(12-11-2012, 06:40 PM)neobrain Wrote: [ -> ]lol guys, let me repeat the problem with just using obj files: You cannot store anything but geometry in them (mostly, anyway). I.e. we need some sort of "header" format which takes care of render states and stuff.
Yeah, I read your post and yeah I know OBJ doesn't handle anything much aside from geometry from personal experience (i.e. it doesn't handle animation, not without some DIY programming) but that still doesn't eliminate the problem of it's text-based nature. It'll almost always take up more space than a binary format. Even if you store the rest of the data in some sort of header file in binary, the size of the OBJs themselves could still be a headache, especially if people get really creative with their idea of hi-res.
Your first idea for the format seems to avoid the issue of giant file size by splitting the model into separate OBJ sources, it's the second idea you proposed that I see the potential for that to happen. Like I said, dunno if this is a concern or not given the average size of any given model from a GC or Wii game. That's my only technical concern atm, so if you can confirm whether it's valid or not, that'd clear up a lot for me.
Not that it's likely to be a good idea, but what if we dumped and loaded them in the console's native format (to save on space) and provided an application to convert between .obj and the native format? It should also reduce the slowdown caused as we wouldn't be converting the models while running the emulator, just loading and saving.
I would totally love this for my own personal benefits of having my own custom made HD Models for games. I love using blender, however I am not fully acquainted with OpenGl Programming... I could not help you make this sort of auto caching program in the emulator...
This would be an awesome feature, and I'd definitely mess around with and create different models , though probably not good enough that anyone else would bother with
(like changing the poltergeist 3000 with a proton pack).
@MaJoR - That's a good point, a lot of Nintendo's GC games tried to make everything round, so it'd real easy to smooth those out while still keeping the original design.
Also it'd be easy to take assets from different games like taking the higher poly toon link from brawl and throwing it into wind waker - or taking SMG's mario and putting it into sunshine. And IIRC the high-poly models from SMG's FMVs are on disc, so, if we can convert them, you could easily enough swap them too.
As for how it would be done, I'm guessing it'd be like 3d ripper - having a bunch of little objects making up the models. It'd be nice if you could group them together into like a their full character model, or whatever, as finding all the pieces of a complex model and stitching all the small objects together gets pretty boring after a while.
And I think using obj would probably be the best, but
also using a different format so people can edit whatever else they want to and to cut down on filesize (like Shonumi said, objs are big and 1 scene from a game like Dark Souls is enough to crash most 3d modelling applications on my PC, and that'd be a pain to upload/download a really big model pack). I don't know what other format would be best, or even if you had to make one up and make/use plugins for 3DS max/blender/noesis or whatever.
Anyway, it'd be a really neat option, and I know I'd use and am sure many others would as well - so yeah, definitely interested.
Is this awesome idea still alive?
