| --- Log opened Thu Sep 09 00:00:22 2021 |
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| 08:34 | <@gnolam> | ... |
| 08:34 | <@gnolam> | Ok, I think I can safely remove this subsystem. |
| 08:35 | <@gnolam> | It has been completely broken for at least three years, and nobody seems to have noticed. |
| 08:46 | <@macdjord> | gnolam: Be sure to check its *actually* broken and not just 'that couldn't possibly work'. I've seen too many cases of 'that couldn't possibly work' where the thing was, in fact, working. |
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| 09:23 | <@gnolam> | Oh, it's proper broken. You get an exception. |
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| 18:52 | < FLHerne> | The worst is when you fix the thing that can't possibly work and then it doesn't |
| 18:52 | < FLHerne> | usually because it was cancelling out some equally stupid bug |
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| 19:26 | <&McMartin> | It's me, dealing with the aftermath of that, today |
| 19:26 | <&McMartin> | But it's software engineering, not system administration, and I control the entire codebase, so the solution is definitely "fix that other bug too" |
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| 19:42 | <&McMartin> | Here's a slightly dumb question for the folks out there with modding experience |
| 19:43 | <&McMartin> | Is it typical for games that you mod to require their data in narrower formats than it "looks like" they accept? |
| 19:43 | <&McMartin> | i.e., "these are PNGs, but they must be 24-bit PNGs with alpha transparency enabled" or "these are wave files but all of them must by 22050Hz Stereo PCM" |
| 19:43 | <&McMartin> | s/i.e/e.g/ |
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| 19:45 | <@gnolam> | Oh yes. |
| 19:46 | <@gnolam> | More rule than exception, at least for older games (which are the ones I have experience modding). |
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| 19:46 | | * McMartin nods |
| 19:46 | <&McMartin> | My experience is with *even older* games, where there broadly speaking were not standard formats at all. :D |
| 19:47 | <&McMartin> | And I've been adding audio to an old project of mine from my misspent youth |
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| 19:48 | <&McMartin> | And my instinct was originally "well, I can just put in raw PCM data because the code will know the right format and frequency" |
| 19:48 | <&McMartin> | But then I started leaning towards "well, the WAVE format is really boring and if I just use .WAV files instead that will make working with them *outside* of the project way easier" |
| 19:48 | <&McMartin> | And then started thinking about how much of the format I should support |
| 19:49 | < [RMS]> | McMartin: Blizzard games are hiilariously finicky about their file formats |
| 19:49 | <&McMartin> | "Basically none of it" sounds like an excellent answer, though! Confirming that the wave file self-reports as the correct format would probably be a kindness to Future Me at least |
| 19:49 | < [RMS]> | War2 needs the .bmp files in a /very/ specific 256-color format |
| 19:49 | <@gnolam> | Things like "It has to be a paletted [raster format] a power of 2, but not larger than X*X, and palette indices [list] is reserved" are pretty standard for example. |
| 19:50 | <@gnolam> | *sare |
| 19:50 | < [RMS]> | Paint couldn't generate a file that war2 would accept |
| 19:50 | <@gnolam> | *are |
| 19:50 | <&McMartin> | Oh yeah. |
| 19:50 | <&McMartin> | When I defaced X-COM I had that sort of experience (gnolam's) |
| 19:50 | <~Vornicus> | I remember fucking around with the editors for Marathon |
| 19:50 | <&McMartin> | I fully expected that from X-COM though because I knew exactly what graphics mode it was using and what the game was hoping to accomplish |
| 19:50 | <~Vornicus> | and discovering that I couldnt just pick a bunch of colors for each different thing I wanted to show |
| 19:54 | <&McMartin> | (X-COM defacement: https://twitter.com/mcmmed/status/1245956221816852480 ) |
| 20:08 | <~Vornicus> | honestly shouldn't have been surprising to me, really |
| 20:08 | <@macdjord> | McMartin: I am unable to load that link. I just get a white page with the titter logo in the middle, but the actual content never loads. |
| 20:08 | <~Vornicus> | my understanding of color limitations on my computer was plenty strong enough to know that it wouldn't be able to do this |
| 20:12 | <&McMartin> | The text of the tweet was: "ME: Maybe I should play that Mario x Rabbids X-COM-like game I've had sitting on my desk for months" ... "ALSO ME: Oh hey, the X-COM wiki gives the spec for the UFOpedia file formats" |
| 20:12 | <&McMartin> | https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUqGXoUU8AISdk7?format=png&name=small |
| 20:13 | <&McMartin> | And if that *still* doesn't work, it's a screenshot from the opening cutscene of Super Mario Galaxy 1, placed into the Interceptor slot in X-COM and given a description that broadly matches the UFOpedia tone, just talking about Bowser's evil flying airships. |
| 20:14 | <&McMartin> | The image has very obviously suffered from needing to conform to a fixed 256-color palette used for all full-screen images in the game. |
| 20:14 | <@macdjord> | McMartin: I can, in fact, see the image, and find it Most Amusing. |
| 20:14 | <&McMartin> | A thing I wanted to do in the other direction, but which turned out to be Too Much Work even though I had the tools for it |
| 20:15 | <&McMartin> | Was to take the Super Mario World music-hacking tools (which are extensive and excellent) and encode the Interceptor theme in it, but using the "riding Yoshi" soundfont |
| 20:15 | <&McMartin> | Not the *general SMW soundfont* mind you, because that would involve heavy use of the Bad Overdriven Electric Guitars from the final boss fight. |
| 20:16 | <&McMartin> | This would need to sound like it's part of one of the overworld levels. |
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| 21:50 | <&Reiver> | McMartin: Oh that tweet is amazing |
| 21:50 | <&Reiver> | And yes, file formats being finicky OH BOY |
| 21:50 | <&Reiver> | Let me tell you about Total Annihilation |
| 21:51 | | * macdjord|wurk pulls up a chair for storytime with Uncle Reiver |
| 21:54 | <&Reiver> | You have a simple .ini file, cool. You can put stuff in it, including weapons. Neat! |
| 21:54 | <&Reiver> | Problem: If you ever give anything a unique ID that interferes with anything else, neither works. You have 255 available. Have fun! |
| 21:54 | <&Reiver> | You have a simple 3d object format. You can design stuff out of quadrilaterals, then shove simple, color-compressed textures on them. Neat! |
| 21:54 | <&Reiver> | Problem: Did you see the part where we mentioned '3d' and 'quadrilateral' in the same sentence, we were being very specific when we said it, no square may deviate from resting on a 2d plane if you want textures to render |
| 21:54 | <&Reiver> | You have baked-a texture file, you can make new designs to give your units a cool look! |
| 21:54 | <&Reiver> | Problem: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA |
| 21:54 | <&Reiver> | ... It's physically possible. Good luck! |
| 22:08 | | macdjord|wurk is now known as macdjord |
| 22:36 | <&Reiver> | Other quirks: All textured quadrilaterals are only rendered on one side, it's perfectly possible to leave gaps which TA in its unaliased glory makes an extremely large effort to ensure any such gaps are /really/ obvious, and this is all before you have curiosities like specifying the polygon in your vehicle that needs targeting by enemy weapons and whether or not it's underwater or not determines whether submarines can target you etc |
| 22:37 | <&ToxicFrog> | Yeah, there's a reason tools like TA Mutation or Conflict Crusher were basically mandatory for playing any sort of modded TA -- they handled the process of looking at all the mods you had installed and shuffling weapon/unit IDs around to remove conflicts. |
| 22:37 | <&Reiver> | yup |
| 22:37 | <&ToxicFrog> | (I was actually fairly impressed, years later, with how Morrowind handled it -- the high byte of each object ID is based on which mod file the object was loaded from, and internal object references in each mod are relocated at load time) |
| 22:51 | <&McMartin> | (I imagine that kind of thing gets designed in when you expect to build your game out of a bunch of teams that are essentially writing the whole game as a series of mods) |
| 22:51 | <&McMartin> | (I can easily see the powerpoint deck where the Systems team is telling PM "hey, look at this, we can just skip the integration step in our build process") |
| 22:52 | <~Vornicus> | oh I should also link in code even though most people are in a channel where it went by anyway |
| 22:52 | <~Vornicus> | https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/474705430434807819/885510381257256981/unknown.png It's alittle hard to tell because the camera angle is weird, but: the shader now automatically selects between slope and cliff based on the height difference between tiles. |
| 22:53 | <&ToxicFrog> | Nice! |
| 22:54 | <&ToxicFrog> | McMartin: I suspect a lot of this sort of more-than-the-format-calls-for specificity comes from the devteam going "we're using our own toolchain for this, and it always outputs 32bpp RGBA PNG (or whatever), so we can keep the game code smaller and faster by only bothering to support the specific formats we know our tools emit" |
| 22:55 | <&McMartin> | That is *exactly* the situation I am facing right now in my hobby project. |
| 22:56 | <&McMartin> | And I already know that I intend to do that thing, but I was mostly curious as to the degree that this matched common practice~ |
| 22:56 | <&McMartin> | I feel like modern practice with generic engines is "they include full audio mixers in their own right and will convert content at load time to whatever it is the hardware says it prefers" |
| 22:57 | <&McMartin> | And UQM, for instance, flatly requires that kind of on-the-fly conversion because the content it inherited is in a wide variety of formats, bitrates, etc. as it is. |
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| --- Log closed Fri Sep 10 00:00:23 2021 |