what are uber's general business activities

Official Versions of stuff? Hope that means Plugins for 3d modelling software

nanodesu.info is sketchy? Really? How dare you! I spent close to an hour of writing the index.html in vim!

nanodesu.info isn't part of pastats anymore though. I do still host random images and mod stuff on it, but pastats has moved to another domain (pastats.com) and another continent.

Also mods are actually build into many parts of PA as first class citizen. Having mod tools is basically just the last part you need for that. It's more about actually having the ability to mod stuff. The PA engine has a lot of that and is getting even more.

A touch-up isn't the way to go about it I think. From what I understand that article is based on old claims Uber has made and Uber is still working towards those goals as well. Trying to alter claims made in the past REALLY looks sketchy. If they need to be corrected make an official notice to people what's going on. Though I don't see a big issue with this right now. Modding works and it will get even better, I am sure of that.

Your point about sketchy webpages is kinda funny though

read up on the definition of kawaii and put an image of hanyuu up as your wallpaper. I command you. You can scare of neptunio any day with it!

The content tools we've already released (papatran.exe and papadump.exe) really are the only tools we use internally for converting art content. Actually we only use papatran as papadump was created purely to make sure papatran was doing what we expected then forgotten. You guys literally have the entirety of our proprietary content tool chain. What was really missing is clear information about how to get content you guys create into the game, including what magic values to give to papatran for different things (units and terrain are handled differently). We honestly don't know why many of the files created by the community show up in the game as polygon soup as we're using the official fbx sdk for reading fbx files and we just use the data it gives us.

As for supporting Blender, it's not something we use it internally. We released as much information as we could on the papa format to try to help facilitate a community created importer / exporter. Whether we need to do one internally is a conversation that hasn't really happened in full yet, though there aren't currently any plans to do one.

hey. thanks. I don't see how you couldn't simply ask and get immediate results since it's your intellectual property.

anyways. I hear you. Yes stuff is coming. but it's not there yet let's be real.

Side-note : is a mod market still in the works? have you seen this idea : https://forums.uberent.com/threads/ranked-mods-idea-mock-ups.58227/

@cola_colin dude! I told you not to take it personal ! I was basically kidding . My point still stands though :

planetaryannihilation.com = serious buiness
nanodesu = uhmm I must have dialed a wrong number?

It was just illustrating my point that "no dodgy sites" was also extremely ironic. (even though I personally don't have a problem with it)

Blender is a free 3d model software tool that isnt that great >-<

3D Studio Max is a much better tool for making awesomeness Some people, such as myself would rather have a .papa script/plugin to use in such a program, rather then rely on programs that are... Well, Lesser, then what we are used to

<joke>Did I come over that serious? I need to start these tags again</joke>

@cola_colin It's a precautionary measure that I have when the /S or /J tag isn't there. Your post was almost 100% certain to be a joke to me but I wasn't 100%, so .... :S

We use 3DS Max, export to .fbx, send the .fbx and .png files through papatran. My experience is most game devs export to a format like .fbx or .collada or use other existing middleware solutions (like Granny) rather than write their own exporter. The nature of game dev is converting from a source file to the game file directly is rarely what's wanted as there's usually an extra step of file conversion for different platforms (especially console vs. pc, or different mobile platforms that often require completely different asset formats).

In that case, can I ask about your setting for 3DS Max and your FBX export settings?

Currently when going from 3DS Max -> FBX -> papa all bones align to the right. This makes me suspect it's one of two things. Either there's some obscure setting that I have missed, or this is an issue with the 3DS Max 2014 fbx exporter.

The end result is that AFAIK, nobody can get models into the game without using the blender plugin. That means no animations.

We use 3ds Max 2012 for PA. I don't have 3ds Max 2014 to know what has changed. I can tell you the export settings we use are essentially the defaults with animation unchecked.

Here's a copy-paste of the maxscript we use to export commanders and units.

FbxExporterSetParam "Animation" false
FbxExporterSetParam "BakeAnimation" false
FbxExporterSetParam "SmoothingGroups" true
FbxExporterSetParam "TangentSpaceExport" true
FbxExporterSetParam "UpAxis" "Z"
exportFile (""+PApath+unitName+".fbx") #noPrompt selectedOnly:true using:FBXEXP​

"PApath" is just a content folder that mirrors the game folder structure and which we run papatran on and copy the files to the matching game folder, and "unitName" is just what it seems like.

2012?! 2014 runs faster and smoother :O You should upgrade >//<

@bgolus Any hints on how to get animations into the game / onto a model would be greatly appreciated, since it seems from your post that you don't animate units directly in 3dsmax.

Our rigging / animation tool only works in 2012, also that was the latest when we started PA. HR would of been 2013 or 2014 and using CAT.

All our animations are done in 3ds Max. We use a rigging tool that helps with bone manipulation and animation organisation, but that doesn't factor into the export as it's still directly driving Max bones. The only differences between exporting the mesh and the animation is when exporting the animation we check on animation export and bake and don't have the mesh selected, only the bones.

select selectionSets["BONEexport"]
FbxExporterSetParam "Animation" true
FbxExporterSetParam "BakeAnimation" true
FbxExporterSetParam "BakeFrameStep" 1
FbxExporterSetParam "SmoothingGroups" true
FbxExporterSetParam "TangentSpaceExport" true
FbxExporterSetParam "UpAxis" "Z"
exportFile (""+PApath+"\\"+ExportanimName+".fbx") #noPrompt selectedOnly:true using:FBXEXP​

Again, same PApath, and the export anim name is just what you see in the content folders (unitname_anim_animname.fbx). The actual animation file names are irrelevant as they're directly listed in the .json files for the units, that's just the naming scheme we used for organization.

Only works in 2012? That....sucks :|

Specifically we used Puppetshop, which we used for MNC and SMNC as well, and many people here worked with in the past. However the author of Puppetshop got hired by Autodesk sometime back, so the only reason why it worked up until 2012 is because plugins from 3ds Max 2008 still worked. As of 3ds Max 2013 Autodesk broke compatibility.

But the tool was never tried on 2014?

@bgolus so, using Max 2012 running puppetshop we should be able to get models and associated animations ingame without any issues? Does that mean you are going to release a version of puppetshop to the community here? Do we need to individually pay for a license for this tool? Perhaps there is also a chance of giving our community a short 5 minute tutorial? This is a problem that many in the community have been banging their head against for a month or more... we would be very thankful, i'm sure.


*Edit: Wow, it looks like Puppetshop was originally free to the community but after *someone* requested it be updated to 2012 was pulled off (including postings about it's release for free). Is there any way for us to get ahold of a working version?

Puppetshop is 100% not required (and, as you noticed, not available anymore). It's not used in our process for creating custom commanders. It's just a matter of taking an existing commander skeleton and skinning a new commander mesh to the existing bones. That's really it.

@bgolus Is there *any* chance that you guys would be willing to post one of your modelled, textured, animated units in 3dsmax format, as a sampler pack for all the budding mod artists out there?

Only reason I ask is because we've got the end result and sort of hacked our way backwards from there, but having a source file to work with would make it tons easier to set up a guide on the 'how to' of modeling / animating / etc.