#my GOD the rigging program is tedious and difficult

[arborix]

spent maybe 45 minutes drawing and over 6 HOURS rigging

[alluring-skull]

ancient scapes

I just got back from Seattle, after watching the Valve Dota 2 tournament The International all week. I don’t talk about it too much beyond random tweets while watching other events at work (and so on) but I’ve played the game for a super long time (albeit somewhat sporadically overall) and definitely have a lot of attachment to it. I wanted to talk about some of the things that have really appealed to me over time, what it’s been like watching the evolution of a game that’s been alive, changing and competitive for longer than almost any other i can think of, a bit about the big event itself, and hopefully some stuff that will give other people an appreciation for what it’s like seeing a game that’s so much the same yet so different from one i played so much as a teenager. This isn’t the most complete, knowledgeable (I really have no familiarity with the pro scene before TI1 in particular), or accurate history you can probably find, but it’s mine, and I hope some people enjoy it. With all that in mind this first post is background (I’m giving this topic...probably 3-4, at least. I have a lot to talk about.)

In 2000 or so a distant, much older cousin introduced my younger brother and I to Starcraft. I think that was about the last time I ever talked to him. (It was extremely unrelated, but I have no desire to return to Texas at any rate.) At some point, probably about a year later, we found a copy for like $10 at a Toys R Us and instantly bought it. We didn’t have a home internet connection that was really usable to play online at the time (dial-up...) so we mostly played single-player, both vs AI and the campaigns. (Brood War didn’t have a key, so we totally just burned a copy of the CD we got from the library.) I played a bit with the map editor, but I couldn’t think of anything interesting to do with it, and making Starcraft maps kinda sucked anyway because the kind of symmetry you have to work with is really limited anyway due to the isometric view.

When Warcraft 3 came out, my older brothers’ friends (I think...) convinced him to get it since he was in college at the time. He got really into it, and my other brother and I played some as well. Eventually he moved home and the expansion came out, so my other brother and I got to start playing a lot. I again messed with the map editor, though I didn’t have any programming experience to touch the more advanced parts. I loved all the terrain construction and deforming (I was a huge, huge fan of Simcity 2000 and especially 3000 before this), but placing trees was kind of tedious and I never really finished anything still. Maybe if I’d had a better concept of “starting small” I could’ve gotten somewhere with things, but that took me a long time to learn. I’m saying this obviously not to be like “oh, I could’ve been Icefrog” (or even Guinsoo) but to emphasize how interesting the UMS map scene (”Use Map Settings,” the common Blizzard RTS community term to refer to these; now most people just use “mod”) was to me from the start.

DotA Allstars, as it was called during the 5.5x era when we started playing, was not the first map to use the general concept that’s become defined as its own genre, with a bunch of predecessors generally named things along the lines of “Aeon of Strife,” dating-I’ve heard, since I wasn’t around much on battle.net then, as I mentioned-back to Starcraft. (The name is a reference to the Starcraft backstory, I guess, so it’s not very hard to believe.) I did eventually find a couple, years later, and messed with them a bit, but the limitations of the design system in that game really don’t work well with the concept, even ignoring the maximalist design elements that are to some extent highlighted in dota’s enormous pool of heroes and items. (These elements are highlighted even more in the popular “Evolves” game type, where, for example, at some point in the game you lose a very good unit because it’s replaced with horrifically clumsy Protoss Dragoons, who have slightly better stats and extremely poor interactions with the engine’s pathing systems)

The newer AOS maps weren’t very good either, but the inherent leveling mechanic in Warcraft 3 made it a little easier to keep some semblance of consistent progression, and the amount of unit types you could set was much higher (I don’t know if there is a limit, but for Starcraft you can generally only create 1-2 different versions of any given unit, depending on if they have a “Hero” counterpart with a different name to tweak). Broadly speaking, most custom maps focused on hero play fell into what I can only describe as the “tome trap,” where you could buy items (consumable tomes) which didn’t take inventory space and permanently buffed stats. There’s three kinds of heroes in Warcraft, correlating roughly to the “Warrior Rogue Mage” thing, and each benefits most from a specific stat. That stat increases attack damage, and each stat has benefits for all heroes as well, with Strength giving health, Agility giving armor and attack speed, and Intellect giving extra mana pool and regeneration. But spells have cooldowns, so the tome items quickly become relatively useless for Int heroes, while Str heroes see slightly better scaling. But Agility gives attack damage and speed to Agility heroes, creating a compounding effect that becomes increasingly absurd the more you feed into it. Although, it did cause the animations to break in all sorts of hilarious ways, with certain breakpoints making the attack animations stop altogether or even go in reverse, so I still consider that a huge plus.

There was a bigger issue with pretty much all maps, due to the way that the map editor exported maps in a format that was, essentially, open-source. It was therefore very easy for people to make small tweaks to a map which would specifically benefit a certain player spot or character, save it under the same name, then host a rigged version of the game for other players. (There were a couple ways to tell if this was probably what was happening, but even so, it made looking for games very frustrating.) As it turned out, there was a workaround for this, by which you could make the editor unable to read the customized script data. The map still worked in game, but other players wouldn’t be able to make slightly altered copies; they would lose all of that code by trying to tweak anything and save a new version of the file. Essentially, it was copy-protection, and few mapmakers used it, probably since most AOS games, Tower Defense maps, and other styles didn’t really use any sophisticated scripting anyway.

Dota Allstars used the copy protection, though it had had relatively few unique abilities at the time we began playing it (I was familiar with another map with far more custom effects, Elil’s “Vale of Nightmares”). Perhaps the most well-known was the Crystal Maiden’s “Freezing Field” ultimate ability, still represented in the game to this day. But most characters simply had weird mixtures of default Warcraft 3 abilities, tweaked with different stats and so on, and strangely, the most egregious example of all (the Brewmaster, who pretty much just had the original Pandaren Brewmaster abilities from the game’s regular RTS mode) still just has the same stuff as ever. I think it’s fair to say that Allstars was never the most original game, and some things that have survived to this day (Lina Inverse is still called Lina!! What is that???) are still incredibly obvious ripoffs of stuff from Blizzard games, other video games, and anime. I understand the “Allstars” name came from this version being a patchwork of characters from different maps, though I’m not sure how true that is. It might explain some of the worst 5.5 era heroes, like “God” (a nigh-unkillable wisp with no offensive skills, who was removed for .52 and has never returned), and “Conjurer” (an outrageously busted magician on a horse, who could push to win the game in as little as 20 minutes with chain-stunning golems, even in a era where player micro was relatively poor), but it became very difficult to find other AoS type games at all once 5.52 and 5.54 locked in as extremely popular maps across the server. Both enjoyed popularity at once, as I recall; it seemed many people simply preferred one or the other and would gravitate toward that choice, making both open all the time. But the release of 5.55 was a huge paradigm shift, with complete overhauls for many heroes and numerous bug fixes and tweaks. Its release signaled the future of the game, in a sense.

Well, I don’t know. That might be giving too much credit to a version of the game which, as I recall, was the newest for approximately one hour.

(Part 2)

(Part 3)

(Part 4)

[monarch-boo]

my experiences in model ripping methods (that retain rigging!) for some games i like

Quick notes: if you encounter a problem I might not be able to help, I just barely know what I’m doing myself. I haven’t personally encountered any issues with these methods that would totally halt my progress so I probably wouldn’t know. Because of that, any issues with any plugins mentioned should probably be taken up with the creator of the plugin if you can get ahold of them.

Dead Rising 1: you can find the already extracted Xbox 360 files online, and those .mod and .tex files can easily just be opened and exported to the desired formats using Noesis! You have to then put the model into blender or something and apply the textures yourself.

Dead Rising 2: well, technically Off The Record because the script only works for OTR, but they’re mostly all the same models, plus characters like Leon are still in the files of OTR despite not being used in it.

you need 3ds max and mario_kart64n’s OTR script, and texmod/umod.

What I do is I obtain all of the textures first and then i use the OTR script to import into 3ds max (literally just hit import and select the .big you want, then wait a bit). Then export it as the format you want, in the same folder that you put the textures. The textures are already applied to the model for you in my experience.

You can also find .bms scripts (you would need QuickBMS to use them) online that will extract .dds textures from the .tex (DR2/OTR .tex files don’t work in Noesis, before you ask). Just note that, in my experience, at least one texture will always wind up corrupted with these, so you would just have to retrieve some replacements using texmod/umod anyway.

GTA IV/EfLC: Dear god. This is not difficult by any means, it’s just a super long process with a lot of steps and porting between programs. You could probably use a different method to merge the duplicate bones together if you know how, this is just the only way I know:

Anyway, you need 3ds max, openiv, the openformats i/o script for 3ds max, and for my method you need blender and the mmd-tools and pymeshio scripts (i feel like mmd-tools is better for importing and pymeshio is better for exporting, that’s why i recommend both), and PMX editor (i highly recommend an english version such as this one).

Take the “ofio” and “startup” folders you got with openformats i/o and paste them into your Program Files\Autodesk\[whatever your 3ds max version is; I use 2019]\scripts.

Now in OpenIV, find the model you want, right click on the .wdd of it, and click “Export to openFormats (.odd)”. At really any point in time you want during this whole ripping process you can also go double click the .wtd of that same model, hit the “export all textures” button, and choose the format you want (i recommend .png or .dds, png would probably be best) then go save those where you want.

Now start up 3ds max and click the wrench tab, scroll down and there should be a whole bunch of import headers for openformats i/o! click “import single” under the .odd header, select the .odd you just extracted and wait a bit for it to fully load. once it’s done you can export it to the format that you want (something openable in blender either vanilla or via an addon).

Now i said the stuff about PMX editor because the model you just ripped is going to have tons and tons of duplicate bones. PMX editor is the easiest program i know of that you can use to merge bones. (Every duplicate bone potentially has SOMETHING weighed to it, so you can’t just delete the duplicates.)

Go import whatever you exported as from 3ds max into blender and then just export it straight to pmx (important: when you import it into blender don’t touch it. for some reason if you select/deselect/resize/move anything before you export it to pmx, it puts every single bone into the center, at least with pymeshio’s exporter. haven’t tried mmd_tools’s exporter because the option is often greyed out and i don’t really know why)

now open said pmx up in PMX editor, go to the bone tab, and now go and remove the extra numbers from the duplicate bones (scroll down and there’s a ton with some number in parentheses tacked onto the end of the name, just remove the number and parentheses). if you double click on the end of the name it should highlight just the number in parentheses. just note though that a model of a person might have way over 1000 bones, so this may take like 20 minutes to get through every bone. it’s a long tedious process but it’s the easiest method i currently know of so just be patient, it’s worth it if you want the already-rigged models as badly as i do lol. once you have them all renamed scroll through the list to double check that you didn’t miss any, now go into Edit>Bone>merge bones with similar names (look for E > B > M if you don’t have an english version) and wait a bit for that to process (a window pops up at some point that i forgot off the top of my head what it says, but it’s not a bad thing, just hit ok)

now you should be able to save the pmx and import it back into blender. it will have merged all of the pieces of the model into one but that’s ok, right click the model (not the armature) to select it and then go into edit mode (Tab), make sure the whole thing is selected (highlighted yellow), and hit P, then click “By material”. Now go back into object mode (Tab again) and everything should be separated again. Now from here you have to apply the textures yourself.