Driver Madness

Just wanted to let you guys know that the vertex limit patch is coming along well. It wont be released for a while (a week or more probably) since theres a bunch of coding that needs done in order to make a working importer . SOAP's importer will be broken due to the new den file format. But the good news is I imported a model with ~850 verticies, and it didn't totally fail!

PS. The vertex patch also will fix the shinyness issue and is capable of fixing the damage issue.

If you don't agree that this guy is amazing, then you're insane. Great work!

Good luck with it. I can't wait to see more detailed cars in the game.

Great Work! keep it up! this games is gonna raise from its ashes!

someone972 wrote:Just wanted to let you guys know that the vertex limit patch is coming along well. It wont be released for a while (a week or more probably) since theres a bunch of coding that needs done in order to make a working importer . SOAP's importer will be broken due to the new den file format. But the good news is I imported a model with ~850 verticies, and it didn't totally fail!

PS. The vertex patch also will fix the shinyness issue and is capable of fixing the damage issue.

Could you tell format of the new DEN file (I'll start working on next plugin version if you tell...)
Why importer will not work???

Ya, I was planning on telling you once I got a good grip on what needs done to import properly (soon). I may even make a library for it since isn't the easiest format to edit. The importer wont work anymore because Driver now dynamically allocates space for the shinyness/damage/vertex arrays. It used to be that they were a fixed size (at 260 verticies). The importer wont work right unless you modify the file so that it has arrays set up for the new model, otherwise it will overflow and start going into memory it shouldn't.

If anyone didn't understand this I can explain it better.

Quite confusing...what do you mean "dynamically allocate" ?

Well when allocating memory dynamically, you pass how much you want to allocate while while the program is running. Static allocation is where it's a fixed size that is pre-allocated before the program runs. So while the original had a static array that could hold only 260 verticies, I can allocate however many I want (to a point of course).

someone972 wrote:The importer wont work right unless you modify the file so that it has arrays set up for the new model, otherwise it will overflow and start going into memory it shouldn't.

As I guessed every player car is hardcoded, the civilian cars in Driver 1 PC only uses DEN and COS, only in Driver 2 these files used for all cars in LEV file.

Great work someone972, it's very awesome to know that more high quality car mods are possible soon
@SOAP: Is it possible to convert Driver 2 cars to Driver 1 PC? I would love to have an TC which turns Driver 1 PC into Driver 2 PSX, but maybe we could also improve the car models and such, would be very,very awesome

EDIT: I was wondering if it's possible that Tanner get out of his car like in Driver 2, but i doubt it's possible...

I hope someone can enlighten me

Those kind of mods aren't possible. We would have to rewrite the ENTIRE game, and that would take years to do. It's not worth it for such an old game. And I don't know, it might be possible to convert D2 --> D1 PC, but again, it takes a long time to do. Making such a converter is...well...HARD, you know?

Will it be possible one day to import high-poly (by Driver's standards) cars into Driver? I'd kill to see a few of GTA IV's muscle cars, interior and all in Driver.

How high poly are you talking? It will soon be able to have much higher poly models than it used to, so possibly. And if it has semi-transparent windows then they might not be able to be included.

I think it's possible to have semi-transparent windows, we just have to make the opacity lower...never tried it though...

God damn it, I wish I could find out how many polygons the default GTA IV cars have. Google is absolutely f***ing pathetic. Maybe 8000-7000 polys? And SparkIV's model viewer blows balls.

GTA IV car models have got about 15 000 triangles.

Holy sh*t, I was off by a long shot.

PostalDude wrote:Maybe 8000-7000 polys?

This is too expensive for Driver (The game will slow down). We need source code to make Vertex Buffer objects in Driver engine, so it's impossible.

Dr. Doom wrote:I think it's possible to have semi-transparent windows, we just have to make the opacity lower...never tried it though...

It's possible through textures.

15000 polys? 8000 polys? GTA like? Transparent windows? NO!
Adding these things in Driver will... make it s*** as the iPhone version. Saw it? The pre**** models, added nasty windows and making them s*** was the biggest mistake from Ubi`s and Gameloft friendship. I just wonder why they maked that? They wanted to show us that Driver is mod-able? Or?

Or just to molest the vehicle models.

I fixed it up a bit more, it now handled a model with 3470 verticies and 5283 faces. It might handle a little more than that, but not too much. I could always up the buffers more, but they already take up 33 MB more space. I'm not sure what the effects of importing a lot of higher quality buildings in would be, it may overflow the buffer.

WHOA 3470 vertices!? thats a HUGE improvement! nice job man!

Wow! Very nice work!

I'm currently working on fixing another buffer overflow, which will probably be the last one I fix. Unfortunately it's less trivia to fix then the last one, but its going well so far.

Yo, sign in on MSN would ya?

Well, that took a long time . Turns out when I was making that final buffer fix that I made an error one time, which resulted in 6 bytes being wrong. This caused it to crash seemingly at random, and took forever to track down. But I fixed it today and got a model with 5584 verticies and 8879 faces, which is the full size of the model I have. It can probably handle more than that, but really anything more than that is crazy. Still have to iron out some other stuff, but it's getting close .

Here's a little pic just to show you it actually works . It's imported in such a way that is gets randomly colored triangles, which shows you how detailed it is.

EDIT: I'd also like to add that you can leave damage on, it just wont bend the car. It will still apply damaged textures though, which I'll make a utility to fix. Shinyness also works, just not with the type of triangle in the picture.

Wow! Congratulations!

PS: I think game with more details will slow down.

someone972 wrote:Here's a little pic just to show you it actually works . It's imported in such a way that is gets randomly colored triangles, which shows you how detailed it is.

EDIT: I'd also like to add that you can leave damage on, it just wont bend the car. It will still apply damaged textures though, which I'll make a utility to fix. Shinyness also works, just not with the type of triangle in the picture.

Is that a Challenger imported from NFS Carbon?
That looks AWESOME!!! (now it looks some kind of psychodelic car )

OMG sweet!