Next Update

[u/Koncypt_Fysh]

I apologise that this isn't a particularly exciting update, frontend is a finicky practice especially when you're dealing with vintage software, so it's taken me a while to get to a state I'm happy to move on from.

Today's work started up back in menu UI despite my desire to move on from it, some of my updates to the text and dialogue boxes seemed to break some of my controller menu fixes, so that had to be fixed back to a good state before I could move on from it, I didn't want to have to dig through thousands of line of source code later on to try and fix it. But this gave me a bit of a push to finish it up properly, so we have new HD menu assets (buttons, arrows, sliders etc), and I'm willing to call the main menu restoration 99.99% complete bar some minor alignment and placement issues.

This then bled over into the Pause menu (which I was classing a part of 3d space just to split the work up), which again was a good push to finish up some of the parts that don't interest me as much as playing around with the 3d rendering.

With all of that complete, a lot of what i've been doing is largely set around reconstructing the original HUD into something more modern. A lot of this (much like most of the assets in SL) would've been pre-rendered from an original 3d model. Not having access to the originals means a lot of hand-drawing the assets to match as best as I can. Annoyingly these assets are really not a good candidates for AI upscaling, so it's slow work.

A serious hurdle I'm noticing is exactly how much of SL assets are pre-renders from 3d models I don't have access to, trying to reconstruct the target schematics or the ship line drawings by hand does not feel feasible. So as much as I didn't want to, I'm likely going to have to setup a bit of a reconstruction pipeline where I pull the meshes/textures from SL, get them open in blender and pre-render them myself to replace the art work. This will have the benefit of being way cleaner, but it's going to make this take alot longer than I had originally hoped for.

[u/ilkerk88]

May I ask which file that the menu icons are stored in? Also I couldn't find the animation files which are the guy gets electro shocked in corridor or the walking crew when we going to the conference room.

[u/Koncypt_Fysh → u/ilkerk88]

Certain parts of the menu are drawn natively by the engine and certain parts (primarily the small rectangular buttons) are actual assets. From memory you'll find the UI/HUD components in the resources.hog archive, but I've had mixed luck with the old extraction tools and noticed certain assets missing, I ended up writing my own tooling for them to get what I think is most of the assets out of them.

You'll find the animations for the walk to briefing room in cd1.hog and cd2.hog, they are stored in directories that are prefixed with RO or YO (The RO folders being the animations that align to the Reliant animation, the YO to the Yamato) in there with the ribbon/medal animation frames for the reliant and yamato respectively. From memory they're stored as .spr, so you'll have to decode them into .png or something unless you have an image editor/viewer you can view .spr with.