General Queries

loony636 · Post by **loony636** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:11 am

Well, I recently dusted off the old Deus Ex and had another look at it. And on my brand new mega-laptop, it looks, quite honestly, bad. After seeing projects like HDTP and New Vision, I thought that it was fantastic that this game would finally be updated. But I did have a couple questions:

1) What is the difference between HDTP and New Vision? Is it something to do with world textures? Because as far as I can see, HDTP is increasing the size of the textures, whereas New Vision is recreating them. Am I warm?

2) If I, hypothetically, wanted to get involved, what skills would I need, programs would I require, etc?

Good job guys, I love the project.

EER · Post by **EER** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:20 am

1)
New Vision: Recreating World textures in higher resolution.
HDTP: Recreating objects-models/textures in higher resolution.

2) For NV I'd say photoshop and a lot of skill in said program. For HDTP it would be cool if you were an animator that can import models into DX

(I don't know what programs would be required for that).

Mr_Cyberpunk · Post by **Mr_Cyberpunk** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:55 am

For no.2, Well I don't know if Snipa is recruiting. Plus world texturing is a lot harder than it looks at such high resolutions. You'll need a powerful computer in order to work at such large resolutions.. so lots of ram (cause photoshop eats it.. and can crash if you don't have enough) and a decent graphics card would be great. (for testing and also getting photoshop to work)

You'll need to have a lot of experience with photoshop as well as texture art and patterns. (though I do have a bit of trouble with patterns) You'll need a big hard drive (ideally 100-200GB), file sizes can get up to 100MB each and even higher in some cases... this isn't including backups, plus I'm assuming you'd be installing and downloading other things too.

You'll need to have an internet connection (obvious) to upload to the FTP.. 56k might be cutting it close. The other things I should stress.. You need to have a lot of patience (being able to sit there for hours at a time on just a few textures is not easy) and You'll need to have the time and commitment.

Don't mean to scare anyone but it is the truth. Oh and a pretty big monitor would be ideal because you'll be working with textures larger than your monitor. So I'd advise anyone using a 17" monitor, be weary that it can really hurt your eyes and piss you off with all the scrolling.

DaveW · Post by **DaveW** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 2:52 pm

Well, I was considering recruiting people. Haven't given it that much thought though.
Basically, you need to be skilled in creating seamless textures - preferably from photo sources (they tend to look better). The program used is completely unimportant as long as you can save to PNG or something.

JC12 · Post by **JC12** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 7:08 pm

In that case I can help ya. I'm experienced with Photoshop and have a large library of resources.

Only thing is I can't get the original textures for comparison.

DaveW · Post by **DaveW** » Thu Sep 13, 2007 11:04 pm

We have them on our upload manager. Send us some examples of your work and we'll see

loony636 · Post by **loony636** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 1:57 am

Plus world texturing is a lot harder than it looks at such high resolutions. You'll need a powerful computer in order to work at such large resolutions.. so lots of ram (cause photoshop eats it.. and can crash if you don't have enough) and a decent graphics card would be great. (for testing and also getting photoshop to work)

You'll need to have a lot of experience with photoshop as well as texture art and patterns. (though I do have a bit of trouble with patterns) You'll need a big hard drive (ideally 100-200GB), file sizes can get up to 100MB each and even higher in some cases... this isn't including backups, plus I'm assuming you'd be installing and downloading other things too.

You'll need to have an internet connection (obvious) to upload to the FTP.. 56k might be cutting it close. The other things I should stress.. You need to have a lot of patience (being able to sit there for hours at a time on just a few textures is not easy) and You'll need to have the time and commitment.

Don't mean to scare anyone but it is the truth. Oh and a pretty big monitor would be ideal because you'll be working with textures larger than your monitor. So I'd advise anyone using a 17" monitor, be weary that it can really hurt your eyes and piss you off with all the scrolling.

Well, I learned how to use Photoshop years ago, so it wouldn't be too hard to reawaken the knowledge. And I have this excellent computer (2gb ram, 512mb graphics, etc, etc) and CS3 (I have no idea where it came from). So I might do a crash course in CS3 and see what I can come up with. Are the original textures just lying in a folder in the game? If so, I'll go digging and see if I can find a couple.

EER · Post by **EER** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 5:56 am

loony636 wrote:Are the original textures just lying in a folder in the game? If so, I'll go digging and see if I can find a couple.

They are in the textures folder packed as UTX files. You can unpack them using unrealed (one by one) or if you're more like me (damn lazy) and want to unpack them in bulk you could use DragonUnpacker: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dragonunpacker
(but there are far more tools: http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/Extraction_tools )

Mr_Cyberpunk · Post by **Mr_Cyberpunk** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 7:13 am

In that case I can help ya.

Snipa, JC12 is a good friend. We should consider letting him in on the project, he does excellent work.

Meanwhile.. JC12 good to have you back

loony636 · Post by **loony636** » Fri Sep 14, 2007 12:17 pm

EER wrote:
loony636 wrote:Are the original textures just lying in a folder in the game? If so, I'll go digging and see if I can find a couple.
They are in the textures folder packed as UTX files. You can unpack them using unrealed (one by one) or if you're more like me (damn lazy) and want to unpack them in bulk you could use DragonUnpacker: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dragonunpacker
(but there are far more tools: http://wiki.xentax.com/index.php/Extraction_tools )

Yeah, I'm in the 'damn lazy' category.

I must say guys, I'm amazed at how active this forum is. The progress indicator is very depressing, but the activity is....reassuring. I'll be glad to help in anyway I can (if I can dust off the old Photoshop knowledge) and I'll have a quick look at some of the textures today.

EDIT: Well I finally got Photoshop to work. If I wanted to have a crack at making a texture, which would be one or two would I want to have a look at?

DaveW · Post by **DaveW** » Sat Sep 15, 2007 10:53 pm

It depends what type of texture package you want to do, really. Just pick anything.