Sat Oct 16, 2004 7:08 am
.SURs... questions
I have some questions about .SUR files... forgive me if these seem rather "noobish", but I want to make sure I clearly understand these issues:
1. Nobody seems to know how make new .SURs yet. Is this an accurate statement?
2. However, several people have figured out how to view/manipulate existing .SURs. How can the first be true, and the second one also? If you can resize and view the polygons... why can't you add/subtract them? I'm not talking about sophisticated import/export here... just hand-coding the positions of vertices...
So... can a new .SUR file be made, by subtracting vertices from existing ones? If not, then why not?
The reason why I ask this is that this should be pretty easy to figure out... if we could figure out how to "reshape" existing .SUR files by removing/moving existing vertices (by hand, of course), then we could make some basic primitives, which would then be far easier to reshape to fit a particular ship's size/shape. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be better than using .SURs which weren't designed for the geometry that they're serving as hitboxes for...
So... what happens when/if somebody removes a vertice's point information? Does the game lock up? At the heart of my question is the rather obvious: since .SUR files, like other geometry, aren't stored in the main executable, it seems likely that if we can figure this out... and we could probably build our own .SURs, using extremely simple geometry (i.e., some cubes)
Now, I've taken a look at .SUR files... they seem to be encrypted hex of some kind. When I looked at the sourcecode for the .SUR resizer, I didn't see any reference to hex... but maybe I'm just not looking at it right. So... uh... how did y'all figure out how to translate that hex into coordinates... and is there a way for mere mortals to do so? I mean... if I could just figure out how this file gets transformed from hex entries into a textfile listing the vertices positions x, y, z... then I could alter these, with a little luck, and move the verts around until I'd reformed the .SUR into a sphere with a cube inside... from the description of what the SUR Resizer is doing, it looks like it's doing even more complicated stuff there... so obviously about 90% of these problems are worked out (which is amazing, considering what a cryptic piece of junk the raw file is!).
Aaaaaanyways... I am far from expert about this deep stuff, but if I could figure out which sections refer to the coordinates of the geometry (and anything else important enough to worry about, like the center point)... then I'd like to know how to do it, so that I can at least try to hack things up a bit.
1. Nobody seems to know how make new .SURs yet. Is this an accurate statement?
2. However, several people have figured out how to view/manipulate existing .SURs. How can the first be true, and the second one also? If you can resize and view the polygons... why can't you add/subtract them? I'm not talking about sophisticated import/export here... just hand-coding the positions of vertices...
So... can a new .SUR file be made, by subtracting vertices from existing ones? If not, then why not?
The reason why I ask this is that this should be pretty easy to figure out... if we could figure out how to "reshape" existing .SUR files by removing/moving existing vertices (by hand, of course), then we could make some basic primitives, which would then be far easier to reshape to fit a particular ship's size/shape. It wouldn't be perfect, but it'd be better than using .SURs which weren't designed for the geometry that they're serving as hitboxes for...
So... what happens when/if somebody removes a vertice's point information? Does the game lock up? At the heart of my question is the rather obvious: since .SUR files, like other geometry, aren't stored in the main executable, it seems likely that if we can figure this out... and we could probably build our own .SURs, using extremely simple geometry (i.e., some cubes)
Now, I've taken a look at .SUR files... they seem to be encrypted hex of some kind. When I looked at the sourcecode for the .SUR resizer, I didn't see any reference to hex... but maybe I'm just not looking at it right. So... uh... how did y'all figure out how to translate that hex into coordinates... and is there a way for mere mortals to do so? I mean... if I could just figure out how this file gets transformed from hex entries into a textfile listing the vertices positions x, y, z... then I could alter these, with a little luck, and move the verts around until I'd reformed the .SUR into a sphere with a cube inside... from the description of what the SUR Resizer is doing, it looks like it's doing even more complicated stuff there... so obviously about 90% of these problems are worked out (which is amazing, considering what a cryptic piece of junk the raw file is!).
Aaaaaanyways... I am far from expert about this deep stuff, but if I could figure out which sections refer to the coordinates of the geometry (and anything else important enough to worry about, like the center point)... then I'd like to know how to do it, so that I can at least try to hack things up a bit.
