Spellborn / Unreal packages, character data.

Hey there,

 

After quite some reverse puzzle time, I'm getting more and more things out of the Original Spellborn packages.

 

I think it might be a good thing to share some of the info I got so far to (maybe) get some more ppl to look into it.

 

The team at Epic who made the Unreal game and it's engine have made a certain standard in which information

is stored in files.

The way this is done depends on the version of the engine and the additional programming that was done to the

files of for example the core and engine files.

 

As you might have guessed the devs of the Spellborn team made some heavy changes, and this is also the reason

why you can't open a Spellborn package in the "standard" Unreal 2004 environment / Editor.

 

After comparing the layout of the Unreal 2004 packages and the Spellborn files I did some testing and found a way in which

I could rewrite a Spellborn package into a layout which is better readable with most Unreal programs.

Since it does only rearrange the data blocks it doesn't change the actual content of the package,

meaning if the are some things that require different layouts of the data itself because of changes in higher lvl programs,

you still get an error while loading it in UT2004 editor.

 

To me and Acid it seems like the Spellborn packages have no big changes in layout from the early 0.8 beta version compared to

the last version 1.51. The security of gameguard was introduced off course and since this is no longer supported for Spellborn

you can't startup clients which have gameguard included.

 

During the last period I've been researching the way character models have been defined in Unreal,

it looks like there have been several changes in it's layouts during Unreal versions changes,

meaning not all Info I find on internet is usefull to me.

 

But the model / skeletal mesh data is always the same since a game engine needs it this way.

 

For some of us it might be good to know how a computer works on 3D.

Using a program like 3DS max or maya you can make a model directly by using the standard defined shapes and/ or modifying these

and later export the model into a file or either directly into an Unreal package.

 

A model consists of the points in 3D being defined in a X, Y and Z position, this is also called a vertex or plural vertices.

Next step is drawing a line between two 3D points, this is called an edge.

taking 3 points you can define a triangle or short Tri.

The plane of the triangle is also called a face.

 

Now the fun begins, the faces of the model can be assigned to a picture (or texture)

Because of the fact that a picture is 2 dimensional, the triangles of the 3D model have to be flattened out into 2D.

There are several programs which can do this automaticly, but doing it by hand is also possible.

What this does is create a link between the texture and the picture in there and the tri's of the model.

 

for example: an oil drum can be seen as a cylinder and two flat circle's. Flattening it out would give a square for the cylinder itself and two circles

for the bottom and top. reusing the same texture part for the bottom and top can save you a little bit of space.

 

Every model or shape in Unreal is defined by Tri's and the way you look at something on your screen has the same technique as above.

 

The game engines have support for different type of texture's, most important is offcourse the color or diffuse map, this gives you the look of a model.

Other types of textures are:

- a Bump map gives a bit of effect on the shading of a surface.

- a Specular map, defines the shininess and highlight color of a surface. 

- a Normal map, brings in extra detail on the surface on top of the flat triangle plane.

- an Alpha map, this controls the transparency of a texture. Think of a stained window which you look through, the alpha map is much used in games.

 

Depending on the look you want to give to a model you need one or more texture maps to be linked to the model, this is done via a so called shader.

 

In the attached file I've placed some Spellborn textures, now think of the model that belongs to them.

 

I'd say more info is on the way.

 

Greetings Jan-Willem JW-NL