[Duke3D] Alien World Order (v1.51)

[Graf Zahl]

Actually very simple: The line is commented out in the .CON script. See line 1949 of WT's game.con

[NightFright]

Ouch. Never thought of that possibility. That's quite weird, can't see the reason why this was done in the first place. I have fixed this behavior in v1.21 now by uncommenting that line in game.con. Message is displayed ingame again. Really seems to be the only line affected after looking through the entire game.con, btw.

Thanks for this find, Graf Zahl!

[NightFright]

The script will now also copy the ep.5 skyboxes to make skies look nicer in the new episode in general (parallax skies look more like placeholders there). For that purpose, a new .def file has been added (worldorder.def) which would have to be loaded by Raze automatically. (Right now it's probably not, unless renamed to duke3d-raze.def.)

Please note:
- Skyboxes will only be shown when using the new renderer. Activate it by entering toggle testnewrender in the ingame console.
- Final filesize will increase by roughly 20 MB with this change (120 MB total).
- If you don't want or need skyboxes, you can stick to the file generated with the v1.21 script (or just don't use the new renderer.)

[markanini]

The script will now also copy the ep.5 skyboxes to make skies look nicer in the new episode in general (parallax skies look more like placeholders there). For that purpose, a new .def file has been added (worldorder.def) which would have to be loaded by Raze automatically. (Right now it's probably not, unless renamed to duke3d-raze.def.)

Please note:
- Skyboxes will only be shown when using the new renderer. Activate it by entering toggle testnewrender in the ingame console.
- Final filesize will increase by roughly 20 MB with this change (120 MB total).
- If you don't want or need skyboxes, you can stick to the file generated with the v1.21 script (or just don't use the new renderer.)

This should be a big pull factor for the script.

[Gez]

The script will now also copy the ep.5 skyboxes to make skies look nicer in the new episode in general (parallax skies look more like placeholders there). For that purpose, a new .def file has been added (worldorder.def) which would have to be loaded by Raze automatically. (Right now it's probably not, unless renamed to duke3d-raze.def.)

I think you could use a name like worldorder-raze.def to get it loaded automatically. No need for the first part of the name to always be duke3d.

[Phredreeke]

Replace the skyboxes with PNGs if you want to reduce the file size further

[Rachael]

Replace the skyboxes with PNGs if you want to reduce the file size further

This does not always work the way you might think it does.

Uncompressed formats compress better in .zip archives than any .png file ever would. In fact with a .png file the only thing you are even able to compress is the headers, metadata and some of the chunks and other extra info. All of which by itself really does not take much file size at all except in much smaller images.

If a png file is pre-compressed with a tool like pngout however, then yes that might actually reduce the total file size somewhat - unless of course the same algorithm is used with a tool like kzip with would negate such savings at all anyhow.

[NightFright]

For personal usage, I actually converted the TGAs to PNG with optimization. It's 6 MB vs 20. In the end, it's negligible for most users, I would say.

Regarding renaming def: Is actually ANYTHING loaded if its name ends with -raze.def? I can do that rename quickly, but I gotta know it works in current Raze builds.

[Gez]

Regarding renaming def: Is actually ANYTHING loaded if its name ends with -raze.def? I can do that rename quickly, but I gotta know it works in current Raze builds.

That's how I understand it to work, since 1.0.1.

[NightFright]

I guess it's easy to test. If it works, I could update the script once more.
Btw, a bit of space could be saved even with the TGAs since the skybox bottom images are identical in 6 out of 8 cases (pure black), so you would only need one down image to cover six skyboxes. Dunno if it's worth much, though.

[Graf Zahl]

Colosseum_dn.tga compresses to 281 bytes, so you won't save much.
If the images were higher resolution, JPG would be an option, but with the given size that will surely not look good.
All the TGAs together compress to 10 MB. Does anybody really care about that for much better skies?

[NightFright]

It's like I wrote, 10 megs more or less won't matter. What does is what you save by using the script in general (800+ MB).
The only change worth doing is the renaming of the def file if that means that the skyboxes are automatically loaded.

Btw: I didn't mean compressing the down images, I rather meant using the same image (e.g. amsterdam-dn.tga) for six skyboxes using the same bottom (with different filenames) and deleting the five needless duplicates. But then again, even that wouldn't change much.

[NightFright]

Update:
After testing, I have found that worldorder-raze.def would NOT be loaded automatically, while duke3d-raze.def would. I dunno if I should go with that filename then or Raze support should rather be changed to either support loading any def with -raze in its name in general or at least worldorder.def in this specific case.

[Graf Zahl]

We can't load everything with '-raze', that'd make any multi-game mod impossible.

[NightFright]

Alright. What about the other two options I mentioned, then? Personally I'd say duke3d-raze.def should be rather used in mods and such, so maybe in this case it would make sense to load worldorder.def specifically, like twindrag.def for SW Twin Dragon (even though that one proved to be redundant and was changed to default later on).