Posted by blank

Unfortunately 3DS files doesn't support vertex colors either. For some reason there is no simple 3D model format that supports vertex colors (except for PLY files, but they only support one mesh per file). So to support vertex colors you would have to use a file format such as COLLADA, which would be a lot of work.

Posted by FnarGod

I make custom shadow by bakin textures. But IMO the hardest part about texturing is seamless textures perfectly mapped

Posted by FnarGod

i use textures from the game, then i take, 'shadeless' off, and then I just bake the textures, after I map them of course.

Posted by FnarGod

What do you use to make this btw. blender? maya? 3DMax?

Posted by Marionumber1

Not trying to force you into coding a COLLADA importer, but this might help:

http://pycollada.github.io/

It's a Python module for reading COLLADA modules as Python objects.

• I exported my model from my 3D package as a standard .OBJ. (I am not using blank's extended .OBJ for now).
• Used OBJ2BDL to generate a .BDL file. (v0.4)
• Used KCLCreate to (v0.7 .exe) to generate .kcl and .pa
• Placed {.bdl, .kcl, .pa}(model files) all in their own folder.
• Found PlanetMapDataTable.arc in extracted SMG2's ObjectData folder
• Used the BCSV editor to add an entry
• Stripped all "Unknown" fields of the string "Placeholder" in appropriate fields.
• Ensured all flags had values of 0 (ie. LowFlag, etc)
• Placed .BCSV in its own folder (separate from model files)
• Dragged model files folder to RARC and then dragged resulting file onto yaz0 .exe file
• Dragged .BCSV containing folder to RARC and then dragged resulting file onto yaz0 .exe file
• Got resulting .arcs; named them after model file name and PlanetMapDataTable
• Replaced old PlanetMapDataTable.arc with my new PlanetMapDataTable.arc in ObjectData
• Added .arc into ObjectData folder
• Launched up Whitehole 1.1 and went to RedBlueExGalaxy (FlipSwap) to check things out.

Posted by NWPlayer123

Not when nobody is willing/able to do it. Mega's given up on Whitehole, he's never going to work on it again.

Posted by NWPlayer123

Even if you don't use vertex shaders, you HAVE to import with v0.3 or it won't show up in whitehole, even if you rename an object to the model name.
EDIT: Here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56043942/Programs/SMGHackingTools/BDLCreate-0.3.zip

Posted by Slacker

• I exported my model from my 3D package as a standard .OBJ. (I am not using blank's extended .OBJ for now).
• Used OBJ2BDL to generate a .BDL file. (v0.4)
• Used KCLCreate to (v0.7 .exe) to generate .kcl and .pa
• Placed {.bdl, .kcl, .pa}(model files) all in their own folder.
• Found PlanetMapDataTable.arc in extracted SMG2's ObjectData folder
• Used the BCSV editor to add an entry
• Stripped all "Unknown" fields of the string "Placeholder" in appropriate fields.
• Ensured all flags had values of 0 (ie. LowFlag, etc)
• Placed .BCSV in its own folder (separate from model files)
• Dragged model files folder to RARC and then dragged resulting file onto yaz0 .exe file
• Dragged .BCSV containing folder to RARC and then dragged resulting file onto yaz0 .exe file
• Got resulting .arcs; named them after model file name and PlanetMapDataTable
• Replaced old PlanetMapDataTable.arc with my new PlanetMapDataTable.arc in ObjectData
• Added .arc into ObjectData folder
• Launched up Whitehole 1.1 and went to RedBlueExGalaxy (FlipSwap) to check things out.

Posted by Luigi

Let me see your XML structure.

Warning

• By using "Planetary" water
• By using the Area type object WaterArea

---

Adding a WaterArea

Just to remind myself, the following is how you make a WaterArea. Areas themselves are not handled all that well in Whitehole. Just to note, I use Whitehole v1.2 to view areas in Whitehole's awesome 3D view. Whitehole cannot add Areas so here you need to use Anarchy in the Galaxy.

Once you open Anarchy, head to the areas marked in red. Changing the rightmost dropdown should make the middle dropdown AreaObjInfo. Add in a new blank object with the "Add" button marked in green.	Now you should have a new object.	Change parameters. Make sure no scale value is 0 as marked in green. Be sure to change AreaShapeNo marked in red to something other that FFFF (-1 in Whitehole).

1. First open Anarchy and then hit "Open"


2. You will need to navigate to the StageData part of your filesystem.


3. Here I work with RedBlueExGalaxy since I've read that it is the most stable galaxy to hack. Really you can open any galaxy's folder and open the "GalaxyName"Map.arc file. As an example, here I am opening the file RedBlueExGalaxyMap.arc.


4. You should see a listing of data. Open the rightmost dropdown and head to "Placement." By doing this you should be to the section we are interested in, "AreaObjInfo."


5. Hit "Add" to make a new blank object.


6. Rename it WaterArea and change the parameters as shown. There are two important things to note here. Firstly, make sure you change scale to 1 (or some positive decimal) for x, y, z. If you leave it as 0, you are making an infinitesimally small object, that is it will not do anything and it will not show up in Whitehole's 3D view. Secondly, do not forget to change AreaShapeNo to 0 for a cube. A value of FFFF will crash the game. Note: I don't know what l_id's do. Again I'm really just a novice with this stuff. But in Anarchy I try to keep them from being the same as other objects. It's called and id for identification -- I try to make it unique.


7. Save your map file out. Take care with this as well. I have found that if you just hit save right out of Anarchy without hitting enter in the current field you're changing, the change won't stick. So be careful.


8. Now Anarchy and Whitehole don't really play nicely with each other. Anarchy's form of saving differs from what Whithole can read. Anarchy saved files will work fine in game though, again just not with Whitehole. To fix this, you need to re-encode any arc file you save with Anarchy in the Galaxy to get the same data into Whitehole.

Drag .Arc map file onto yaz0dec. A new file should pop up in your .Arc directory.

Drag resulting file onto yaz0enc. Yet another file pops up.

Delete the older (crossed out) files and keep the newest, ugliest file. Rename the kept file to RedBlueExGalaxyMap.arc. This is your map file.
9. First drag the Anarchy modified .ARC file to yaz0dec.exe. This should give you an ugly .arc 0.rarc...thing.
10. Next drag the resulting file onto yaz0enc.exe. This should seem to yield some sort of awful .arc 0.rarc.yaz0 monstrosity. Really, it's just your new, cleaned .ARC file. Rename it to "GalaxyName".arc after you've deleted the other two files including your original Anarchy modified .ARC file.


11. And that's it! (A terrible workflow I know, but it works). Open up your galaxy in Whitehole (v1.2 displays Areas to you should probably use that one). Your new WaterArea should be viewable. For this example, a 100 x 100 x 100 pink cube should be at (0,0,0) -- the world origin. In game, as I've said before, this will be an area where you can swim measuring 1000 units for length width and height.

---

Understanding Rectangular WaterAreas

To give a concrete look at things, I made a 3D model meant for measuring aspects of the game. The model is simply a large platform measuring 5,000 units in length and width. It is 1000 units tall. It's pivot is not at the model's center, but at a corner. This is to ensure that if my platform object's parameters are at (0,0,0) the platform will have its corners at positive XZ distances from the origin. Pivots are important, and I'll talk a little about them later.

Good for measuring models. Getting measurements allows you to make your custom models fit with official objects.

The model is textured as a grid. Each cell is exactly 10 units in length and width. They are numbered in groups of four and colored to make counting easy. It's a useful model for understanding the game and making official objects match up with my custom stuff.

Grid is sectioned into 400 unit chunks.

By using the model, it's obvious that a WaterArea is a 1000 unit cube (when all scale values are 1). In the below image, my WaterArea placed at the measuring platform's center. Therefore it must have influence over all of the center green tiles including one more row of blue tiles. That is in the XZ plane. I've read about wonky Y-Scale when matching WaterAreas with RailMoveWaterObjs, ie. the height of the are cube is strange. Not so much. All that is happening is that WaterArea has its pivot point at the bottom-center of its cube while many other objects, namely RailMoveWaterObj, have their pivots at their xyz center. RailMoveWaterObjs are 700 unit cubes.

The red outline marks the end of swimmable area.

To make things even more concrete, here is an example. RailMoveWaterObj. A good place to look is in Cosmic Cove's (StarCreekGalaxy) map. Switching the scenario to [2] the third entry down the list displayed in Whitehole, you can see the area where RailMoveWaterObjs are officially in the game. Note that below each of the objects there are WaterAreas. Looking at each WaterArea scale, everything is scaled by 0.7. From this it's easy to see that RailMoveWaterObjs are in fact 700 unit cubes (with chamfered edges). 0.7 of 1000 = 700.

In order to see this part of the map, change Scenario to what is shown in second image.

But what if we wanted an even bigger cube? Remember, RailMoveWaterObjs are not 1000 unit cubes. They are 700 unit ones. Below shows this:

Scale needs to increase.

Well that takes a little math. Say, we wanted to match our RailMoveWaterObj to a WaterArea of a normal xyz scale of 1 -- that is, a 1000 unit cube. You must make a 700 unit cube scale up to 1000 units. This is your classic Algebra 1 percentage problem. 700x = 1000, solve for x. This turns into 1000/700 which yields 1.4285714285714285714285714285714. Great. Punch that into RailMoveWaterObj's scaling parameters. Whitehole will round things a bit and there you go -- a 1000 unit RailMoveWaterObj that has functioning water collision.

RailMoveWaterObj scaled up to match a normal scale WaterArea. Note the "Z-fighting" occurring at the bottom of the WaterCube. This just shows that the faces of the bottom of the RailMoveWaterObj match the ground a little too perfectly. Generally, you want to move the cube up a little more to prevent this since it's ugly.

RailMoveWaterObj is placed at a Y position of 500. This makes sense. We scaled to the size of a normal cubed WaterArea -- 1000 units in length, width, & height. Since RailMoveWaterObjs have a pivot at the center of the cube. The model must be moved "up" half its height -- in this case 500 units.

Pivot Points

Just to drive home the point on pivots points here are some images. Pivots are very noticeable when rotating objects. To illustrate, the picture below shows a rotating pixelated Mario image.

Point from which 3D transformations take place is at the center of the image. This is similar to a RailMoveWaterObj pivot point.

Point from which 3D transformations take place is at the bottom of the image. This is similar to a WaterArea pivot point.

That's really all there is to that.

---

Moving Water Cubes

It's called RailMoveWaterObj for a reason. It is possible to get these cubes of water to move along paths at designated speeds with water collision. The below diagram sort of outlines the key points:

RailMoveWaterObj must be in MapParts.

There are three ingredients to this concoction: a WaterArea/RailMoveWaterObj pair (as described prior) and a path. To start, add a RailMoveWaterObj to Map Parts. This is important. A General object RailMoveWaterObj will not work for movement. Most of the time, you put things in Map Parts when they need to be moving.

Hit "Add Object" marked in green. Hit "Map Part" marked in red and then find your object (in this case RailMoveWaterObj).
The result should be the rightmost image - Cubed Water Block in the Map parts folder.

Each path has a Path ID field. Each object has a Path Id field as well. To match an object to a path, you must match the object's Path ID to the desired Path's Path ID. Pretty simple.

To view available paths in Whitehole, hit the "Show all Paths" button at the top of the 3D viewing window. You'll know that things are linked when you select your path-linked object and see its matching path pop up even if you don't have "Show all Paths" enabled. Very convenient.

Object ID must be unique. PathId must match the path you want to use.

When placing all of the elements together, have the WaterArea placed at the bottom of the RailMoveWaterObj (due to pivots as discussed earlier). Place the pair of objects at the beginning point of your path. Also make sure that your RailMoveWaterObj has an ObjectID. Make sure this id is unique.

Now your RailMoveWaterObj has a path. But it will not move as things are. Paths have point parameters that designate how things move along them. I have not tested these extensively, but I am assuming that since speed is designated on a point-to-point basis, things can move faster and slower depending on how far along path-linked objects are on the path.

I closed my path. Based on official Cosmic Cove values, this is probably unneeded given that all path points have speed.
The field for changing speed is the red marked "point_arg0."
Marked in purple is the field for delaying movement at a path point. I left it as -1 so signify that I don't want delay. You can change this though.

These parameters can be changed in Whitehole. I would suggest v1.1.2 for this since it's more stable and can reliably changes Path parameters. Be sure that you are in Point Arguments and not Path arguments. There's a difference.

• point_arg0 = Movement Speed
• point_arg5 = Delay

If you want to change things in Anarchy take a look at the below image:

We are working in hexadecimal with the two fields marked in red. So value "A" is 10 and value "14" is 20.
Hexadecimal is a base 16 counting system. On Windows 7, just use the built in Windows calculator tool and set it to "Programmer" mode to convert.
You must change point parameters, found by going to middle drop down marked in green.
To find the points for the path you want, find the Common.PathPointInfo._ section with the same number as your path's Id.

(Found by Splitwirez in MapParts and Path Variable Testing).

As a side note, I closed my path for this example. The path only had 2 points on it. Only one point (the first point) had a speed parameter. Had I not closed the path, the Water Cube would just move and then get stuck at the end of the path. Closing the cube.

Official use doesn't seem to require that the paths are closed. In Cosmic Cove, all points have a speed values and the path is open. Either way works, the official way is probably better.

Now you have a RailMoveWaterObj that can move. Great. But remember, RailMoveWaterObjs are only models without collision so we need the WaterArea to move with with the water cube. To do this, match the value in your WaterArea's MapParts_Id field to the ObjectID of your RailMoveWaterObj. That is all that is needed -- WaterArea does not need a PathID value.

MapParts_ID must match ObjectID of RailMoveWaterObj.

That is all there is to that. Scale things seem to work, granted match positions correctly. Pretty cool.

Moving Water Cube with swimming collision.

Just as a warning, this type of behaviour doesn't move the players along with the water cube. Consequently, fast cubes can be difficult to swim with. Perhaps this is why the water cubes were only in one galaxy. That aside, it's still a really neat level element, and with some creativity, you can probably do some cool stuff.

---

Some Things to Think About

There are some things to think about here. Scaling an object like this up is usually not a good idea. Because RailMoveWaterObj has chamfered/beveled edges, it is not an absolute cube. As you scale something like this up, its edges won't match the edges of a cube object. Things will look bad if you scale too much -- as with most objects in game. This was just an example to show how controlled things can be.

Things can get pretty wonky once you try to work with rotations on WaterAreas since areas are invisible. Whitehole does not render area things correctly, so don't trust what you see. I would suggest making a custom model with an adjusted pivot so mimic what the area's look like in Whitehole. I have shown what I use in my own setup. If you match my model's x,y,z position, scale, and rotation, it give an accurate representation of what you are dealing with when working with WaterAreas that are cubes. Here you can see how the beveled edges of RailMoveWaterObj don't make it fill up the WaterArea perfectly.

A custom model to allow me to see cubed areas correctly in Whitehole. When making custom models, the pivot point will be wherever world (0,0,0) is in your 3D modelling package.

At the point of this writing, custom textures cannot be transparent or translucent. Bad for making water. Also, there is no way to make animated textures. Again, bad for making water, specifically the pretty shimmering water that makes SMG 2 look great at times. That shimmering water, if I understand correctly results from shaders/materials -- a category of 3D that can be complex in and of itself. Be that as it may, we cannot take pre-made, official shaders from existing models and "band-aid" them on our custom ones. Unfortunate.

In the end, scaling up water cubes can provide a bit of a kludge for water in galaxies. Overlapping a scaled up RailMoveWaterObj WaterArea pair on a custom model to hide the bad edges can mimic a lake or a pond (provided you vertex color parts submerged on your custom model some sort of blue or green to strengthen the "underwater" effect).

Things are imperfect. But workable, and with good planning, I'd imagine you can make pretty believable levels.


As a side note, what I've been talking about WaterAreas with a AreaShapeNo field set to 0. This value specifies a box area. There are other types. Courtesy of Splitzwirez from this thread with some of my added info:

Name	AreaShapeNo Values	Base Measurements (Scale XYZ is 1)	Pivot Location
Rectangular Prism	0	A cube with a 1000 unit length, width and height.	Bottom Center
Hemisphere (?)	1	A hemisphere with a radius of 1000 units.	Bottom Center
Sphere	2	A sphere with a radius of 1000 units.	XYZ Center
Cylinder	3	A cylindar width a radius of 1000 units. I don't know the height.	Unknown
Strange Splashing	4	Something I've observed. Cannot swim in this area. When walking around, you may see an occasional splash. Doesn't seem useful.	Unknown

Downloads

Realized that I should probably include some of my custom models to help people out. They're nothing special so don't expect much. I have prefixed my models with underscores so that it is easy to my modified files in the ObjectData folder. As requested:

Large Measuring Platform
The platform I have been showing throughout these notes. Shown here. 5000 unit length and width. 1000 units tall. Useful for eyeballing measurements from in-game. Really, its just a grid you can walk on. Named _T_BigMeasurePlatform for access in Whitehole.

Rectangular Area Outliner
A custom model used to see boundaries of rectangular Area objects. Named _T_CubeOutliner for access. You must match the position and rotation of this object to those of the rectangular Area you are using in order for things to match up.

Hope this helps. If there are any ways I can improve this thread, please don't hesitate to inform me.

Posted by SunakazeKun

This is a very helpfully tutorial! Thanks for creating this.

Posted by Splitwirez

A few improvements I'd like to see: The thing about Cheep-Cheeps made no sense, and if you could release those test planets, that would be great.

Posted by Splitwirez

Huh. [russianaccent]Those models will make my life 400,000x easier...for 12 seconds.[/russianaccent] Oh, and I just noticed that while editing my post, I accidentally removed the 'thank you' part. I'm so sorry if that sounded picky or rude or anything, it was meant to be sort of a 'thank you for the awesome tutorial, here are some ways you could make it even better' but then it came out as a 'HERE'S A FLAW, HERE'S ANOTHER FLAW, FIX THEM' type thing. I'M SO SORRY, IT WAS MEANT TO BE CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM...{wanders off, rather upset}

Posted by smg2haxer

Oh wow!! Thanks so much! I really needed to work out how to add water!

Posted by Luigi

If you PM me the details, I can easily just modify it since I know what controls it.

• AreaCubes must be a 1000x1000x1000 cube rather than a 100x100x100 cube. So don't draw Areas like ColorCubes.
• ColorCubes are drawn from center. A float is used to designate a distance from the cube's center. If a ColorCube is placed at (0,0,0), 50 units of the cube would be below the origin (bottom face at y-pos -50) and 50 units would be above. The bottom face of an AreaCube should be right at a y-position of 0.
• When Y scale is increased, height only grows positively, i.e. the bottom doesn't grow at all in Y direction.