I helps me with my other program, so thank you for asking about it.

If it doesn't do what you need, let me know.

MSH_TAG_SIZE_VALIDATION_TOOL v1.0
by tirpider@yahoo.com

A Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2 model utility.

visit http://www.swbfgamers.com/

This tool is an aid for hex editing.
It will look for tag sizes in any SWBF 1 or 2 .msh file you select, and determine if they are valid or not, offering to repair them if they are incorrect.

USAGE:
It is simple to use.

1 - Double click on the executable.
2 - Select a .msh file.
    The program will take a moment to analyze the file.
3 - If any problems were found, it will ask if you want to repair them.
4 - It will then ask if you wish to save a report on the .msh you selected.
-done.


The idea is to reduce the number of edits needed when doing simple hex edits.
The way I see it, everytime you alter a .msh by hand, there is a potential for a mistake to be made.

If you want to, say, change the name of a texture reference.
First you need to make the change, keeping track of the byte size diference caused by your edit.
Then update the size entry for the TX0D.
Then update the size entry for that TX0D's parent MATD.
Then update the size entry for that MATD's parent MATL.
Then update the size entry for that MATL's parent MSH2.
Then update the size entry for that MSH2's parent HEDR.

-or-

Simple change the entry and run it through this program.

I've tested on several files and in a 32 bit environment.  I have no idea what it will do on a 64 bit system, but I have included an x64 version in case it is needed.

The report might be usefull outside of tag size correction, as it lists all the tags in order and the offsets where they are found.  Also, all the offsets should be even. If you notice that any of the offsets are odd, then there is a malformed tag somewhere around the change. This program wont fix that, but the report can help find it

I hope this saves time and makes room for bolder operation on .msh files.

E-mail me or contact me on www.swbfgames.com if you have ANY problems with it.
(include "MSH_TAG_SIZE_VALIDATION_TOOL v1.0" in the topic if you e-mail me.)

Thanks:
SleepKiller for asking about this feature. I hope this helps.
George Lucas for making my second favorite thing, Star Wars.
My wife for being my #1 favorite, and for putting up with late night coding.
Pandemic for making SWBF.
LucasArts, for the Empire of SW I can't get away from.

I can only justify them in that it is an attempt to protect their interests.

My personal view is that the web has gotten worse and worse over the years and have resigned myself to the idea that one day it will be just as useless as TV or a phone app. (I blame marketers and not government for this.)
I am more angry about unsolicited advertising online than I am about more intense filtering of content.

For SOPA.
The potential for abuse is there, but it always has been, even before modern attention.
I just don't see it as a personal threat.
My advise is to get some distance from all the illicit sources of media before the revised version actually makes it through.

For Megaupload.
They had a criminal piracy ring operating (among other things). Yeah.. their takedown was enevitable without special policies needed.  If they had a simple file hosting service, they could have worked with athorities to track offenders.  There was more to it than just holding files for folks, though.

PIPA.
That one is bad.  Fits right in with Homeland Security.
I imagine that it will be abused, and I honestly don't know what to do about it.
If you don't approve of it, you must be a terrorist, and they stuff you in a bag and send you to see Jimmy Hoffa.
No due process.
It's evil and anti-American in every way.

The authors/architects of the above arent out to get anyone.
(PIPA, I am not so sure of. I really hope it isn't another round of McCarthyism)All they want is to keep their jobs and a pile of money to call their own.
That goes for the media organizations, lobbiests, politicians, and artists.

I severely doubt that any of them are wringing their hands waiting to 'get' that one random person for some online indiscresion.

Show up as a group or mass of random persons, activly trying to couter or subvert their efforts, then yeah, they are going to fight back, till it becomes to expensive, then they will just pull the plug.

I just don't know what else to say about it.

-edit
I did some reading and I completely mixed up PIPA with something else.... my bad.

Just got it installed.

A+ work.

The Poison grenade is really nice. (All your effects are nice, but that one stands out for me)

I'm especially digging the Dark Trooper.
Slow and Heavy. It adds character to the unit.
Takes it a while to show up, but when it gets there, things fall down.. heh.

Not so fond of the Clone Jet, but I got it in for those guys anyway.
(It's skin is groovy though)

Blah.
[spoiler]

Quotea case, and evidence

All one would have to do to fairly build a case against any of these sites is do a simple google search for bootleg material.
Follow up on those links and what do you find?

Evidence.

Add a few months of server logs, show it to a judge, shake and serve.

Seems to be not only fair, but fairly easy.



Really, SOPA is a different issue. If any government decides your speech needs to go away, you honestly think they would think twice about using legal or illegal tactics to make it happen?
Big Brother isn't the enemy.  He is a distraction, just like Goldstein.
The real enemy is that thing in the back of our heads that dreams up all the terrible things that can happen if we 'get caught'.

QuoteVirtually any website designed for the dissemination/sharing of private information can be meaningfully accused of copyright violation at some level

While idealisticly true, you aren't going to win any fights about free speech by waving the flag of thieves and pirates.

Sharing the lifetime work and study of a physician/scientist/astrologer/whatever in the efforts to hold back dissease/stop evil/save the world/whatever , while still protected under intellectual property laws, could at least be argued as the 'right' thing to do.

Feeling persecuted because you can't download Lady GaGa's new album is just pouting.

And that's all they were interested in with SOPA to begin with. It was lobbied for by industry, not black hattted, moustache twirling, illuminate, waiting for the day they can show us all...

I hate the idea of having isp's, server operators, and even forum staff turned into police for the industry.
It would turn out as infuriating as the TSA hiring airport security through state unemployment lines.
People doing a job they are not qualified for, and not interested in doing.

But that doesn't mean that everyone gets to sneak into the latest Twilight for free.
There needs to be some sort of regulation and at least a penalty for trafficing stolen goods.

The users of the internet have proven that they can't be in the library without stealing the books, so the industry has started looking for solutions.

Arresting them and putting legislation in place is part of it.

QuoteI think the end game is clear: the end of privacy as we know it. This is a direct assault on the freedom of information, and privacy. The first decades of the internet have been wild, and free, but there is a menacing effort on the part of authorities worldwide to replace this internet 1.0 with a second, "improved" internet 2.0. We can't let them undo so much progress.

You are right.
The internet is ruined forever.
But governments aren't the reason.
Marketers are.
They started jamming ads and products into every corner of the web, and now it's just as annoyingly filled with coersive advertisment and insipid infomercial-like sites as broadcast television.
And since everyone involved is not only interested in the money, but acting as someone elses employee, they all want to keep their jobs and are willing to do all the same crappy things to the net that they have done to newspapers, magazines, tele, radio, and city streets, to the internet.

The government could care less if you are a brony.
But Hasbro will pay good money to make sure you get ads for the latest Rainbow Dash t-shirt on your facebook.
And that's where your privacy concers are... not in the hands of government, but deep pocketed industry lobbiests and demographic data harvesters (google, facebook, anyone with a cookie.. which all the tracker sites, including TorrentFreak, use.) 
[/spoiler]


Summery:
[spoiler]
I kinda don't care how they make the thieves go away.
As long as they go...
If they have something important to tell the world, they can write their manifesto in prison and mail it it to a friend to publish, so the world can bootleg it all over the place.[/spoiler]

Re:The Jet Droid
I want to play with the flying/jetting a bit.
It's all on hold till I rebuild my dev environment.

I agree with SleepKiller that the jets imbalance play.
More on the Jet Trooper side than the Dark Trooper.

If everyone had the jets, even as they are, It wouldn't be so bad.

I had just discovered MOS EISLEY: Utter Chaos (utc1) before my drive died.
It's a bit silly at first, with the over powered weapons, but after a while, it grows on you.
(Infinite Rockets FTW)
Just need to make the hover go away and add a fuel limit.

Another thing to overcome with the jets is the way they just cut off if your feet touch the ground.
Thats the part that kills skiing.

I don't hate them, but I don't really care for them either.

My big complaint with jets is really with Zero itself.  I miss the skiing abilities of Tribes.
(Using gravity, inertia, small hops, light jet pulses, and terrain countours to gather tremendous speed with minimal effort.)
Without the 'bounce' to it, the jets are kinda flat feeling.

Id rather walk. (Or nade launch.. same thing ... or not.)

My only lament in all this is the loss of modding assets.

If anyone here has messed with quake or doom, you'll have noticed the very large id games shaped hole in public ftp sites (If you can even find those, anymore.) There is an entropic force erasing the good stuff before it's even discovered.

I recommend hoarding assets, So we don't have to scramble for links as they die (via megaupload like takedowns, or just plain deletion like filefront.)

I'm sitting on a 15gb un-organized pile of stuff for BF1 & 2, but none of the old stuff and lots of overlap.


As for btjunkie, this was inevitable. I suspect they were either threatened or paid to just go away. Had to see it comming though. The argument that there were legit torrents linked on their site died the instant you tried to find one.
Looked like a black market software and dvd warehouse to me.

I can't imagine that the absense of this black market will bring the demise of democracy, though. If it does, then I must completely misunderstand what democracy is. I don't see downloading movies for free or bootlegging music and software as an inalienable right. (I can't see the new Iron Man for free? RIOT!)

When federal agents start shutting down news sites and political forums, then I'll see the ability to speak freely as being in peril.

Till then, it's just bussines doing what it has always done: act in it's own best interest.
To expect it to do otherwise is fantasy.

I come up with only some raw JK Yoda's and the one in the Alien Species Pack(s).
(Google and Yahoo can't even find the dead filefront link.)

The the readme credits Pandemic/LucasArts/Rage for the Yoda model and It's conversion.

-edit-
Guess it might help to include a link, even if it's not the MileHighGuy one.
www.swbfgamers.com - Alien Model Assets Pack v3.5

Quote from: SleepKiller on January 31, 2012, 03:27:57 PM
Okay, let me get this straight if I were to HEX edit a TGA name to be longer. And then run it through this It would automatic fix the file size headers for me?

EDIT:
Also would the same apply for renaming a bone for instance?

Short answer:
(for both) Yes and no.

Ok, a bit more descriptive:
Once editing and saving is enabled.  yes.
There will be an option to manually fix the sizes or to have it do it automagicaly.

Until editing and saving is enabled.  no.
There are numerous bugs in the code. I'm not willing to open up the ability to completely hose a model just yet.

The Long answer:
In order to speed up load times, I read the size fields and use that to guess where the next tag is.

The good side is a speed up on load, the bad side is that if the size fields are incorrect on load, then that tag would be incorrectly read, and worse, there is a good chance the tags after the corrupt size field would never be found or loaded (and couldn't be saved).

What I'm going to do about it:
I'm re-writing the msh loading routines in a side file with the intent of porting to a more robust language. But the current development line is stuck with my AutoIT limitations.
Look for editing capabilities once the version number gets to 0.5. By then I'll have the display and loading bugs gone.
(seems far off, but it's just a planned jump)

I'm gonna revisit my old tools and see if I can make a size fixer, because going back through a msh to make several edits for the sake of one string change is just silly.
It may be slow to identify the tags at first, but the rest should run really quick.

Renaming a bone:
Same rules apply. If you change it's size, then you have to change its parent and it's parent's parent all the way back to HEDR.

Note: All the MODL tags are children of MSH2. The PRNT bone is technicaly the MODL's parent, but only in the bone heirarchy. The Bone heirarchy interacts with the msh in special ways, but is seperate from sizes.

Fresh version in first post.

I bump this because more tags are translated (confirming a lot of Ande's work.)
And it's loading a bit faster.
Still gets hung up on NDXL/XT but big models are no longer taking 15-20 min to load. 1 or 2 at the  most.

Other than that, not much new.

My initial poking around in the PS2 BF1 mission.lvl showed the encodings of floating points and integers to be the same as the PC version.

I don't have the PS2 BF2 server or the PC BF2 game handy. So it's all relative.

It would be interesting if BF2 ps2 lvl's worked on PC.  BF1 lvls don't at all.

There might be some ps2 platform specific lua commands. Some the rendering is handled a little different, it's possible some of the game mechanics are a little tweaked as well.

I think there is a SetPS2ModelMemory() function somewhere. (I don't even know if that's spelled right or applicable.)

I'm following so far. Really good.

I have 1 question, but I'll save it till class is over

-EDIT-

Ok, my question is regarding step one.

In the 2nd XVi32 screenshot, why are we removing the 'a' from that tga name? (fell_ter03_.tga)

Welcome, PyroJockey.

Good to see more ps2 players

I'd love to know more about the HEXes you've put on the ps2 server.
I got a little one, but it rarely gets anyone on it. (TheShop, North America)
I haven't messed with hacking it, but if I run across any groovy(or non-groovy) ps2 hacks or mods, I'll let you know.

Got my start on a Space Invaders machine as well. It was in the snack bar of a local department store.
Can't remember if it was all green or if it had the colored filter on the glass....

Anyway, welcome aboard.

This is pretty neat-o.

Thanks, SleepKiller.