The Universe according to Spellborn

As promised, the new skin is live ^^

Looks very interesting,its a good feeling to see the old arena where I spend alot of hours of fighting others in hard PvP matches.


Also the new skin is beautyful,great work

^^

I would say it's time for an update,

Acidburn is pretty busy with the UC files which contain program code and I have a look into the animation files.

The animation files from spellborn are, as aspected, different in layout from standard unreal, in other words, we cannot read them directly into Unreal Editor 2004.

These files contain the shape meshes (called skeletal meshes) and the animation info which belong to them.

It seems that the animation part is the most troubling, that's the reason why it takes longer.


The fun thing is that both AcidBurn and I, learn a lot about the way things are made in Spellborn and how it works in Unreal, so even if we don't succeed in getting the original

client/server into action, we might still be able to transfer the information to a newer version of the Unreal engine which has more possibilty's

and maybe get nicer results.


By the way, is anyone else doing something like us, please give a reply, it might help to exchange info.


Greetings JW-NL.

My technical knowledge about this is unexcisting.

Awesome though that you guys are doing this, I can only dream to know even half as much as you guys..


But I've got my job now ... Means I can support more on this forum financially.

How is it that i never saw the later posts on this topic?

This is so amazing what you have done....

I have been studying C++ and related software programming for a little while now, but my knowledge is somewhat limited.

I would however enjoy to work with you on extracting data from the Spellborn client. Could you send me your files/editor programs/other stuff? I would appreciate it very much. if there is anyway to revive spellborn, I can't let the hope die.


Respectfully,

~~Joshua (Spellborn/NightQuest Dev Team)

Hey StrikeX,


Good to see some activity from your side...


For the moment I propose the following:


First start with some basic things you need to have:


- a copy of the TCOS files on your PC, if not, try to get your hands on the installation files, there are still several versions available on the net.


- an UT2004 (unreal Tournament 2004, developer edition) This contains the UT game and also the Unreal editor. In the folder extra's there's also an installation for Maya 5.0 Personal Learning Editon.


- read up a bit on websites like http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/WebHome.html, maybe vieuw some tutorials via: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/VideoTutorials.html

(These links are for the newer version of the unreal engine, since it contains more free info, for spellborn the earlier version of the engine was used, but on the epicgames website you need a login code to get into that part which we don't know.)


- Get yourself a good hex editor like http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delphi/fr.../xvi32.htm


- read up on the way the unreal packages are formatted and compare some of the original files of UT2004 with the Spellborn files.


- Find out what DRfortheWin means


- Some Pascal or C++ program like Delphi could be handy.


In other words, it's quite some things that you need to get before you can actually do or see some result from the Spellborn files


Also keep in mind that the devs from the Spellborn team have used the complete source code from the Unreal engine to make their own changes to a lot of things,

this includes the way the packages are build up. In other words, the basic unreal 2004 editor cannot read in the files from Spellborn unless some changes are done to the Spellborn files.


The amount of data is off course quite something, and that's also why it took us a while to rewrite them part by my program and part by hand....



The newer version of the game of spellborn contains the gameguard protection which gives problems when starting up the game, but my guess is that the packages files are not affected by gameguard,

in other words we should be able to extract the data from it.


This is off course all a little shady area, so let's keep it a bit low


In the mean time we speak on ventrilo about it, so hope this info helps out a bit....


Greetings Jan-Willem.

Thanks for the update

I'm reading up on Delphi coding, and downloading files... I can't wait to get started.... I have great hopes and expectations.

I'll keep everyone posted.

As always,

A pleasure to serve you,

~~Joshua(Dev Team)

I hope Joshua didn't give up yet...


Greetings Jan-Willem