Textures Hosting

[Edgar1898]

Anyone that wishes for me to host there textures simply email them to me as an attachment to:

textures@eqemupvp.net

On the subject line please tell me what type of file it is (ie A whole zone, an object, etc).

I'll upload them a few times a day and when its uploaded it will be downloadable from http://openzone.eqemulator.net/

If you are going to be making a lot of textures for the eqemu community, contact me for a username/pass so you can upload them yourself.

NOTE: Please note that the website is .com and the email is address is .net, I dont have the email server setup on the dedicated server so if you send it to the wrong address I wont receive it.

[Windcatcher]

I've got 20 textures so far and a test zone that people can play with (it overwrites ecommons)...it's a lot to send, so I'd prefer FTP'ing it directly to the server. PM me when you get the chance :)

WC

[Edgar1898]

Sent you the pm

[Windcatcher]

Yup, got it. I've been making some major improvements to OpenZone so I haven't had the chance to upload yet. I'll try to get something up tonight if I can.

WC

Edit: OK, the first version of my test zone is up, all nice and packaged as an .S3D file you can use. I also uploaded all of the textures I've generated so far, all my own original stuff (created with Texture Maker). There's also a tiny text file accompanying the zone file that tells you what to do to use it.

Once you zone in, make sure to do a #goto 0 0 500 so you don't fall forever. The normal entry point to EC is off the edge of my zone.

The textures are all 24-bit BMP and take some room. I don't know if you want to ZIP them up in the future...

[IANumtin]

I just tried this out. VERY COOL. Obviously it keeps the spawns for EC intact so Bubar was about 15 feet in the air standing by the water. Easily fixed though, great job!

I've tried tinkering with the 1.6 version of this tool but don't quite understand how to use it. The only thing I was able to come up with was a door, a chair and a block all piled on top of one another. Care to shed some light?

[Windcatcher]

When I get home I'll upload the .SCN file I used to generate it. You'll need OpenZone 1.7 to open it and tinker with it. Basically you make buildings from the ground up, just like a real building: first the foundation, then the ground floor walls, then what's in there. Then add the ceiling/second floor, more walls, etc. Add the roof when you're done. Since the tool lets you move around in "fly" mode also, you can move inside buildings and add more stuff, like chairs and tables. You'll see what I mean when I upload the scene file.

WC

[IANumtin]

Thanks, Windcatcher. I've already downloaded 1.7. When I get home from work I'll look for the other file.

[Windcatcher]

It's up. It's in the same folder as the .S3D file.

WC

EDIT: I mist have accidentally deleted the bounding box or forgotten to include it in this version. I've replaced the .SCN and .S3D files with correct ones.

[IANumtin]

Got it...I've redownloaded the s3d file as well. Going to give this a shot. After seeing your sample zone, I can definately see some major possibilities with this tool (if I can figure it out :lol: ). Thanks again, Windcatcher!

[IANumtin]

Hmm, maybe I'm doing something wrong. I opened up the SCN file and I see the different objects listed on the left but I don't see anything in the view screen. Nothing at all anymore even if I try to create or add anything. It's just a blank green screen. :?

[Windcatcher]

Hmmm. Do you have OpenGL support? The tool uses OpenGL to display the 3D view.

Two tests you can try:

1. Click the edit ground button. You should see a top-down grid of the zone, with grassy areas and barren underwater areas shown. If this doesn't happen, then it sounds like the zone didn't load properly (which I highly doubt if you're seeing the object list).

2. Click the change view button to switch to first-person perspective and see if that helps.

I just uploaded new versions of the .SCN and .S3D, with some roads I put in with the ground editor. The road textures I made are up on the FTP site.

WC

[IANumtin]

Good news and bad news:

Good News: Got Open Zone to show the objects and I even loaded in your SCN file and looked around. I also understand the changeview now.

Bad News: Now that I've seen how you created your zone, I decided to try it myself and started a fresh zone. I added in ground, objects, etc. Only problem is it's not showing again. Not even if I load in your file, it's just not showing up. It's almost as if it comes and goes as it pleases.

Is there any type of readme or manual that shows how to do things? I have a gazillion questions and I really want to use this tool. I think it would be awesome to create zones and put them in for all new and truly "customized" content.

[Windcatcher]

There should be an OpenZone.Txt included in the .ZIP file that serves as basic documentation.

When you load my file, does the object treeview on the left side get populated, or does it stay blank?

WC

[IANumtin]

It gets populated but I think I figured it out. I was actually able to get in and put in a flat ground, building and a table and chair inside. But again, I have a ton of questions about using this. The txt file inside the zip doesn't even begin to scratch the surface when it comes to questions. I'm trying to do a "trial and error" so to speak but would save hours upon hours if I had some sort of reference to turn to.

Just as an example, looking at your SCN file I wanted to see how you placed the text on the sign that says, "Wind's Tower". The value I'm showing is "windstowersign" which is in the "sidetxt" column. How on earth did you come up with that value and how do you add textures? Is it on a numbered value? Do I have to create the textures? If so, where do I save them? I tried saving a simple brick texture to the proper subfolder in a .bmp 24 bit format (can't remember exact name of the folder at the moment) according to the readme.txt that was inside that folder but I still couldn't pull it up.

Again, way to many questions to post here...

[IANumtin]

UPDATE:

I did finally slow my brain down enough from the excitement of using this program to actually READ the OpenZone.txt instead of scanning (sorry about that). It did answer several questions but a few things do come to mind that I couldn't find or figure out.

1. You mention several times in your OpenZone.txt about creating heightmaps. I have yet to figure out how to do this. I found the sample one you supplied but how do I load that into Open Zone to use and/or edit? Everytime I click on edit terrain it tells me a heightmap needs to be created using Open Zone 1.7 or later (I'm using your most recent 1.8) and the loop continues putting me right back to the same question, "how do I create the heightmap or use and alter the one you supplied?".

2. Several times in the OpenZone.txt file "mesh" was mentioned. I read through this section for nearly two hours and have yet to understand a single bit of it. I'm not a programmer, dev, know about compiling or parsing, etc. Any chance of an English version of this explanation?

3. The included program "GC3" I have yet to understand the use for. Why would I need a .WLD file (what is the use of this format?) if Open Zone can create straight to an .s3d file? I tried loading in a .DDS file using this program to see if I can find anything to convert to .bmp but nothing came up after browsing over 600 .DDS files found. It was all garbled.

4. .XML files......see question "2" and replace "mesh" with ".XML". Very confusing. :?

5. Texture Sets: I understand how to select and create new folders to select from (I created northkarana to test it) but do these pull from the textures in the eqemu files? Or do I have to create each texture for each zone that I want to create?

Overall this is a fun tool to use despite several questions and not understanding how to do certain things. A very loud "Way to go!!" definately goes out to you for this project. I even have my two kids creating .SCN's and they're doing quite well with the buildings. I figure what the heck, I might be able to use their creations later when I actually save to an .s3d and test it. :D

[Trumpcard]

XML is a file format specification , alot like HTML.

<aheight>30</aheight>
<awidth>50</awidth>

Like that.


A mesh is basiclly a representation of an object ..

http://pages.zoom.co.uk/expendablejim/meshes/meshes.htm

[Windcatcher]

Okay, here goes...

1. To create a new zone using a heightmap, open up the new zone window. At the top is a checkbox specifying whether to create a flat zone or one using a heightmap. By default, it's already checked. Then enter the coordinates of the *center* of the zone in the lower left area. Then, in the lower right, enter the *size* of the entire zone. For the output-blah-blah-rotated.tga heightmap that I included, my settings were

Center: 0, 0, 62
Size: 4000, 4000, 400

Then select your textures for the land and underwater areas. I used grass.bmp and barren_ground.bmp. All of my textures are available on the FTP site, and I have them all in my library\textures folder (they're not in a textureset subfolder like \library\textureset\ecommons).

Once you have everything selected, click Ok and you'll be presented with a dialog to open the heightmap file (either .BMP or .TGA). OpenZone will then generate the meshes from that information.

What is a mesh? It's a generic term for a collection of polygons. Think of a screen door or a screen on a window. It's an aluminum wire mesh. A collection of polygons is thought of the same way (though they tend to be triangles instead of squares).

Perhaps this is a good time to discuss what I mean by "textureset". At any given time, OpenZone knows about two kinds of textures: "common" and "textureset". Common textures all reside in library\textures and are available no matter what zone you're working on. However, if you have a lot of textures, you might want to put those textures that are specific to a zone in their own folders so they only show up when you're working on that zone. For example, if you made a bunch of textures that you only use wth ecommons, you could make a library\textures\ecommons subfolder and put those textures in there. When you select the ecommons textureset, the common textures and the ecommons textures will be available on the texture drop-down lists, but textures in any other textureset folders will be hidden. I define "textureset" as those textures that are specific to a particular zone and reside in a subfolder of the same name. It's a way of making large numbers of textures manageable.

There is one caveat to creating a new zone with a heightmap: at this time, you have to have your water settings already set *before* you create the zone. That's because OpenZone first reads the heightmap, creates a single ground mesh from it using the ground texture only, and then breaks it up along all the water boundaries. It's a permanent type of thing. What I do to first figure out where I want my water areas to be is this: create a new zone using *only* a ground texture and then play with my water settings until I'm happy with them. Then, when I'm satisfied with them, click "new" again and re-create the zone with both ground and underwater textures.

There are third-party programs for creating heightmaps. There are two heightmaps (not programs) supplied with OpenZone. I found the first one with a freeware program, though I don't remember where. The other, the output-blah-blah.tga, I created with a freeware program called World Machine. You can find it with any search engine. It's got a steep learning curve but is very good aat creating "realistic" heightmaps. I created mine with this and exported it as 8-bit grayscale TGA. There are others out there as well.

2. See above for meshes in general, but yes, I also refer to them with special meaning in the documentation. Referring to OpenZone meshes I mean this: *all* objects in OpenZone are meshes, that is, three-dimensional objects, but I'm specifically referring to non-scripted objects (ground, underwater polygons, bounding boxes). Technically scripted objects are supersets of meshes: their size and shape are configurable, whereas basic OpenZone meshes can't be changed.

3. Why would you need a .WLD? You don't, not anymore. Before I figured out how to create .S3D files it was the only way to make a custom zone, but now that everything about .S3D's is known, I wouldn't bother with .WLD files.

The reason for GC3 was if you wanted to create .WLD files that *reference* the textures that come with EQ. You can't distribute those textures, but you could distriute your .WLD files and rely on users to insert them into their .S3D files. Frankly now that we can create .S3D files with our own textures, I think the usefulness of .WLD and GC3 is dubious. GC3 can convert the .DDS textures that come with EQ into .BMP so you can see them when you're making your scene file. Aside from that, it has little other use. In my opinion we should simply concentrate on making our own textures, and that's what I'm doing.

4. You only need to worry about XML files if you're dealing with OGRE, which is an open-source 3D engine. You see, OGRE has a file format called OGRE-MESH (yes, I know it's confusing) that is in XML format. XML is very much like HTML, that is, it's a text-based format that uses tags. It's great for transmitting and parsing information. At some point I might convert my .SCN file format to use XML. Anyway, at the current time, it all boils down to the fact that OpenZone can import OGRE-MESH XML files and 3DS-Max .3DS files. They're somewhat equivalent to .SCN files in that they describe geometric information.

5. Texturesets have *nothing* to do with real EQ files: they only provide a way to categorize textures so you don't wind up with a huge mess of textures. OpenZone can work with the common textures and one textureset at a time. However, the *name* of the textureset is used when you export to .S3D; the name of the .S3D and its internal .WLD rely on your textureset name, so realistically your textureset names should be the same as the zone short_names. I have a dream that someday a third-party client will emerge that can load any zone (not just the EQ zones) and then you'll be able to call your texturesets anything you like.

Do you have to create all your own textures? Yes, if you want to distribute .S3D files, since they contain your textures. I use a program called Texture Maker to make mine. It's shareware or somesuch, but I bought the registered version. You can find it on any search engine. It might seem steep at $70 but let me tell you, it's worth every penny. I'm still floored every time I use it.

WC

[IANumtin]

/bow's before WC....I must say that explained a ton. I had to print the page out so I have a reference, hehe. I really appreciate the explanations on everything, I wasn't expecting this big of a response in a single post but I really appreciate the effort you've put into helping me with this. I haven't quite got the water down yet but I'm sure after I tinker with it a bit I'll understand it a little better. I can create the water, but it's above ground. When I alter the elevation it keeps the underwater terrain above water.

Anyways, thanks a ton Windcatcher....now time to go create a zone :lol:

[IANumtin]

Windcatcher, thanks to your help I'm in full swing of this utility. It's awesome. I even got Texture Maker and have made a few textures as well.

Just remembered the very first post on this forum from Edgar. I've just tried the zone out for the first time and it's awesome! There's just a few bugs to work out and I'll send it off to you Edgar....Also, I'll be making quite a few textures for others to use as they wish. Not to mention more zones. I'm having a blast using this tool. :wink: :lol: :wink:

[stormhbrnd]

and when is this site up so we can all enjoy the textures ??