Ah yes but allow me to point out the critical wording I used.

Quote from: SleepKiller... that when rendered by the game's original shaders look visibly different ...

Here are what the three models you sent me look like when rendered side by side, using the game's stock shaders.

[spoiler][/spoiler]

Aside from the difference in the angle of the highlights from the camera they're identical. If the decay/exponent was being used in the rendering of this we would expect significant (or at least some) differences between each of these models, due to great range being used.

Unfortunately you've been lied to by a lot of information out there but in SWBFII (by default, it is possible their is some combination of material flags that trigger use of the exponent) the specular exponent is ignored and unused.

This why I used the wording I did, I've tested different specular exponents before. I've just never seen a difference in the constants passed to the shaders or in the rendered results.

All that said I do really appreciate your offer of help in the matter. If you do ever encounter two identical models save the specular exponent and they do look different I would be very interested to look at them.

Quote from: Teancum on March 09, 2018, 08:35:03 AM
Didn't work for me. Maybe I didn't use the switch to specify it was swbf and not swbf_ii

Ah I see, were you able to get it in the end? I can send you over the source files I got from unmunge if you need. Let me know if their are any other maps that aren't working right.

Quote from: RC-1138 on March 08, 2018, 08:04:47 PM
Why I can unmunge files to 150 mb max ?

I don't know. The tool has no internal limit on file size and should work gracefully on munged files that are multiple gigabytes in size.

Can you clarify for me what's broken in the output? After fixing up filenames and .bnd's path reference manually it loaded fine it Zero Editor for me.

Quote from: Cdt Fox on March 08, 2018, 10:20:52 AM
So here is a quick feedback. I tried with Battlefront Evolved and it erase the droideka shield completely. Secondly the phase 1 clone troopers are way more shiny than expected. -I know that the devs used specular for these models.

Other than that I've seen a few feedback on SWBF3 Legacy's Discord.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to look into the Droideka's shield not rendering when I have the time.

Be warned, more information than you probably wanted in response now follows.

As for the specular being different this is regrettably a case of "it just has to be that way". This is one of the two key differences that my shader toolkit (which is a HLSL recreation of the game's stock shaders) has. The details are here but basically the game's original method of specular lighting couldn't be implemented in HLSL, thus I replaced it with a well respected classic of the game's industry.

Unfortunately the specular exponent (or decay) has to be fixed, because despite SWBF exposing such a parameter to artists I could never find where or how is was being passed in to the shader.

If someone can supply me with two models, with two different specular exponents, that when rendered by the game's original shaders look visibly different I am happy to give it another search.

Quote from: Dark_Phantom on March 08, 2018, 04:08:24 PM
To expect this to support every mod out there is a little bit overkill - everybody put their own touches on mods and some of those are going to conflict with this because the shader patch did not exist when most were made.

I'd agree, but in all except edge cases I still want to aim for it improving the visuals without changing the art style. It is a bit of a hard ask and their are times (like above) were there is simply no other option than to make a breaking change, but it is what I'd like to aim for.

Quote from: Teancum on March 05, 2018, 08:06:47 AM
Question mostly for @Sleepkiller -- would it be helpful to send over specific example maps that are not decompiling correctly? I'm not sure how to best help here, but it's been a heaven-send to get this tool.

It does depend on what the problem is, but in most cases definitely.

Thanks for the feedback guys!

Quote from: Ginev on March 03, 2018, 10:12:28 AM
If you want download it and test it to see how some stuff look like.
For example the water is kinda bright and the refraction make thins from the side look like crap..in my opinion
If you look beneat the water the trees bark is glowing.I do not know but the shadow for everything is super dark.It will be better to say completely black.The droideka shield effect is really nice.I like it.Better test everything on this map.If you do not have such problems please tell me i will send you screenshots.

The water shader is still very much a work in progress and I definitely agree that it could do with some more work. The overbright reflections mean I am definitely doing something wrong somewhere and I'll have to look into that.

As for the darkened terrain shadows I'll look into what's causing them as well. Be sure to let me know if you spot any other problems.

EDIT: I have fixed the darkened terrain shadows and overbright water reflections. The downloads have been updated.

Quote from: RepComm on March 03, 2018, 12:07:32 PM
Theoretically, couldn't we add a displacement shader also? Kind of like tesselation? The only application I can think of would be ice caves (I thought ea swbf had displacement for each frost flake in the hoth caves, but it turns it that it's just a lot of geometry..)

Quote from: Ginev on March 03, 2018, 10:12:28 AM
Amazing!!!And now one day..one day my dream for relef maping for atleast terrain.That will be epic.Or something else.Tell me is it possible to use some of the unused shaders or not working shaders as a empty slot to make new shader effect?I would love to have a shader that can be applyed to a model that will basically work like the water reflection effect where you can see yourself for example in a wall just like a mirror.This effects is added only to water.Is it possible to be put on model like wall?I know that if this work it will eat alot of frames ingame but we can use it for some small objects its really nice.What you think?Personally for me this 2 shader effects can be the best things ever.

I forgot to mention this in the original post but I have some ideas about how to add support for custom materials. I'm absolutely up for implementing if the demand is there. The catch is however if a mod used them it would make Shader Patch a requirement for running it. Leaving modders to make a choice between better visuals, better support or potentially maintaining two versions of their mod, one with Shader Patch and one without.

A proper reflection shader however would require access to the game's scene graph, so unfortunately without the source code to the game there isn't much that can be done in this regard. One thing you can do in some cases is put a reflection region on it's side and that will let you make a mirror, however it will require that the space used for the reflections is unused by the rest of the map, so far from ideal.

Implementing a form displacement mapping should however be extremely doable. We probably won't be able to match a shader that uses real tessellation + displacement mapping but we could still get some nice results going.

Quote from: RepComm on March 03, 2018, 12:07:32 PM
I love the normal mapping! The distort on the deka shield is very sweet too! If we mod a higher rez sphere mesh, that distortion should spread a little better I think.

Yeah, ideally I would love a high resolution smooth shield mesh. However the game either generates it on the fly or stores it in the executable, making it nontrivial to replace.

This a mod focusing improving the quality of SWBFII's visuals in subtle ways without interfering with any mod or map's art style. After all a lot of modders spend quite a while making their content look just right and I don't want to come along, ignore all their effort and end up butchering their content.

I want visual improvements that interfere minimally with existing content but are still meaningful. Now let's go on a tour of the features provided by this amazing mod.

First up we have the lovely global per-pixel. Per-pixel lighting is already in the game but modelers must opt into it, this is because back in the day GPUs just weren't up to the task of doing it. However GPUs have gotten alot faster since the game came out and thus we're now able to enable per-pixel lighting across the board.

Notice how on the left the light fades out unevenly and it is hard to even identify where the light is coming from. Compare that to the right where the light interacts with the wall smoothly and correctly from it's centre point.
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Next up we have my attempt at improving the look of the Droideka shield effect ingame. On right you can see how the shield has distortion that helps give the appearance of greater depth and complexity to the shield's surface. (The normal map is also seamless.)
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Moving onto water! You ever notice ingame how the water animation always looks jittery and lowres? This always bugged me and was my reason for getting into editing the game's shaders. It does however potentially interfere with the art of some maps, although I've done my best to avoid it.
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Then we have normal mapping. The game normally uses it's normal maps to modify a light's attenuation to produce a bump mapping effect, this gives a reasonably good result, it's not 2005 anymore, we can do better by using real normal mapping. (The impact of this change is often more noticeable on custom maps that make use of normal maps as opposed to stock maps.)
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Ever gotten bugged by that boxy looking bloom falloff that can sometimes show up? As of v0.6.0 Shader Patch comes with an optional (but on by default) replacement stock bloom effect designed to smooth out the falloff.
[spoiler][/spoiler]

Another new one as of v0.6.0. The game comes with a scene blur effect that some maps use. The stock one has a nasty habit of adding aliasing to the corners of objects, to solve this Shader Patch can now (once again optionally) replace the blur effect with a gaussian blur that doesn't add as much aliasing to the scene and (keeping in line with Shader Patch's goal of respecting a map's artwork) looks similar when blended in. (Minus the aliasing obviously!)
[spoiler][/spoiler]

For a while now SP has had a custom materials system and a fancy pants post-processing system to go along with it. However as I expected there hasn't been any use of it. But one thing I have noted is that people sure to seem to like their post-processing effects. So the effects system used by the materials system has been extended to be perfectly (and easily) usable on it's own. There should be a tutorial on the GitHub wiki either now or in the next couple days for how to use and integrate it with your map.
[spoiler]Please note that I'm not suggesting you color grade a night time map like this, it's just meant to show off what SP's post-processing can do.
[/spoiler]

To use this amazing mod you'll need:

* To understand that it works by hooking into the game using a .dll, if that isn't something you're comfortable with then obviously don't install this

* If you want to use the included Installer/Uninstaller .NET Framework 4.6.2 which you can find here if you don't already have it. (You probably do.)

* A Shader Model 3.0 capable GPU, if you don't have this the patch won't work, full stop.

* Windows 7 or higher, because adding XP support would be a serious pain.

Assuming I haven't frightened you off and you're eager to start installing the patch you can find it at the below link on GitHub. The name of the file you're after is shaderpatch.zip.

GitHub Release

If you hit problems have a look at Common Problems & Solutions page, it is possible some simple settings need changing for it to work.

And of course the source code to both the shaders and DirectInput hook can be found on GitHub.

GitHub Source

If you have any thoughts/bug reports or requests then I'm always happy to hear to them. You can reach me here, on GitHub or if you prefer on Discord.

Actually that Zero Editor method is incorrect and will not do anything. The steps shown will move whatever you have selected in the editor into the layer selected. (And since the screenshot doesn't have anything selected in the editor it will do nothing.)

In order to merge layers together first open the layers window in Zero Editor. Then hold down shift and click on which layers you want to merge. They should all be highlighted as selected. The button named "Merge" will no no longer be greyed out and will become clickable. Clicking it will merge the selected layers into one.

Quote from: RepComm on February 22, 2018, 04:23:40 PM
-Speculation: I think this cfg/config format was probably the JSON format/notation equivalent back in 2004, because it is used extensively for multiple purposes in SWBF's files.

I think that would likely just be XML. The format Zero Editor uses is likely just something Pandemic developed and used internally, much like Valve's key-value format.

I've looked at the troublesome section in the munged file, tried some things I thought of that could be causing the problem and I've come completely blank for now.

Your best bet may just be to re-import the file into XSI and fixup the damaged sections manually.

Can you try re-exporting the .tga files for the model through gimp? (Simply open it and export it again.) I know some programs have issues reading .tga files written out by DirectXTex.

Quote from: Teancum on February 15, 2018, 06:08:24 PM
YES! Console support is actually a lot more useful than you might think, especially for those of us who work on console-based mods.

On a different note if I sent a few specific PC map lvls to you could you take a look at them? These were old files I got permission for from the Conversion Pack days, and I'd like to use them in the Xbox mod. The problem is these files (well, really one map in particular) don't output the .wld file, and so I can't rebuild the assets.

That being said I've been able to recover a few maps with this tool, which is amazing. Honestly you've done so much to revitalize things.

I'm glad to hear that it's been useful to you!

I'll happily to take a look at files that aren't handled correctly. Feel free to send me them and I'll try to look at them when I have the time.

There is a new minor release out. It includes fixes that improve the output of extracted models (such as fixing the normals on hardskinned meshes, which I believe was causing the darkening LitFam posted above) and some cool new stuff.

The big highlight for me that I worked on was adding support for Xbox files (both models and textures) and PS2 textures (while also fixing up PS2 model extraction). As a small example attached below is a screenshot one of the DLC heroes extracted from the Xbox DLC files.

I mean the ability to extract the console files is almost completely useless but I had a lot of fun implementing it. See the full changelog and download the new release on GitHub.

Quote from: Norwood on February 12, 2018, 06:26:32 PM
I'd be curious to know if Jedikiller or someone has an archive of the site, though I have to admit I'm not sure if that is possible with a forum.

It is interesting though, looking at some old captures of the site on the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100202013043/http://www.mpcgamers.com:80/

Sure, since Led formed SWBFGamers out of MPCGamers in a way SWBFGamers is an archive of it. For instance here is the first topic linked in the side bar of the web archive link you posted http://www.swbfgamers.com/index.php?topic=1695.

Why not the modtools exactly? Did you mess with your data folder and want to save some redownload time? How can you have Zero Editor but not it's config files?

You'd use Zero Editor to edit a command post, along with some mandatory scripting for gamemode purposes in the mission's script. You can certainly do both these things by hand in a hex editor, in that it is not impossible, but it would be extremely cumbersome to the point of being impossible.

My guess is the directional light is supposed to be overridden in there. And since SWBF1 only has the concept of one directional light (the sun) you're seeing this. As a workaround for SWBF1; find the light and region it's bound to by looking in the .lgt file and then once you have the region name from within Zero Editor change it to a shadow region, turn sun intensity down to 0 and just instead tweak ambient colours in the region until it looks roughly how it should.