TresCom Forums

Hey, I just joined the forum but have played Trespasser for years,

I was wondering why I can find mods and patches that fix basic things or even updates textures in the game but cant one that updates the whole game with better dinosaur models like ones I've seen in other mods, or make trees look better, or fix environment or building geometries maybe even improve animations or AI? just wanted to know if there's a reason a user made remaster hasn't been done in engine yet, sorry if its a dumb question.

-Tristanasurus

Welcome to TresCom!

The majority of mods ever released for this game have been based on peoples own ideas, cause that has been what people want.
It is possible to update the dinosaur models but then again, there has been little demand for a mod like that over the years.

Trespasser does not use animation for the AI, which makes it a lot more difficult to fix. The source was leaked a long time ago and the best we got from it so far is the CE patch. The code is complex, and even the devs say you are better off making a new engine from scratch than trying to fix it. And we don't have that many people who knows coding in the community, let alone be able to fix or improve the AI. It is worth remembering that games still today don't try to do the AI system Trespasser has, with emotion based AI, and not animation.

As for improvement over the retail. There is a HD AI texture upscale mod. Otherwise something like Trespasser: Isla Sorna is trying to fix (what we can fix) in the original levels, as well as combining them with the earlier versions we have and combine some levels to make them bigger! https://www.trescom.org/download/trespasser-isla-sorna/

It is not a dumb question and I hope this answers some of it.

_________________
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."

Short answer: because Trespasser isn't designed that way. Each level is basically a standalone, so you can't make a "mod" that will replace dinosaurs or anything else in every single level afterwards, and you can't change animations either, because there aren't any. What modding the engine can achieve is allow higher resolutions and use features from more modern DirectX versions to a certain degree, re-enable dinosaur activities which were supressed before the final release and a few other things. Even the mod for high-resolution textures required its creator to search for every single texture in every single level in the retail version of the game and enhance them one by one, and it won't do anything for any other levels which use their own textures...

And when I say it doesn't use animations, I mean it. It uses inverse kinematics (IK), basically teaching the models (both bipedal and quadrupedal) how to walk or jump or anything (imagine something like "raise your right foot first, then place it in front of you, put it down again, raise your left foot now, ..."), and then they use that when they have to travel from point A to point B at speed C (not "c", which is the speed of light, BTW).

_________________
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