Zelda Windwaker Textures Yay or Nay ?!
polycounter lvl 18
i started playing windwaker with that dolphin emulator a while back.
its just one of those games i am nostalgicly in love with. i played it many times on the gamecube in lowres and shitty quality on a lowdef tv and was always amazed at the look of a lot of the textures facial expressions and fx but because of the poor image quality could never quite tell how it was done. that is actually something that happend to me a lot with the last console generation i saw something amazing and had to know how its done and desperately wanted to take a closer look but the tv quality just wouldnt do.
when i installed the dolphine emulator ( i still have my gamecube copy of the game and a wii and a gamecube controller and mmemory card to boot so its all legit !) and fiddled with the gfx settings to make it run run properly i noticed that there are a whole bunch of debug options like wireframe vertex/pixel light freecam and ... "dump textures" 0_0 i couldnt resist and had to try all of this. seeing how well all of it worked i immediately thought i am gonna disecct the fuck out of this game and look at every pixel nook and cranny. i already learend alot of interesting stuff about the game for example:
-the water is actually attached to link and always moves with you (except vertical)
-the cloth strips hanging from the pig/boar enemys weapons are not done with precomputed physics its all dynamic ( why dont modern games have cloth simulation that good ? *mindblown* )
-the stars in the sky are not done with a skybox or texture but are just a bunch of additive quads rotating on top of each other.
-the facial expressions are all done with floating alpha planes for eyes and eyebrows (that also draw in front of the hair shader) but not the mouth that is an opaque texture on the actual model (not floating) for some reason.
-there are both geometry and sprite waves at different weathers.
the textures dumping is a bit weird its not storing the textures with its original name instead it gives every textures that gets loaded a random name and drops it into a folder so every texture that gets used multiple times in the game will get dumped multiple times also you can never be sure you dumped all the textures unless you actually went into absolutely every 3d scene in the game.
that is kind of what i am doing right now trying to 100% complete the game get every treasure chart make every easter-egg happen etc to get a all the textures dumped.
that is quite a lot of work and than sweeping through the textures an deleting all the duplicates is super tedious too.
now this is something i wished someone had already done so that i could just download a big package and look at the textures but right than and there one steps into a legal gray area. obviously looking at textures cant be illegal technically you are also looking at the textures inside your legally purchased game. but uploading this and offering it for download somewhere is pretty shady. so my question to you is:
A) are you as interested in looking at this stuff and researching it as much as i am ... or at all ?
would you want to have this texture collection once i am done dumping them ?
C) do you think its okay if i share/upload them somewhere ?
i am really conflicted about this! on one hand the textures are really small and couldnt really be "used" for anything but research but if somebody misused them anyway somehow than i would feel horrible that i had a hand in it.
its just one of those games i am nostalgicly in love with. i played it many times on the gamecube in lowres and shitty quality on a lowdef tv and was always amazed at the look of a lot of the textures facial expressions and fx but because of the poor image quality could never quite tell how it was done. that is actually something that happend to me a lot with the last console generation i saw something amazing and had to know how its done and desperately wanted to take a closer look but the tv quality just wouldnt do.
when i installed the dolphine emulator ( i still have my gamecube copy of the game and a wii and a gamecube controller and mmemory card to boot so its all legit !) and fiddled with the gfx settings to make it run run properly i noticed that there are a whole bunch of debug options like wireframe vertex/pixel light freecam and ... "dump textures" 0_0 i couldnt resist and had to try all of this. seeing how well all of it worked i immediately thought i am gonna disecct the fuck out of this game and look at every pixel nook and cranny. i already learend alot of interesting stuff about the game for example:
-the water is actually attached to link and always moves with you (except vertical)
-the cloth strips hanging from the pig/boar enemys weapons are not done with precomputed physics its all dynamic ( why dont modern games have cloth simulation that good ? *mindblown* )
-the stars in the sky are not done with a skybox or texture but are just a bunch of additive quads rotating on top of each other.
-the facial expressions are all done with floating alpha planes for eyes and eyebrows (that also draw in front of the hair shader) but not the mouth that is an opaque texture on the actual model (not floating) for some reason.
-there are both geometry and sprite waves at different weathers.
the textures dumping is a bit weird its not storing the textures with its original name instead it gives every textures that gets loaded a random name and drops it into a folder so every texture that gets used multiple times in the game will get dumped multiple times also you can never be sure you dumped all the textures unless you actually went into absolutely every 3d scene in the game.
that is kind of what i am doing right now trying to 100% complete the game get every treasure chart make every easter-egg happen etc to get a all the textures dumped.
that is quite a lot of work and than sweeping through the textures an deleting all the duplicates is super tedious too.
now this is something i wished someone had already done so that i could just download a big package and look at the textures but right than and there one steps into a legal gray area. obviously looking at textures cant be illegal technically you are also looking at the textures inside your legally purchased game. but uploading this and offering it for download somewhere is pretty shady. so my question to you is:
A) are you as interested in looking at this stuff and researching it as much as i am ... or at all ?
would you want to have this texture collection once i am done dumping them ?C) do you think its okay if i share/upload them somewhere ?
i am really conflicted about this! on one hand the textures are really small and couldnt really be "used" for anything but research but if somebody misused them anyway somehow than i would feel horrible that i had a hand in it.
Replies
As for the shared collection, yeah, that is super shady. Fortunately it's a older game so I dunno how likely it would be anyone would go after you aggressively for it. Even with the honest educational intentions, I still wouldn't post any links publicly here.
Always interesting to read this stuff, and I'd love a peek at the textures as well..
I might do this too for skyward sword, I recently have been playing it though Dolphin(my wii took a dump on me and all games played I ripped my self using a friends modded wii) and had no idea you could do this
and i mean relentless in a legal way. even though it is a old game, i wouldnt risk it in your place.
better keep it to yourself, or share it only with people you realy trust.
that is what i am doing right now luckily png have deterministic loss-less compression so all the textures with the same dimensions dont end up being exactly the same file-size but duplicates do.
the dolphin directx9 plugin dumps pngs while the opengl mode only extracts tga that was a bit of pain in the ass because i moved the whole operation to a windows 7 machine with directx11 and the dx 9 dlls werent working
i really didnt want to mix pngs and tgas or replay the game from the beginning ( i just beat the earth temple )
so i downloaded a bunch of shady dlls and installed them and it works again so the work continues.
now that i think about it i could have just batch converted the tgas in the end and the would have sorted in just fine.
@Xenobond does visipics find/select the images based on actual image color comparison or based on file-size ?!
some new nuggets of info that i found interesting:
-the sharp edged lighting around lanterns and fireflies doesnt seam to come from dynamic lightsources i saw more than 8 of them resting next to each other on one object and without deffered lighting/rendering this shouldnt be possible with standard tnl point light sources ... so i am suspecting a geometry sphere and some stencil buffer magic
-some of the static shadows in the game are done with deliberate cuts in the geometry+vertex colors while others are done with the same texture in 2 different levels of brightness stored in the same bitmap and than uv mapped appropriately where its needed to be dark ... why not use vert colors everywhere? i have no idea.
-when you stare into the sun all opaque geometry becomes darker ... fake hdr tonemapping ... never noticed that on the gamecube
-the dynamic shadow that link casts sometimes is split/ interrupted when you cast it onto an edge on the terrain below and it looks like the shadow is floating as if they dynamically generate floating decals per poly where ever it falls moved outwards the normals a bit. should look at that again in wireframe.
-there seems to be no occlusion in the game.indoor and outdoor scenes are always separated into their own scenes
and obviously never draw simultaneously but nothing ever disappears behind a building or large rock in the game.
-sometimes when link walks through a door in a dungeon that has a different ambient color and light setup link maintains the light of the prior room for a second before the ambient color fades over and the cell shading direction "rotates" to the new direction this + the fact that the vertexlight/pixel lighting options in dolphin dont do anything makes me believe that the shading is done entirely in the shader and not with light sources.
I'm kind of ambivalent about posting some of the raw content. On one hand I would like to see it so I can learn from it, but on the other hand I don't want to see it recycled. Maybe posting some break-down shots or textures with watermarks?
by image color comparison
http://www.visipics.info
I use it a bunch when I'm cleaning up reference folders and image dumps. USed to use it when dumping textures from the N64, too.
thanks man this saved me alot of hours of work
What the big guy said. I want to see a release of this if possible. I have all the Zelda Twilight princess Models+source textures and it gave a big insight on how they did some things (and left alot of room for question on others) I always love to see how jap' devs go about making some of there games.
I specially like the way they did the eye animations, just by having decal placements.
One other game that got me impressed was Final Fantasy Chrystal Chronicles, you should take a look at that one too!
i think having worked on an admittedly shit game that used similar process on the wii it would be for production reasons as well as artistic:
-its a great way to be able to change a scenes colour scheme as all the uvs are setup... you just have to make small changes to the texture to see map wide changes relatively instantly
-also you can change the blend between the colours by adding more pixels to sharpen the line and add subtle shift in tone between the UVed colour swatches to add to the look
Also remember that a bunch of artists were working on these over time, so perhaps early in production they did it one way, and later on they found the other way was more efficient on it's platform, or some of the artists just tackled the problem differently.
Or, in a poly-heavy scene, I'm sure a larger image would be better than all the cuts for VC, and in a texture-heavy scene, a few extra polygons wouldn't hurt.
Bang it up on a torrent, then just post the name of it and the site its on, I would advice against posting links, I don't think PC needs Nintendos attention.
Environment is traditional stuff of tiling your textures either via a single blend mask or separate mesh put ontop of another things, and reused down the line, much cheaper then most other options.
Also of Vertex Colors are also stored for shadows and such.
Sometimes, if they needed a specific 'look' in a certain section of the game, a couple of extra planes with Vertex or Textures was what they put up, not intricate full fledged unique textures or model even, just a simple copy work from other assets.
Environmental assets was also old school a la Doom3 style, either bones of blends where used for animation, so no Vertex Offsetting expect for a few very specific things.
It's not that hard to get your hands on a couple of modding tools and take a look at the artwork or rig-up your emulator to Wireframe mode a scene, just be prepared to see alot of 'misc' stuff, that might not make sense on why they exist until much later.
Yes granted you will loose some 1kb textures in the process. Guess you could copy every texture that's higher then 1kb in file size and then run visipics on the 1kb files to remove duplicates and manually go trough them all to find the rest of the textures.
I tried the first one and found 222 textures. And it seems that the texture dump does not duplicate textures, so visipics might be unnecessary to use (except if you are gonna to the above thing and remove the duplicate of the rest of the stuff).
Don't know if this link will work, don't know how to share folders in dropbox, it's the 222 textures I found, something to share at least. https://www.dropbox.com/home/Public/Zelda%20-%20Wind%20Waker (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/9876544/Zelda%20-%20Wind%20Waker/Zelda%20-%20Wind%20Waker.rar <- zipfile with all the new 1163(Should be no duplicates(old 1633textures.)))
(after visi cleanup + played half way through the game ... a ton of simple gui stuff ... but no duplicates as far as i can tell)
that makes a lot of sense to me
just realised are these probably areas where day/night shift happens... so they probably either (cant remember if it blends or does it while your not there) loads different textures or has two loaded and lerps between