DescentBB

The graphics patch for Descent 2 was a much bigger and more time-consuming job, but here it is, at least the "fixes only" part. I'm really anxious to do the extension also, but that'll require some adjustments to DLE. So what we have on the table this time:

UUD2TP

- Contains all relevant fixes from the UUD1TP (check that thread for those)
- Remember the spider monitor and how it used the completely wrong breaking animation, and yet another rest frame for when the monitor is shattered? Not any longer. I've added these babies to each of the seven PIG palettes:

and made appropriate changes to descent2.ham that actually link them with the spider monitor texture. Now it breaks just as it should. I'm really dumbfounded that no one actually thought of making this fix in 25 years Note: as of this writing DLE doesn't see these extra textures and doesn't allow you to select them for placement like it does with the other broken monitors. This will hopefully get resolved in the future.

- door50 was a relic of early assets where the texture it was based on - rock281 - was intended to be magenta, rather than red (the traces of which can be seen in the Interactive Demo which has the texture but not the door). In the retail games the texture itself was turned to crimson red, but the door remained - leading to a jarring discrepancy between the appearances of the main texture and the door. While the door was telegraphed thanks to that, every single palette from D2 rendered the magenta lousily and the result was an artifact-ridden mess. I decided to redo all the frames for the door based on fire.pig's rendition of rock281 (which appeared to be the least lossy of them all):

so now the texture isn't distinguishable from the wall texture that serves as its basis.

- door11 had a very similar problem in most palettes - the rock and door textures differed, so I did the same thing - redid the door while using the rock texture as the basis. Now they're identical in each and every palette, though of course their renderings differ.

Also made a change in descent2.ham that shortens the opening and closing animation from the painstaking 1.6s to just 1s, making it appear less sluggish and choppy.

- fixed the following monitors for all 7 palettes:

These variants of the monitors were misaligned as compared to the remaining ones, making them appear to move on the wall while being shot.
- misc060d had to be moved one pixel to the right
- misc061d moved two pixels down
- misc062d also two pixels down
- misc067d one pixel down (this is also the one I've imported the new assets for, read above)
- misc068d had to be moved three pixels down and one to the left
- misc102b had to be moved one pixel down and one to the left
- misc103b - one pixel up.
Now all the animations in both standard and "crisis" mode (after the reactor is blown) align perfectly with their breaking and broken frames.
Here are the downloads, which contain the seven PIG palettes, the modified descent2.ham, a readme and a small HOG mission with which you can test out the changes and observe them for yourself. I'm also providing a version combined with the UUD2SP, since descent2.ham is only one file, and it contains references for both sounds and textures, so the patches in fact need to be unified like this to be used together.
Solo version: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kdq8Lq ... sp=sharing
Combined with the sound patch: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sO1x3J ... sp=sharing

Regarding UUD2TP-X - this time I'm not holding out for your input regarding what should be added (as I've got a very good idea), instead I'm waiting for tool availability to test it. It can be done right now, but DLE will not see them, as mentioned when describing the new broken monitor texture additions. We had 31 bitmaps left to use that the engine will recognize, so after accounting for the spider monitor, 27 are left. Here's what they're gonna be:

- door25 was replaced entirely in Descent 2, the green cobbled one will be brought back with full functionality
- rock262 and 263 were also both replaced, so the green cobble textures are gone from d2. I'll replace rock019 with the light green cobble (it's a perfect duplicate of rock004), and rock263 with the dark green cobble (it's also an identical dupe of the new rock262).
- The four retro D1 door light strips will be brought back - today creating a POG is necessary for having them, and mappers usually replace one of the animated door lights with these, meaning they have to do each frame. A tedious job which will no longer be necessary and perhaps encourage some D2 mappers to use these retro doors
- Same goes for the D1 lava (4 frames) and the thin lava trickle (8 frames) - today replacing other textures is necessary to get them to work, and even if the frame count matches, the total animation speed - not necessarily. These will have entirely new effects created for them, meaning they'll be rendered perfectly like they were in D1.
- rock001 is brought back only because door17 is in all the descent2 PIGs, but it doesn't have a matching wall, which it should.
- rock024, 131 and 144 are universal purple textures that D2 completely lacks, and they render decently in most palettes, so having them readily available might give mappers some new ideas they otherwise perhaps wouldn't have cared to explore.

So yeah, hopefully I get to make that. In the meantime, enjoy the patch with the fixes.

Alright, so I added these extra textures to Groupa.PIG and set up proper events in the HAM. Here's a screenshot from a new editor currently being worked on by ProxyOne, which is able to display these extra textures:



Both types of lava have their exact properties from D1 ported, and work nice. Unfortunately that editor, while already has animated texture previewing, can't save to HOGs yet, so there is no way as of right now to test it in-game. For that reason I'm not yet putting up any new files (have yet to insert those textures to the other HOG palettes anyway). But when the tools are there to use it, it'll be pretty nifty, since you won't need to make POGs to have all these fun textures, and the extra door too.

Is there a new mission editor in the works? This is the first I've heard of it. I would be very interested in hearing more of what ProxyOne is cooking up. I just learned Doom Builder and it is sooo much more optimized. It has been hard to go back to DLE, haha.

This is a great resource! Like you said, I'm surprised it hasn't been tackled sooner. My favorite part is the D1 door lights. I've been having to manually import as I prefer them lol. It's unfortunate DLE doesn't recognize the improvement. Having the textures fixed in game is great, but it inconvenient being unable to build with them. I suppose you could memorize the differences and plan ahead?

worldoffood wrote: ↑Thu Mar 10, 2022 9:57 pm Is there a new mission editor in the works? This is the first I've heard of it. I would be very interested in hearing more of what ProxyOne is cooking up. I just learned Doom Builder and it is sooo much more optimized. It has been hard to go back to DLE, haha.

This is a great resource! Like you said, I'm surprised it hasn't been tackled sooner. My favorite part is the D1 door lights. I've been having to manually import as I prefer them lol. It's unfortunate DLE doesn't recognize the improvement. Having the textures fixed in game is great, but it inconvenient being unable to build with them. I suppose you could memorize the differences and plan ahead?

You can still easily build using these textures as long as you import them, i.e. use POG files. That necessitates replacing other textures temporarily though. It's very rarely a problem, as it can be done on a per-level basis, but it would be much funner to have all these textures readily available - I think I chose some of the most often used ones. Shame we don't have an unlimited number possible to port, in that case we could just port every single one of them and have zero losslessness. But we need to take what we can get.

As for editors - yeah, ProxyOne's apparenly can find these new textures. I'm not building anything at the moment (or probably anytime soon, other commitments at the moment), but I'm not sure if I can just switch to another editor and learn it quickly, been too used to working with DLE.

With the Descent 1 palette things are easier, since we don't have any extra free slots, nor can we create POGs. I think I made a poll in the respective thread regarding which D2 texture would be best to import to D1, since we've got some duplicates - just like in D2.

Ok, some news. Guess I'll add all that stuff after all, even though it will not be readable by DLE for now (and likely revert these textures to defaults upon opening the level), but the new editor Inferno will be able to handle them just fine. But I think before I do that, I'll also be making some improvements to Pumo's palette, like this for example :


The gray parts of the red stripe were lossy, since this texture doesn't exist in D1, so Pumo had to reimport it from one of the other six palettes. But it was very simple to just cut out the richer gray parts from the blue stripe and just paste them into the red one, improving the fidelity of the red stripe texture. I'll try and do the same for the other red stripe texture (the stained one), since the equivalent operation can be done using the stained yellow tape, which did exist in D1. I'd also like to make similar restorations of quality to other D2 textures that didn't exist in D1, but I don't think there are many and it'd be hard to pinpoint them - since Pumo did export whichever textures he could directly from D1 and pasted them into this palette.

Other than that I'll be adding all the extra textures listed in one of the earlier posts, though I think I won't be separating them into an X and "Non-X" version after all. Using Inferno it makes no difference whatsoever even now, and hopefully the function will be coming to DLE soon too.

Ok, finally done with version 1.1!

- Implemented all the changes from UUD1TP up to version 1.5 - basically translated the fixes and tweaks to all seven D2 palettes
- Made additional fixes for some textures that didn't look the best in the D1 palette, including most desert textures and Alien2 ones
- Made all the additions previously advertised as UUD2TP-X. I decided there's no need to keep the versions separate, since the extended version doesn't interfere with any older assets, so it's safe to have it installed anyhow. The exception is that rock144 was cut and rock021 replaced with rock005 because there was 1 texture less room than anticipated, but those can of course be imported as a POG. The most important thing is that you have the D1 doorlights back, as well as fully functional D1 lava & lava trickle and the green door.

The links are still valid - the patch is available both separately and combined with the sound patch. Unfortunately if you want both, you can't have them separately since both make heavy use of Descent2.ham alterations. Still, separate versions are available if you want to experiment with different folders for the installations.

Does this work with D2X Rebirth?

CDN_Merlin wrote: ↑Tue May 30, 2023 6:20 am Does this work with D2X Rebirth?

Does it ever! Rebirth was the main testing environment for it, in fact. It working with vanilla in DOSBox would be a more dubious proposition than it working with Rebirth. Although in the D1 version, maintaining the PIG size was actually necessary to make it work with Rebirth, since it's coded to use file size as evidence of the PIG version for D1. The DOS version of D2 didn't have such a requirement. Anyhow, currently D1 Workshop already contains a function that makes sure the size of the PIG file is preserved, so there are no compatibility issues.

As for D2, Rebirth has no extra requirements like D1 did, so this thing worked there from day one. Only I think it would be best to have a whole separate folder for it, since all the PIG files are replaced, as is descent2.ham. I would have preferred a patcher for the existing files, the distribution would have been much smaller - but I don't know how to do that, so we need to break the EULA and replace the game files.

If you want a patcher, look up a command line utility called xdelta. If you bundle it with some pre-set command line scripts that run through the sequence you can get away with just patching.