Official P99 Retexturing Thread Mk. II

[Uberom]

Perhaps I missed it, is there a project scope or roadmap listed somewhere? Is it just faces and worn items ?

[loramin]

Originally Posted by Uberom [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Perhaps I missed it, is there a project scope or roadmap listed somewhere? Is it just faces and worn items ?

Go back a few pages: they say they're waiting for certain sets of textures to be completed and then they plan to do a release. I don't think there's an official schedule or roadmap, but they're fairly close to a release.

[paulgiamatti]

Originally Posted by Uberom [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Perhaps I missed it, is there a project scope or roadmap listed somewhere? Is it just faces and worn items ?

Not really. The specifics have been kept behind closed doors because the work is so sporadic and voluminous and not actually "managed" per se. Originally "Phase 1" was just going to be upscaling all character, equipment, and spell particle textures, with some stuff redone by hand, but then we redid tons of weapons and held items by hand, hired Zaela to tinker with things providing us with animation, spell particle, and transparency fixes, and then hired Sorn to make faces prettier.

Once Sorn joined we pretty much unanimously decided that we'll release as soon as the faces are completed. So as expected we suffered quite a bit of scope creep in the beginning, but now we have a definitive release point even though we don't know exactly when that will be. Phase 2 will involve upscaling all classic zone and NPC textures, and that may or may not ever happen since it's anyone's guess as to whether we'll have any gas left in the tank after Phase 1. It will probably happen at some point, but we've barely started theorizing about how we're gonna pull that off while keeping the end texture packages to a reasonable size.

There were also quite a few hurdles along the way such as figuring out what to convert to DDS to avoid crashing the client from memory bloat, and which DDS format and conversion methods to use in order to avoid artifacts while keeping the textures to a reasonable size being that DDS files are much larger than JPEG despite being way more memory-efficient due to mipmapping. Not to mention all of the file extension wonkiness - some of the textures are DDS and some are JPEG, but they're all renamed to .bmp and flipped vertically before being repacked into the S3D archives. Makes sense, right? Meanwhile Cucumbers drew upon the powers of The Vision™ and somehow managed to permanently unfuck gequip.s3d which suffered from a litany of issues making that archive an absolute nightmare to handle. I still don't even know what he did to that thing, or what the initial cause of the problem was. I don't even want to know. It's fixed now - thanks Cucumbers!