/3 4/5/6 7/8/9 10/11/12 13/14/15. Instead of writting this tons of 0xBF triangles, I just call an "master" display list using the 0x06 jump command. Hacky but works

.

John Smith
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Posted on 10-04-09 01:51:14 AM (last edited by Metal_Man88 at 10-04-09 02:05 AM)

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Originally posted by VL-Tone
MASSIVELY UNNEEDED FULL QUOTE OF SEVERAL PAGE-LONG POST REMOVED - MM88

Take your time

Vinnyboiler
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Posted on 10-04-09 03:17:59 PM (last edited by vinnyboiler at 10-04-09 12:19 PM)

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Vl-Tone if you don't want people to loose intrest you could release a few OBJ's as levels. That would really get alot of intrest in your work. It dose not have to be master peices heck you could even just realese some of the old SM64 rom files cramming your laptop as patches.
Please

Lyskar
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Posted on 10-04-09 06:03:41 PM (last edited by Metal_Man88 at 10-04-09 10:07 PM)

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