The Harvest Moon Consortium

[OldMansBeard]

One of the software tools used to produce CTP Release 1 is now available to all.

CleanModels 3.0 does batch checking and fixing of about forty types of error that we commonly (and not-so-commonly) encountered in tilesets.

If you are a tileset maker, you should be using it. No excuse now, for publishing tilesets with bugs in them !

Brought to you by the CTP as part of its drive to improve the quality of tilesets.

[Bannor Bloodfist]

[quote=OldMansBeard;8443]One of the software tools used to produce CTP Release 1 is now available to all.

CleanModels 3.0 does batch checking and fixing of about forty types of error that we commonly (and not-so-commonly) encountered in tilesets.

If you are a tileset maker, you should be using it. No excuse now, for publishing tilesets with bugs in them !

Brought to you by the CTP as part of its drive to improve the quality of tilesets.[/quote]

People, this tool is a godsend creted by our resident miracle worker OldMansBeard.

If you are merging tilesets, and want to make sure that the tiles themselves are bug free, then run them through this nifty and easy to use utility. Be aware that it can't fix everything, but it can sure save a serios tileset developer loads of debug time.

What is can not fix, it tells you about, in an easy to read log file, and if you pay close enough attention, it tells you the polygon(mesh) to fix if the tool can not fix it all on it's own.

Absolutely fantastic utility that is saving us a huge amount of manual labor here. I highly recommend it's use against ANY tileset out there to help assure as few bugs as possible remain to be manually done.

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

Would it work on placeables to correct shadow faults with those? Has anyone tried it?

[Bannor Bloodfist]

[quote=Tiberius_Morguhn;8449]Would it work on placeables to correct shadow faults with those? Has anyone tried it?[/quote]


Well, it is designed around tiles and their specific properties. Like 1,000 wide etc. But, it wouldn't hurt to try it out on a placeable, just make sure your output dir is different from input and even if it doesn't work, you would be in no worse shape.

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

I played around with it on my first tileset (the really nice Icewind Dale looking set) and hit a Prolog error of an undefined procedure after the first tile:

CleanModels 3.0 Beta 1.0 Fri Oct 13 00:02:41 2006
Input Directory: d:/neverwinternights/nwn/cleanmodels_3.0_beta_1.0_release/input
Output Directory: d:/neverwinternights/nwn/cleanmodels_3.0_beta_1.0_release/output
Files: *.mdl
Snap: decimal
Shadow: default
Repivot: all
Allow Split: yes
Min. Size: 4
Smoothing Groups: use
Split First: concave
Force non-black nodes to ambient/diffuse 1 1 1: no

Edge Tiles Loaded

ct1_a01_01.mdl loaded.
resetting all orientations to zero in ct1_a01_01
applying decimal snap to node positions and trimesh vertices
out of range tvert(s) in face(s) of wm set to zero
vertices welded in tree01
vertices welded in tree02
vertices welded in tree03
vertices welded in tree04
vertices welded in tree05
vertices welded in tree06
vertices welded in tree07
vertices welded in tree08
vertices welded in wm
vertices welded in grass
vertices welded in grass01
tverts welded in tree01
tverts welded in tree02
tverts welded in tree03
tverts welded in tree04
tverts welded in tree05
tverts welded in tree06
tverts welded in tree07
tverts welded in tree08
tverts welded in grass
tverts welded in grass01
repivoted forest by [1.5800000, 1.7000000, 0.0000000]
repivoted krona00 by [-0.2444444, -0.5588889, 4.0000000]
No pivot shift needed for dirt
ERROR: Prolog initialisation failed:
ERROR: check_for/3: Undefined procedure: / change_aabb_material 2

[Bannor Bloodfist]

Hmmm... give OMB a link to the tileset so he can check it out.

We found several errors like that during development, and he adjusted the program to handle most of them.

The program can NOT read compiled tiles, they have to be ascii models.

It also has problems occasionaly with some of the earlier created sets, those that were created before nwmax. It handles most of them though, and fixes their problems.

Anyway, give us a vault link to the set in question and we will take a look.

[OldMansBeard]

[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn;8451]I played around with it on my first tileset (the really nice Icewind Dale looking set) and hit a Prolog error of an undefined procedure after the first tile:

ERROR: Prolog initialisation failed:
ERROR: check_for/3: Undefined procedure: / change_aabb_material 2[/QUOTE]

Drat. It's a surgical swab in the program. It doesn't mean there is necessarily anything wrong with your tile.

I've uploaded Beta 1.1 - try that one instead.

[Sharona Curves]

i am going to try this on a particularly buggy tileset. tileset name withheld to protect the innocent and guilty. i am curious to see what this does and if it can actually repair this tileset for me. i have zero experience working with tilesets and any tool that can help would be great. there are sooooooo many good tilesets at the vault and yet most of them are so buggy that they are unusable in their current state.

[Tiberius_Morguhn]

[QUOTE=OldMansBeard;8455]Drat. It's a surgical swab in the program. It doesn't mean there is necessarily anything wrong with your tile.

I've uploaded Beta 1.1 - try that one instead.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the quick update - that did the trick.

I just got thru cleaning this tileset : http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Hakpaks.Detail&id=6417

Took about 4 minutes, and it did export all but 3 tiles. Time to re-hak and check the fixed work out.

Oh, and there is one small/minute bug - if the tile models are in uppercase or mixed case, the tool converts the filenames to all lower case. There is no problem per se in that, but the NWN hak utility is brain dead so that when you try to add the fixed tiles back to the hak, it keeps the upper/mixed cases mdls and also adds the lower case ones as though they were different! May be good to fix the tool to keep the input and output filename case names the same? Thanks again!

[Bannor Bloodfist]

[quote=Tiberius_Morguhn;8465]Thanks for the quick update - that did the trick.

I just got thru cleaning this tileset : http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Ha ... il&id=6417

Took about 4 minutes, and it did export all but 3 tiles. Time to re-hak and check the fixed work out.

Oh, and there is one small/minute bug - if the tile models are in uppercase or mixed case, the tool converts the filenames to all lower case. There is no problem per se in that, but the NWN hak utility is brain dead so that when you try to add the fixed tiles back to the hak, it keeps the upper/mixed cases mdls and also adds the lower case ones as though they were different! May be good to fix the tool to keep the input and output filename case names the same? Thanks again![/quote]

Actually NO. Mixed case is BAD NEWS. We originally had it that way, and ran into the problem you are seeing in the haks.

This is one of those human attention required things. When you go to hak, you have to remove all the uppercase stuff.

Why? Different tools handle things differently according to the case of the text. Converting all to lower case eliminates possible problems.

If your case, copy the original files into a directory, copy the new fixed files into same directory, manually eliminate dupes, and THEN rehak. Start with a clean hak and handle all files when doing this.

Believe me, I feel your pain with this, but we found that forcing the lower case caused us the least amount of pain in the long run.

Big advantage is, once converted to lower case, you never have to worry about it again. NWMax, Gmax, 3dsmax, the compiler, nwhak, ALL handle it fine. It's when you have the mixed case that you have the issues.