how much do you really know about this game?

[fo0k]

give me your best, even stupid thoughts on making the following.. no wrong answers here.

- night vision goggles - they need to make the invisible, visible.. not turn dark grey into dark green..
- making custom lightmapshadow for interior building with multiple levels and light / dark areas..??? no idea how or if that can be done as standard.
- using effects to dynamically change the players clothing.. (white cloth becoming black etc..)

ill probably add to this thread..

[Swaffy]

My only idea for night-vision goggles, since I doubt it is possible to get them in the game to work like real goggles:

You'd have to retexture the game and possibly custom make the shadowing in order to get the effect. It would be mapside as far as I know. I highly doubt it is possible to get night-vision goggles working in BF1942, but I've seen them in BF2. The engine is not advanced enough for those. So instead of using camera effects on the soldiers, you'd have to change the map's appearance, so the night-vision would always be active for every player.

I don't know much, if anything, about shadowing and lightmaps.

(Sent from someone else's computer.)

[archer]

Just what kind of magic do you expect from an old DirectX 8.1 based engine? Of course, there exist mods for other games that managed to upgrade the graphics engine, like for example "A Path Beyond" mod for C&C: Renegade, but I believe they were actively supported by game developers. I'm afraid we won't be seeing that for Battlefield 1942...

As for you questions, I think all of that could be accomplished by some tricks, after a very long research, and they wouldn't look anywhere as good as in newer games. The question is: would the result be worth all the effort?

[fo0k]

Just what kind of magic do you expect from an old DirectX 8.1 based engine? Of course, there exist mods for other games that managed to upgrade the graphics engine, like for example "A Path Beyond" mod for C&C: Renegade, but I believe they were actively supported by game developers. I'm afraid we won't be seeing that for Battlefield 1942...

As for you questions, I think all of that could be accomplished by some tricks, after a very long research, and they wouldn't look anywhere as good as in newer games. The question is: would the result be worth all the effort?

heheh.. It's just the tricks that are fun to try.. I suppose I should make it clear that these questions are for fun and I don't expect to be integrating them in a map mod for a serious use.. This is just the 2012 equivalent to the 1950's man in the shed at the bottom of the garden making 'stuff'. 1942 simply provides an old, fun, familiar engine to place a 3D work into so that I can run around it and, if its got something a bit unique for 1942 I can share it with others..

I'm guessing that for most of you guys, when you try a bit of modding for '42 these days it is not so serious.. just more seeing what could be done..


so.. yeah bring on the crazy ideas.. if you had a low poly tunnel network model.. then i guess when the player puts on the night vision you could swap out the entire tunnel mesh for a version that was lit up like night vision..

hell, I just like the discussion of the impossible things.. and to see what wacky races kinda ideas can solve them in '42.

[cajunwolf]

Interesting post, and I was cruising through post looking for different tidbits of information when I ran across it, thinking it worth bringing up again because the title is misleading.

If I am not mistaken, the night vision goggles have been done. I think it was in the final version of DCX, but I could be wrong, I know I have seen them though and in bf42 - bfv. I remember the modeling team for DCX were working on it when I left the mod as AI coder after release 9? I forget, was long ago, but I do have some dev releases that I could dig through when time permits. Look into GC also, as it could have been there. I worked with so many mods back then they all kind of merge, and like 4c, Dnamro, and others at BFSP we each worked with several mods at the same time, even sharing information. So when I say I have seen it, then there is a good chance I'm right.

I'm guessing that for most of you guys, when you try a bit of modding for '42 these days it is not so serious.. just more seeing what could be done ?

I can go with that, and yes I often do this with AI or map related "wild, edge of the envelope" schemes or ideas to not only see if it is possible, but out of the thread come many other wild, fantastic ideas, some work. Most of the time it is a win win thing, others a waste of my time, and reading later think I might have been drinking or something else (I'm an old hippie from the 60's, so what).

Mainly, I like to share ideas with other like minded people, and you have to admit, there aren't many folks at the office you can strike up a conversation about oh say, the "technique's of lightmapping 3D models for bf1942" I can tell you. They tend to look at you a little strange to say the least, and your darn sure not gonna pick up hot women this way. This was and is one of the most unique, and mod able games to come out and probably the only one ever of it's kind. I have met some of the most brilliant, crazy, artistic, helpful and sharing people during the 10 years I have been involved with this silly old game, and wouldn't trade it for anything in the world, it has been a great ride! So I would have to say I come here to be around weirdos like myself, and a place where people understand what I talk about. It's a bitch being a geek in the real world, though we are gaining in popularity. Hey, let someone's computer break and all of a sudden I am their friend indeed, right?

Next would be that I like to learn, and teach what I learn. It's one thing to learn something on your own and it makes you pleased, you even feel clever, but no fun if nobody else knows, right? The best feeling to me is to be able to teach others what I learn and share in their excitement when they learn to do it for themselves. So here it seems we are on the same channel ..

1942 simply provides me an old, fun, familiar engine to place a lot of my 3D work into so that I can run around it and, if its got something a bit unique for 1942 I can share it with others..

This idea is what has always driven the BF community and why so many kewl new possibilities exist today. When I first started to "attempt" to mod-map the game all we had was a cheesy, cmd script rfa extractor- packer, MadBulls Heghtmap editor, GMAX, plugins for 3Dmax 5 -6 by Rex, and that's about it. Today, I cannot began to count the stuff available to map or mod with. It's people who build on what others started and then others after build on where they were. You know no one ever figured that we would still be modding and mapping this game 10 years later, did they?

I have to say, playing online again in the new free release was so nostalgic. There were many n00bs and the usual A holes, and it reminded me why I like SP - Coop so much. It was great fun though.

[Apache Thunder]

give me your best, even stupid thoughts on making the following.. no wrong answers here.

- night vision goggles - they need to make the invisible, visible.. not turn dark grey into dark green..
- making custom lightmapshadow for interior building with multiple levels and light / dark areas..??? no idea how or if that can be done as standard.
- using effects to dynamically change the players clothing.. (white cloth becoming black etc..)

ill probably add to this thread..

1. Night Vision Goggles. I don't see any coding tricks or texture tricks I can think of that could achieve this. Would require major exe hex-editing and custom shaders to enable something like this.

2. Not entirely sure what you mean by this. Lightmaps for interiors that are different from outside and/or different areas inside the same interior with different lighting? This can't be achieved using the game engine to lightmap it, But most certainly can if you use 3DS Max. That and BF1942 supports DDS format textures for lightmaps (in fact it seems to run better with them) so having different color schemes or skylight settings for some areas would be easy to do since DDS textures aren't confined to a 256 color pallet applied to grayscale TGA files.

I've lightmapped the interior of DC Sea Rigs using 3DS Max, and if I had wanted to, I could easily change different areas to use different lighting. If I wanted to use different skylight settings for one area, I would have to split that geometry off to it's own unique object so it can have it's own lightmap file. At which point I can give it totally unique lightmap settings.

3. This might be possible. It would involve adding the clothes as destructible child objects. Would not work correctly in multiplayer (and adding PCO child objects to a soldier object is one of those things that is a bad idea in BF1942. ). But only limit I can see is that it could only happen once. Unless you put all the clothes on at once with each new one a tiny bit smaller so it won't clip through the last one. Give each their own collision mesh. So that when a projectile hits it, that child object dies and reveals the next item in order. Repeat until they are all gone and the base clothing item part of the soldier mesh it self becomes visible. However child objects can't respawn like stand-a-lone PCO objects tied to spawners. So the soldier would have to die and re-spawn to reset his clothing. I also recall armor effects not working for destructible child objects, so any possible fancy stuff using that is a no-go.

Destructible SimpleObject and destructible bundles can work in BF1942, but only if they are a child object of a soldier or PCO. If they were made destructible by themselves on a map, then the game would CTD the moment a soldier or PCO touches said object. (though if a projectile hits it, they can still die like normal. Its only direct player interactions that is bugged.)

The reason this won't work in multiplayer is because the game isn't coded to track the status of Static Objects (any object class that is not a soldier, projectile, or PCO basically) in a multiplayer environment. Even if you add network info, the game will not relay the visible change in that objects status to each player. You can kill a child object but for all other players it will appear as if it was still there. There may also be server CTDs associated with doing this, but I haven't throughly tested that aspect of it. I had made destructible door shields on a BF2142 titan I ported to BF1942. When they were put in as bundles or simpleobjects, they would die as they are supposed to but would still remain visible to players connected to the server. They can walk though it after it died though so of coarse collision info is still tracked to some degree. (but you get the slightly buggy player movement when the player crosses the area where the child object was. It's like when you remove static objects from a map (or add them) server side. They won't be visible to the players, but they can still walk and interact with the added objects or go in areas where an object was removed from. but their collision info is buggy because the server is telling the client one thing while the client was expecting another resulting in a brief tug of war with the server so to speak. :p )