Grim Fandango Deluxe - Original Thread [Locked]

[JohnnyWalker2001]

DUDE this looks EPIC!

Great Project.

Are you planning to remaster every single texture from the game? And are you also planning to add higher detailed models which have more polygons?

Thanks, Fischkopf! I'm not planning on redoing every single texture because a lot of the textures are seen as such a distance that you wouldn't be able to see any extra detail.

However for the images that you can see a difference in, I do plan to make higher resolution versions.

It would also be great to up the polygon count on characters, but there are technical issues that need to be solved before we can get there.

[mogul]

Ah yes, that's good to know. I'm not fully au fait with how the game's engine works, but I don't suppose those occlusion areas are stored as images that work as masks? That would obviously be very easy for me to then smooth the edges/plug the few gaps.

Of course your description of a "per-pixel z-buffer" makes me think it's done in a more complicated way

(I guess somaen and company will be aware of how this works?)

It's one 16-bit depth value per-pixel, stored in a separate file corresponding to each background, and some for particularly complicated 2D "costume" bitmap elements. For Escape From Monkey Island, they were quantized down into masks as you suggested, but the naive approach in GF means that you'd have to deal with this.

(I'm betting that you could probably efficiently create a mask channel or stencils on the fly using a shader with the z-buffer as input on modern GPUs.)

[JohnnyWalker2001]

Great! Thanks a lot for these insights, mogul. They're extremely appreciated.

[JohnnyWalker2001]

Things are really coming along nicely. I thought I'd make a list of the things that would really help right now.

A tool that can change the texture co-ordinates in a given .3do file so it takes a texture 4x the size. (As soon as we have a way of doing this, I could, in theory start distributing new textures.)

For the polygon improvements:

Finishing somean's binary .3do to text .3do/.obj.

An .obj to .3do converter.

[somaen]

First one should be trivial from what I remember about the quick-fix we did, second one, do you need it to obj, or does text-3dos work?

[JohnnyWalker2001]

First one should be trivial from what I remember about the quick-fix we did, second one, do you need it to obj, or does text-3dos work?

I'm still getting to grips with 3D but I think just converting to text .3do should work. There's tools for converting those files and, providing they work as expected, we should be ok with that.

We'll still need a way to convert them back, however.

[Jon N/A]

Great project! Looking forward to it!
And specially its derivetives (You know, Like, Making the game fully 3D, Not only 2.5D and remodeling/retexturizing the whole game in order to make the game look like the actual concept-arts and , Etc ...)

I wonder why didn't you ask the Grim Fandango Network at Mojo to host the site ThunderPeel?

[JohnnyWalker2001]

Great project! Looking forward to it!
And specially it's derivetives (You know, Like, Making the game fully 3D, Not only 2.5D and remoddling/retexturizing the whole game in order to make the game look like the actuall concept-arts and , Etc ...)

I wonder why didn't you ask the Grim Fandango Network at Mojo to host the site ThunderPeel?[/url]

Glad you like the project, Jon. I will probably work something out with the GFN at some point, but we're still in early days here.

[Jon N/A]

Maybe I can help you in the future.

I'm learning Google ScetchUp right now, So maybe I can help if you decided to make the game fully 3D.
Then I can probably be of some help to make the Backgrounds in 3D models.
I'd be glad to do so

[JohnnyWalker2001]

Maybe I can help you in the future.

I'm learning Google ScetchUp right now, So maybe I can help if you descided to make the game fully 3D.
Then I can probabley be of some help to make the Backgrounds in 3D models.
I'd be glad to do so

Thanks, Jon. I don't think there are any plans to remake the game in full 3D at the moment, though.

[somaen]

What would full 3D add? There is no camera-control on that level in the scripts (as far as I know, but really, why would there be?), and thus little to add, apart from a way to rerender the rooms out-of-engine.

One thing you should be aware of, is that things like Glottis coming out of his little hut in the garage, are movies, that seem to fade directly into a rendered Glottis (with a fade-time of 0 secs ), so, any drastic departures in polycount/textures, would mean either reanimating all the movies, or, avoiding too much change.

As for the conversion-stuff, does the current 3DO-converter produce text-3dos that work in ResidualVM and the tools? Is the OBJ-conversion actually usefull?

Otherwise, I guess I could make a mode to transplant an OBJ into a 3DO-file, to keep all the animation-data untouched (which we really dont want to change at the moment anyways).

If what you have works, then upping the resolution is just a matter of a one-line change in the converter. Drop by IRC if you need any help.

[JohnnyWalker2001]

As for the conversion-stuff, does the current 3DO-converter produce text-3dos that work in ResidualVM and the tools? Is the OBJ-conversion actually usefull?

There's still some issues with the text 3dos that have been created. I converted every .3do file in the game and ran it in ResidualVM. All the models seemed to appear correctly, but Manny wouldn't "look" in the right direction. His head was always point off screen whenever he saw an object he could interact with. It was very strange.

I can try again if you think it's not related to your converter?

Otherwise, I guess I could make a mode to transplant an OBJ into a 3DO-file, to keep all the animation-data untouched (which we really dont want to change at the moment anyways).

That sounds great! I don't think there's any plans to change the animation, is there?

If what you have works, then upping the resolution is just a matter of a one-line change in the converter. Drop by IRC if you need any help.

That's wonderful news! I'll be in IRC when I have some time (travelling back home today).

Thanks a lot!

[Jon N/A]

What would full 3D add? There is no camera-control on that level in the scripts (as far as I know, but really, why would there be?), and thus little to add, apart from a way to re-render the rooms out-of-engine.

Lots of things!
We can make the game more dynamic by adding camera control animations a la TellTale's ToMI.
We can lighting effects to make the noir setting the glory it should have.

Even if it's not affordable/too-much-time-consuming to make a full 3D game, The 3d background models can at least be used to re-render the backgrounds with more detailed textures rather than just stretching them or re-painting them.

Personally, I'd like to recreate the whole game in a better engine!, But that just an arguably silly ODC-filled dream of mine ..

[somaen]

Ah, lightning might have some benefits, dynamic camera control however, I'm not so sure about, that would mean reframing to make sure ALL puzzles work, and still make sense...

The game is designed around the locked-camera-2.5D system, which would mean that moving it out of that paradigm, would be A LOT of work. (And, it would require changes to ResidualVM itself, which should be avoided (atleast until ResidualVM can run Grim Fandango original ~100% correctly ).

EDIT:
JohnnyWalker2001: Animations shouldn't need changing as long as you don't do any radical changes to the meshes. (And, I think I might have missed a thing or two in reading the animdata, judging from your results). The main point was that transplanting the data back, would mean completely untouched hierarchy-data, which should ensure that the animations work. (And, allow for a little more lawyer-proofedness on the distribution too, by actually letting it be a patch to the files )

[Jon N/A]

@somaen;
I think you missed another thing I said in my post, About using the 3Dfied BG's Models to rerender the backgrounds for the current 2.5D system.
IMO, Streaching the BGs make the game look ugly.