Thursday, September 12, 2013

ForgeLight Tools in Development

I've been playing PlanetSide 2 since the tech test back in July 2012. As a PlanetSide vet I was fortunate to get in on the first wave. I immediately started to poke around in the game assets and wrote an asset unpacker to get all the DDS files to theme my Twitch channel.  I never did much work on the internal formats at that time. Now that Defiance Tools has wrapped up I've decided to go back to PlanetSide 2 and create more extensive tools like what I have done for other projects.

Since PlanetSide 2 uses the ForgeLight engine that will also power Everquest Next I've decided to name the project ForgeLight Tools with the intention of supporting any other games that use the engine.

So, first off I rewrote my .pack file unpacker to be a lot more flexible and work like the other asset extraction tools I've released.

I also created a tool to compare .pack files between different client versions to track changes. I did this for Defiance Tools and it was invaluable when tracking what the developers were doing between client patches.

I'm in the process of creating a tool to extract and convert the .dme to .obj and .mtl files that you can open in Blender. So far this was A LOT easier than Defiance was to figure out. Trion went a bit crazy with bit flags in the formats compared to SoE. I have a 80% automated process of extracting  the position, texture coords, and diffuse textures.

New Conglomerate MAX
As usual I'll release binaries and the source once I get the tools stable enough to release and working with all the assets.         

1 comment: