ya know, unless gravemind made it able to be toggled.

Actually, can you do that Gravemind? Make a checkbox menu in the options that allows you to use Just Diffuse, Normal, Specular, etc maps or even enable/disable the model viewer? Might be a helpful feature for some people

SteelixB is hurt.

You should ignore people who say stupid things like that. No matter who they are, that's a very low thing to say and shows they themselves live on a rather high horse. The horse of reality-loss. Not a fine horse to ride in on.

It's only really meant to be a preview, not an exact Halo3 style render. It would also make it much slower to load and view models. I may add bump maps if the renderer supports it, but I don't think detail maps will happen.

Diffuse and specular are the only materials that it loads, so not much need for a toggle. I'll check the speed difference between loading and not loading specular, and if it's significant enough I'll add a toggle. Disabling the entire model viewer wouldn't make much difference either, seeing as it only loads when you click it anyway.

i was actually going more towards letting the program do what altheros said with the other maps and making those maps toggleable along with the viewer itself

There's no native way to do bump maps and detail maps, and it would be extremely slow to render them manually (if I could even get them to look right) so they're not going to be added. I tested the specular speed and it was a couple seconds faster without it on a really slow laptop, shouldn't be too much difference on a newer/faster computer, but I guess I'll add a toggle for it. I'll also add some other settings like background colour and what permutations are included in the B/D/S toggle.

I think I know how to extract the sounds from Halo 3.
Find the start bytes and the end bytes and save that as a file.
Then put the file into ToWav, we just need to be able to get the bytes from the audio.

EDIT: Information about XMA2
http://hcs64.com/mboard/forum.php?showthread=14818&showpage=6
Edited by AussieBacom on Oct 3, 2012 at 11:13 PM

It's compressed.. plus the game doesn't use wav by default, it uses some xma sound format.
Edited by XlzQwerty1 on Oct 3, 2012 at 11:19 PM

It uses XMA not XNA http://www.modhalo.net/index.php?/topic/20792-halo-3-audio-extraction/
XNA is game designjunk for xbox games,
Edited by AussieBacom on Oct 3, 2012 at 11:22 PM

My bad, typo.

Here is the ToWav XMA Decypto:
http://www.ctpax-x.ru/index.php?goto=files&show=24

It is currenty in either XMA1 or XMA2 format. The two tools I posted above will convert it from XMA2 into XMA1, and then use ToWav to convert it into a WAV file.

I'd say no, currently zteam are the only people who know how to do it.
Edited by The_Arbiter on Oct 4, 2012 at 12:59 AM

I wouldn't have a clue.

Thank god that the animations are not extractable yet. If people found out a way to extract everything from reach and halo 4 there would not be any creativity left in the community, only duplicates from other games.

You dont know how good it is untill it's gone unfortunately.

Other note though Gravemind:

Nice progress on reverse engineering :).
Edited by Cheddars on Oct 4, 2012 at 08:53 AM

That's a bad way of looking at it; that you can't find any creativity in using bungie's animations.

i must disagree cheddars. The only way i got whatever skill in animating i have as it is now is because i cross referenced different styles used by multiple animators, including bungie's. Saying that it would ruin creativity is completely wrong as far as i see it. Infact, it'd give us two bonuses.

First, we'd have far more accurate replicas of the preceeding halo games, which isn't exactly a bad thing because of how microsoft has cut off the PC market from halo essentially

Secondly, we'll have people who will learn how to make better animations and more halo themed weapon sets

Yes but there will be people who abuse it, like everything. Just look at the the forum now. Half the people are just porting all sorts of sh*** into halo. I suppose you can do what you like but it is frowned upon. I'll probably leave this community anyway after I finish these tutorials and finish team assets. I will be late to the party in polycounts tf2 Lol.
Edited by Cheddars on Oct 4, 2012 at 06:22 PM

I agree with waffles.

Also, I'm finally back from my week off and the 2.2 update is out.

Let me know if there's any problems with it not working. There's also some more tweaks I need to add which I'll start on tomorrow. I'm also going to start work on a new model format to replace EMF, but it could take a while and may not end up getting finished.
Edited by Gravemind on Oct 8, 2012 at 09:30 AM

Good luck, and hopefully the new format does get finished :)

Thanks :)
I got much further than I thought. Here's some features of the new EMF format:

• Bug fixes, such as:
  
  • No un-needed extra triangles
    
  • Unchecking the UVW option actually makes it not add UVW unwraps
    
  • Unchecking import nodes/markers works properly
• Backwards compatible with older EMF files
  
• Loads face material IDs (shader indexes )
  
• Loads diffuse and specular materials (if bitmaps have already been extracted)

I'll also try to make it load bump maps, but the bumps and specular are only there for renders and don't make much difference for exporting.

I also made some changes to the model viewer. The camera speed acceleration is now exponential so it doesn't take forever to change the speed by a few hundred. I also added a maximum camera speed depending on the size of the model, so you can't make it too high and lose the model, and added maximum camera distance so you can't fly too far away from the model and lose it.
Edited by Gravemind on Oct 10, 2012 at 09:32 PM

o someone just hit the bullseye there http://www.xfire.com/blog/clonetrooper163/3794764/



o and that is 1 reason why it wont be and second is abuses of it, that's also one reason why no one as seen the reach extractor.....
Edited by clonetrooper163 on Oct 10, 2012 at 09:39 PM

Well,Cheddars,if lack of creativity and rips is what is going to keep community alive,I'm sure it would be worth it.

Are you CorraAshu by any chance?

does that mean anyone who uses the vanilla resources is unoriginal? they didn't make the Master Chief model or the cubemaps, must make them unoriginal and abusive

honestly, keeping an extractor to oneself is absolutely stupid, since creativity applies to level design, weapon design, execution, etc. yes, there will be maps that are "BlOoODGlCHu w/ Rech Elits!!!1!!!" but is that really any excuse? there are maps that are just modified weapon properties that are released, but it doesn't make the creator unoriginal. and how could someone abuse an extractor? sure, reach bitmaps and models would be everywhere, but if people want to use them, then let them use reach's resources. there are people who DON'T want to use them(holy blam, dropped the ball there), and people who use them for other things than map modding. they are not your bipeds or resources, so I don't see a point in defending them.

rant mode over, time to rush into battle without my shields again

stop

they may not be our bipeds or resources, but it's ours and their hard work in getting the programs and coding to extract those resources, and i'll leave it at that
Edited by clonetrooper163 on Oct 10, 2012 at 10:37 PM

You really don't get my point do you? My point is It wrecked the community before hand.If there was no model extractor, people would have learned to model and same with texturing.

But because of the extractors when all the skilled 3D artists left, there was no people who could produce custom assets from scratch. (besides scripters and bsp artists etc)

without the model extractors we would have seen alot more maps which are fun and not just, chuck a halo 3 ar there and call it a day. And there probably would be alot more members on today here.

/rant

And waffles in a sense you are right that I should get over it but any way.
Edited by Cheddars on Oct 10, 2012 at 10:53 PM

counter rant!

people don't mod halo to learn how to model, they learn to model beforehand or they use the vanilla resources. the logic that people would make their own models if extractors didn't exist doesn't apply to most of the maps available since they all practically use vanilla resources, ala... um... for example, er...

dangit, you win since I can't find a decent example :P

Let's see.Common first-time mod typically have a bunch of public tags and stock tags.

Cheddars,it takes a higher level of skill and understanding just get the ripped content to work for Halo CE.
It may become the only thing that will keep this Halo community alive.

Edited by Dumb AI on Oct 10, 2012 at 11:08 PM
Edited by Dumb AI on Oct 10, 2012 at 11:09 PM

Not higher. Different.

It really depends on your point of view.
Edited by Dumb AI on Oct 10, 2012 at 11:16 PM

I remember I had problems with batch extracting .obj back when I first made batch extraction. I haven't look at it since, but it can't hurt to look again. Obj isn't really the best option though, seeing as it only exports mesh data. With the new EMF format I'm working on you can also import the shader indexes and whatnot.

Speaking of the new EMF format, I got it to import bumps as well. Up next is illum maps.
Edit: Illums are done.
Edit2: And decals.
Edited by Gravemind on Oct 11, 2012 at 01:49 AM

As long as it's not .x ...

Also you should give this new "emf" your own extension seeing as it's your file, and what do you mean by decals?

Decals are basically decorations, like the arrows and signs on the pelican and the coloured ribbon around the spartan's upper arm in multiplayer. They also usually have transparency. Also, I'm keeping the .EMF extension seeing as it's more of an upgrade to the original EMF than a new format. The new script is still be able to read old EMFs though.


I added "single" obj to the batch extract settings, it doesn't support skipping tags though. Also, "single" obj isn't actually single, its the same as "multi" obj but with permutations as the file names. I'll have to get around to fixing that one day.
Edited by Gravemind on Oct 11, 2012 at 05:39 AM