TresCom Forums

Sooo are we gonna get to work or what?

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->Tres2020 Starter Kit

"Well, as long as you're under there, you can check the breakers," Thorne said. ... "There's a box right behind the front bumper. Over on the left."
"I see it." [said Sarah]
...
"The box is in backward. Flip all the switches the other way. Are you dry?"
"No, Doc. I'm soaking wet, lying in the damn mud."
~Michael Crichton

Not sure if this has been attempted before so I gave it a shot myself. I've been trying to figure out the Plains and this is what I came up with. I used the max file from "mystery models" and separated objects that clearly weren't aligned to any terrain from those that definitely were aligned to some terrain. I ended up with foliage suspended in mid air. Blender has a modifier called shrinkwrap. I used it on a subdivided plane which made it stick to the foliage objects by displacing its surface. I fixed some parts where the foliage was still not properly aligned with the plane and this is the end result. What do you think?

Interesting option. I had tried to manually do something like that before. Mixed with the terrain from the surrounding levels. Never finished it, though.

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Visit The Carnivores Saga - a forum devoted to modding Action Forms' Carnivores, Carnivores 2 and Carnivores: Ice Age games
Tres WIP: updated T-Script Reference and File Formats documents
Sound name listings for the Demo (build 117), Retail (build 116), Beta 103, Beta 99, Beta 97, Beta 96, Build 55, PC Gamer Alpha (build 32) and E3 1998 Alpha (build 22) TPA files

Looks pretty cool.
The Plains version from the Mystery Models is a bit of a mystery. While it clearly have proper Trespasser sized models, very little feels logical, at least for a "Plains" level.

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Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

so i've been thinking. since we have that bumpmap of the island in Hammond's house, i figured that i should see how it looks like in 3d. basically i loaded it into blender as a displacement map and i compared it to my frankenstein of an island that i extracted from various builds using TresEd. turns out 256x256 bumpmap still can hold quite a lot of detail. most of the landscape features match surprisingly well when compared to the actual heightmap from TresEd. since that bumpmap contains accurate representations of all the other previously missing levels, i guess it's safe to assume that what we can see here is an accurate representation of the Plains. in this case all we would have to do is turn the plains part into an actual heightmap, smooth it out a bit and add some details here and there. not sure how to make the max file fit inside this landscape tho. it sort of fits but not really. any thoughts?

Here's a link to an archive containing my Plains in .obj format https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nakblHtY-7XlJ_g-d0D3eHRSsLYyE9c-/view?usp=sharing

sorry if i'm stating the obvious

You might want to check out the Island Project we're working on here:
https://www.trescomforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11122

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Current Project: Cloning Facility | My Release Thread

That's more or less what I've done, too... I like your choice of the term "Frankenstein" to describe it, it fits perfectly as this is stitched together from bits and pieces...

I should post renders of my version too...

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Visit The Carnivores Saga - a forum devoted to modding Action Forms' Carnivores, Carnivores 2 and Carnivores: Ice Age games
Tres WIP: updated T-Script Reference and File Formats documents
Sound name listings for the Demo (build 117), Retail (build 116), Beta 103, Beta 99, Beta 97, Beta 96, Build 55, PC Gamer Alpha (build 32) and E3 1998 Alpha (build 22) TPA files

i have no idea how i missed that project. looks really promising. i like how you guys handled keeping both the swamp and the raptor gorge in IJ2 and i'm curious how you plan on incorporating the lake mentioned in the walkthrough because it just so happens that i'm trying to figure out a lot of this stuff too. any word on when you are releasing the first batch of levels?


definitely

Look back on page 6, one of the rivers seems to meet up with the drainage pipe in the Town and another is awfully close to the dam reservoir, might indicate that at some point the dam overflowed.

so i think i figured it out. ignore the streambeds floating above the map ;p with a little bit of adjusting it should be possible to align the objects even better. in some places it's impossible to align them though, and it's most likely because the heightmap i used (the one from Hammond's house) must be a little bit older than the max file itself and in that time they managed to further develop the Plains heightmap

i uploaded this entire model to sketchfab. take a look and let me know if any of this makes any sense
https://skfb.ly/6O7Ep

One thing that have always bothered me is that the objects in the Plains level we got are so small in scale. However, your terrain just made me wonder if they used a much smaller scale overall when they did the MAX file. That way it would make more sense that the mountains you see would be much higher than they actually appear in the retail. It could also explain the spread of the foliage and why it has so much "open area" between them (and make more sense why Plains have so few open areas in retail scale).

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Active project: Trespasser: Isla Sorna - Working on PH2-IT (and experimental BE-IT).

"...there used to be more benches, but InGen's workers removed them during the evacuation in the name of framerate."

OK, to discard any theories, when I did use the bumpmap from Hammond's house (and I think I used the older version), I got most things in the MAX file to line up with the terrain elevation. As for those streambed textures in the MAX file, we shoud ignore thm, as you can clearly see that they have just been copied and pasted (one has been rotated a bit, another one is a partial copy only), so they were far from a final version they were just put there for further use/editing...

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Visit The Carnivores Saga - a forum devoted to modding Action Forms' Carnivores, Carnivores 2 and Carnivores: Ice Age games
Tres WIP: updated T-Script Reference and File Formats documents
Sound name listings for the Demo (build 117), Retail (build 116), Beta 103, Beta 99, Beta 97, Beta 96, Build 55, PC Gamer Alpha (build 32) and E3 1998 Alpha (build 22) TPA files

i feel like they were using those streambeds in 3ds max as guides whenever they wanted to create a streambed. looking from the the top it helped them understand where to place rocks and textures, and that's the only purpose of these objects. maybe they even had a script that randomly distributes rocks along a predetermined path and aligns them with the terrain. so shortly after they began working on the Plains, they slapped together a couple of squares in a shape that roughly resembles a streambed, copied and pasted it around for variation and hit "create". it just so happened that some of those objects they used as guides for the script, were going through a ridge or a hill. and it just so happened that we've got this exact version even though there might be a newer one that makes more sense

This is some nice Tres detective work, fairly in line with what some of us have discovered in recent years. For my part, here's the thread of my own work on it, which includes at the end my final-to-date recreation of the Plains, including some points of interest from the walkthrough:
https://www.trescomforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=7046

_________________
->Tres2020 Starter Kit

"Well, as long as you're under there, you can check the breakers," Thorne said. ... "There's a box right behind the front bumper. Over on the left."
"I see it." [said Sarah]
...
"The box is in backward. Flip all the switches the other way. Are you dry?"
"No, Doc. I'm soaking wet, lying in the damn mud."
~Michael Crichton

So now none of the rivers match up, I can understood the central one, but what's wrong with the one running through IT and the one by the dam reservoir?