The Universe according to Spellborn

I also fear it's not as easy as it may sound.

 

First an update about my current work in progress.

 

I'm rebuilding my OS software from Vista on the older system to Windows 7 now.

The older system had a breakdown due to a lightning strike nearby.

 

The harddisks were still ok, it was just the sata and network connection that broke down on the old system's motherboard.

 

Since the OS wouldn't boot anymore on the new motherboard I had to do a new install.

I made a trial install for windows 8, but it was pretty quick decided that it was not my cup of tea as main OS for my system.

 

I was working on extracting the character meshes and the animation data of the skeletal meshes that belong to the character meshes

and it seems that it should be possible to get that done in a program.

 

Part of the program should be to build up the structure off the skeletal order of the bones since this is the link that has to be compared with

the animation data which is in a different file.

Next part is the shape of a character which is defined in the skeletal mesh part.

This shape has connections to the skeletal bones and the bones in order are animated according to the animation data.

 

Acid and I did find some definitions for the way the data should be placed in the Unreal packages, but you might have guessed that

the devs of Spellborn added extra things that I now have to find again between the rest of the data in the packages.

 

Current goal for me is to be able to extract the characters / monsters out of the Spellborn packages into the PSA and PSK files.

The PSA file contains the animation data en the PSK file the shape for a char/ monster. Both contain the skelet so they can be linked together

in 3D software such as 3DS max.

 

I did however read on the Epic forums that the actor-X software (which uses the PSA/PSK file format) is no longer supported with the newer version of 3DS Max,

it's only available for the older versions of 3DS max.

 

After I've finished the first goal Maybe next step should be to implement the newer way the data is exported / imported between the newer version of 3DS max and the current release of the UDK (Unreal Development Kit).

 

Let's see how far I can get in reaching my first goal.

 

CU,

 

Jan-Willem.