Retexture Project
 

Hi,

With tools like azone and 3D spy has anyone tried to do a retexture of the old zones with higher resolution textures? Similar to what people are doing for Skyrim mods?

I never tried those tools, I don't know if its doable?

Thanks,

Phil

I'm sure it's possible as I've modified zones/character models. Also they made retextures of Classic-Velious zones to be higher definition and released it as a downloadable pack. (And it's packed by default with SoF-Underfoot.). It's possible to change the size of textures so long as the ratios stay the same.

I don't know how they did it with Skyrim (Like the High Def civilian clothes etc as i use those mods too heh) but I'm pretty sure to increase the appearance you would mostly have to completely rebuild the texture from scratch. You can remove data that's there but you can't make what isn't there just appear, you know? =/

If you want to try though, here: (This is for editing race models but zones would function similarly)
http://www.peqtgc.com/phpBB2/viewtop...t=9313&start=7

Awesome! Do you know where to find the download pack for higher definition classic-velious?

I toy'd with the thought of redoing zones with smoother geometry and different textures. Same layouts but just more...natural looking?

Partly for the look and partly for the ability to have zones that are not copyright material therefore the ability to share.

I found the classic retexture on the Luclin CD's. They look very nice!

Phil

There are quite a few problems with your goal (none of these are your own fault). The old EQ zone format/engine capabilities are quite outdated. They don't support a lot of what a modern day engine can and should. I am developing an EQ client and have decided it will contain two ways to render old zones. Simply pressing a button will swap between the rendering methods.

1. Default textures, per-vertex lighting, everything exactly as it was.

2. High resolution textures (loaded externally) with normal maps, parallax mapping, per-pixel lighting, water with cubemap reflections, high resolution skydomes, etc.

If you would like to help with the high resolution component, pop over into the development forum. I am working on finishing up the lighting code.

Let me know if you are interested.

So... What happened here. Did this project lose steam already?

Is there any way to possibly configure zone textures? That would be really handy.

I've got a few zone_points where the textures between one zone to the other looks marginally off slightly awkward where that kind of thing would be really handy to fix and correct.

For the most part it looks relatively decent despite that and I can live with it, but it's something that would be nice to be able to touch up and fix.

Sorry to help further necro a necro-ed post, but I think those interested in alternative textures would find this thread very interesting.

http://forum.shardsofdalaya.com/showthread.php?t=28215

Funny how much a little surface change could make the game interesting in a whole new way.

Yeah I saw that thread and forgot all about it. Grinkles second post response in that thread is what I had in mind about cosmetically altering zone textures.

I wasn't looking to use custom textures not previous a part of EQ however like he did in his case, but simply have a way to pick and choose textures that EQ does in fact use and swap them around as I like between various zones.

Like if I could turn a wooden textured building into a mossy stone, granite, or brick one instead as a example. I want it in my case for zone lines to better match different custom zone line transitions from one zone line to the other.

Is it possible to just rename zone texture files and use them for different zones? Like could I reuse Rivervale textures for Freeport zones? and vice verse?

If that's the case a simple .bat file would be a easy way to customize zones that could be distributed legally just having it backup old textures to a folder and then having it copy, rename, and overwrite (replace) the previous textures with the ones you wanted to swap over.

This guy also has some texture modification stuff people might find interesting.
http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...d.php?t=121490

It is going to be more complicated than a .bat file because of the way textures are actually stored. (I have been doing some texture modifications and I post as daffie/galelor on the SoD/P99 forums respectively.) I will even go so far as to say that the version of eq you have running effects how you modify the textures. As an example, SoD textures appear upright once extracted with eqspy while p99 and live seem to be inverted. There are also other differences. (I can't think of any other way to explain this unless the SoD guys extracted, modified, reintroduced all textures, and then rewrote the engine to use the textures in an upright position... I highly doubt this is the case...)

That said, the textures are fairly well organized by location/name. Depending on the texture sizing, it may be possible take background textures from one zone to use them in another zone.

They don't need to extract anything, they have the source material used to build the files in the first place. It's not uncommon for a file format to change over time as features and optimizations are done to an engine. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they decided that storing the files a different way worked better for them in more recent clients.

Usually, textures are grouped from between 50-400 per file... The only way I have found to quickly make any meaningful changes is by isolating each texture through extraction using S3Dspy.

How do you modify individual textures if you don't 'extract' them from the .s3d, .eqg, and .pak files?

EDIT- I see what you mean now. I don't think SoD made any major changes to the engine or reading of the textures. I think that was done by Sony in subsequent versions of the EQ client. I will plug the SoD guys as being far and away my favorite EQ emulator ;)

I just came across this forum thread tonight that got me thinking about this subject a bit further.

http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=87281

It's a program to fix transparent textures and according to the wiki it's legal as it includes no copyrighted files basically it just patch edits your current s3d files with transpfx.exe and a .bat file that tells the executable what to patch.

Looking at the .bat with notepad++ I see both chr.s3d and obj.s3d files along with a bunch of .bmp texture files and some sort of commands it's issues transpfx.exe to do to them and what not.

I'd be curious if the .bat could be manipulated to patch different s3d files textures to replace them with other ones of your liking to do something like for example inverting nro to a ice covered zone like great divide and you do the reverse for that zone making it into desert.

That's one example for large scale cosmetic changes. Now another example for it's use would be take Zone_points for zone lines that look similar, but don't normally go together like qeytoqrg to lakerathe though do look close to do some texture touch ups on them to fit together as if they always belong next to each other. So it's potential has both cosmetic and physical land reconstruction purposes.

There could very well possibly be some client differences in regards to it, but could be resolved with different .bat patch files for different clients. It could really open up a new avenue of server customization for the EQemu community.

So S3DSpy is pretty nifty. I wish it could extract all your .s3d files into separated folders then have a user configuration session file type thing sorta like nlite to create custom windows installations like that would be a absolute godsend.

Anyway here's a teaser screenshot of a project I might work on converting a bunch of zones over to Luclin textures. Here's the higher resolution version .s3d file of Unrest zone with a couple Nexus zone textures replacing a couple. Oh noes where did the grass go?!?!?
http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p...ps8eb1fa73.png

See if I could make configuration files for entire .s3d conversions some way easily it would make it relatively easy to create zone_points connecting pretty much any zone to another outside of the hard coded one's at least.