[WIP] Zeus: Pre-alpha 1 release

[Modzy]

Also Modzy, is there a possible discrepency between trial and demo that would screw up spawn points? Because on the Databank Facility mod and a few of my others, players sometimes spawn once and then another spawn point can't be located, while when playing on pc spawning works fine.

Also, lets say i renamed levels/test/bloodgulch to levels/test/tier0. Would renaming it back to levels/test/bloodgulch fix this, or the header/tag data perm damaged?

Spawn issues will occur if someone has used Sparkedit to delete spawn points, which does not restructure the scnr and rebuild when it makes changes, causing issues for HD.

Tag names do not have an effect on parsing. They are only really used to identify tags over a server, and even then, only object tags (tags whose second class is obje) are sent.

[Monk34]

If you make this app and it doesn't work on my shitty old 10.4 PPC, I might kill someone.

[{DKW}drk]

just 1 question... will this only be for ppc or something?

[Samuco_]

Oh and Halo Demo doesn't run on Lion...

[Sparky]

Oh and Halo Demo doesn't run on Lion...

Ah yes. Why does this have to be so complicated?

So if I make Zeus for 10.6+ only, then I'm limiting it to ONLY 10.6, not 10.6+ in reality, because most people will likely not mod any PPC games like Halo Demo Mac on one OS and play it on another. That said, Halo Full has a UB and Halo Mac is not the only supported platform of the game.

I'm thinking perhaps I should include heavy features like lightmap generation in the 10.6+ version and all other general features in a 10.4+ version.

Time for a new poll, quickly.

Mac OS 10.6+ (Intel) only?
Yes, I want this to be more 1337 in every way. 52% [ 11 ] x
Yes, and support for Windows via Cocotron. 19% [ 4 ]
No, you must build it for 10.5+ and PPC also. 5% [ 1 ]
No, you must build it for 10.4+ and PPC also. 24% [ 5 ]
Total votes : 21

[nil]

Operating system results (for Mac users) poll taken over a year ago http://macgamingmods.com/forum/viewtopi ... =2&t=11793 with as far as I can tell, minimum bias.

10.4 is not sane supporting in the slightest for any project anymore. 10.5 is kind of but barely sane right now to support for new projects (let us say that it is definitely not desirable), but as far as MGM goes (much worse than other communities) there could be a number of leopard users roaming around. I expect the number of Tiger users have decreased since the time I created that poll.

[Sparky]

OK. Offhand, I think I'm just gonna tell peeps to upgrade to 10.5 PPC and I can build Zeus as a Universal Binary for 10.5+, which at least gives me garbage collection capabilities. I'll make a separate and improved 10.6 Intel version.

So here you have it:

Version "Thunder": 10.5+ PPC and *maybe* Windows via Cocotron
Version "Lightning": 10.6+ Intel

Lightning will include Apple's multi-core technologies like Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL to get the best performance out of your multi-core computer. Lightning will be much faster than Thunder, and you will be able to create new maps and render lightmaps for them much faster than Halo Editing Kit users do with Halo CE.


MONK34, Upgrade your OS to 10.5!

[Mgalekgolo]

cool bro, but Itd be nice for us to have some proof of concept so I know this wont take 8 years.

[Sparky]

cool bro, but Itd be nice for us to have some proof of concept so I know this wont take 8 years.

I know what you meant to say, which is not what you said. "Proof of concept" is a logically incorrect phrase. "Developmental release" is what you meant to say, or even "evidence of development". I both have given and cannot give a "proof of concept", since loosely understood I've already given it and strictly understood such a thing makes no rational sense. Are my concepts listed and brainstormed to be proven true, false, possible or impossible? Grammatically, a concept is not "proven" to be completed, since a concept can have no real termination in a creative mind.

But to answer what you meant to say, which wasn't really a question anyway: given what I'm doing right now, it will likely be several months before I have map parsing written in code for all the Halo 1 maps. I'm writing Objective-C classes to parse (index) the halo map file code. Since I'm just about finished figuring out how I will do this, it will take some time. In the mean time, I'm also learning how I can make the program into a fast application.

I learned from sword's experience that I should study the language first, rather than use the instruction guide as a reference to pick and choose the methods. For example, I learned memory management, not only NSData which lets you read files into memory.

[Sparky]

Because Zeus will allow you to import model and animation data, I'm going to be studying BLEND files. The structure of saved files with the program Blender is done very well:

http://www.blender.org/development/arch ... le-format/

For example, they handle endian issues by recording the endianness within the .blend file, so that when the file is opened, Blender knows how to interpret it.

The only other model-related file format I expect to learn at this point is the widespread .obj file format, which I prefer because it includes texture references.

[Zanghfei]

QUESTION!

Hum, how do I use that?
I can't open my Halo map file x_x.

[Dirk Gently]

OK. Offhand, I think I'm just gonna tell peeps to upgrade to 10.5 PPC and I can build Zeus as a Universal Binary for 10.5+, which at least gives me garbage collection capabilities. I'll make a separate and improved 10.6 Intel version.

So here you have it:

Version "Thunder": 10.5+ PPC and *maybe* Windows via Cocotron
Version "Lightning": 10.6+ Intel

Lightning will include Apple's multi-core technologies like Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL to get the best performance out of your multi-core computer. Lightning will be much faster than Thunder, and you will be able to create new maps and render lightmaps for them much faster than Halo Editing Kit users do with Halo CE.


MONK34, Upgrade your OS to 10.5!

It makes no sense to do it like that. Speaking from a project I have going on right now, it is extremely hard to try to make it support anything other than 10.5 and forward. It means having to write hundreds of additional lines of code to do the same thing as built in features of the10.6 or even 10.5 API libraries. The simple fact is that with Lion not supporting PPC apps anymore, you are going to have to deal with a lack of support going forward. It makes more sense to build this project using 10.5 and making it intel only. The fact of the matter is that you don't need GCD to do multithreading, does it make it an order of magnitude easier? hell yes. However we have had multi-threading code using NSThread for a while now and it works just fine. If you ever come into a situation where you need to use GCD to compute something then you are doing it ineffectively. If you want to see an application of GCD and the benefits of it over NSThread, I can show you some code I wrote this past semester where I needed GCD because I am not an expert with threading and using GCD over NSThread paid off. The order of magnitude of computations I was making was on average 0.5-1.5billion in a span of 30-60 seconds. At that point it would have been possible to manage threads myself with NSThread, however it would have taken me more than a week to refine that to a point where I could run it somewhere remotely near decent.

No, I am not saying give up, I am saying you need to refine your plan because you are creating your project that is an order of magnitude more difficult for you to complete.

[Sparky]

As a side project, I am creating a QuickLook plugin for the Finder that lets you preview .obj models. This is useful besides what we're doing, but it pertains to Zeus because Zeus is only going to let you import model data in .obj format.

I'm trying to find the .obj file type UTI (uniform type identifier), so what I did was used Blender to export the default cube into an .obj file. This was the UTI that resulted, and I wonder if this dynamic (dyn) UTI is what I should use in this QuickLook generator plugin and in Zeus:

This image shows that the UTI for .obj model files is "dyn.ah62d4rv4ge8082xn". Right?

I also exported a similar obj file with Wings3D and got the same UTI, so I'm going to say it's the standard .obj file type UTI.
The UTI for related material (.mtl) files is "dyn.ah62d4rv4ge8047dq".

[Vegerot]

Spark, I would recommend making it for 10.6+, since most of the people here have at least that. Granted, there may be a few people around here who still have Leopard, but at this point they shouldn't feel guilty for pirating it online.

But if their conscience is still just TOO strong to do that. Then they can just download Eschaton and individual modding apps for all we care.

P.S. Can an admin move this thread to the Modding Applications forum, please?

[nil]

P.S. Can an admin move this thread to the Modding Applications forum, please?

Only threads that have program or source code releases should be in "Modding Programs" sub forum (i.e, your "Pearl Issue" thread should have been posted here, not there).