swordedit: An Update

Halo modding and gaming related applications.
sword
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by sword » Wed Jan 13, 2010 11:12 pm

Samuco wrote:College is still three years away for me. I am also about to head back to high school, so I won't have much time either. I don't mind editing small parts of the code or GUI, but I also have to fit time for school and my other software projects. The duplicate button also doesn't seem to work. Simple fix though :)

-Sharpy
Hahaha, I know what you mean there. I started doing this stuff when I was 14 and I must say that I believe the whole self taught comp sci thing really helped get me into college. Certainly you will be one of a small number of well experienced students once you get to college. Well, I don't know about student bodies at schools like MIT, CalTech, or Stanford, but what I just claimed certainly applies to the ivy league. When I visited MIT and brought up the different comp sci stuff I had done the people I talked to were really amazed - very few kids do anything like us. I've only met one other freshmen so far who is anywhere near me, and even he hasn't done any reverse engineering (but he is one of the top ranked for rubks cube completion in the world, something like 3rd in the world for doing them with his feet and one of the top for doing them blindfolded). By the way, nil, modzy, I don't know what your plans are or where you are in life right now but I can say that colleges LOVE kids who teach themselves things to a high proficiency, and I believe especially love kids who can say that they have reverse engineered something. It has that sort of genius-nerdy cool to it that so few people can claim. Plus, at least at columbia, you can opt out of taking the ridiculous into courses and jump straight into something like datastructures and algorithms or classes beyond that just by talking to professors and displaying a good knowledge of the course content.

I must say that wish I started programming earlier, but I was hoping that my high school would actually have a comp sci class that would teach me what I wanted. They ended up canceling the class due to a lack of interest. So, I just decided to teach myself. But then I got pissed off at the teach yourself java book I was using for not teaching me anything that I thought was useful and so I started just looking over other people's code to see how programs worked. That meant that along with cobbling together what programming meant and entailed I was learning other people's, shall I say, odd coding styles. This really made things bad when I learned obj-c from bobindashadow's sparkedit port and not from proper resources. I would only look up very specific material that the project required for it to work (hence the magic numbers for offsetting selection rather than translating click coordinates - I had no clue what the error was coming from and didn't spend the time in the beginning to learn about views). Almost all of the GUI stuff and all of the opengl related code and most of the bsp and model parsing code is what I took from bobindashadow's project and, needless to say, there's a lot that could have been improved upon that I just didn't care to learn.

So yeah, I want to make swordedit actually work. That would be cool. After that I still want to make giant robots a la gundam, but I'm going to take things one step at a time.
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Altimit01
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Altimit01 » Wed Jan 13, 2010 11:20 pm

sword wrote:By the way, nil, modzy, I don't know what your plans are or where you are in life right now but I can say that colleges LOVE kids who teach themselves things to a high proficiency, and I believe especially love kids who can say that they have reverse engineered something.
alt is left out... :(
sword wrote:After that I still want to make giant robots a la gundam, but I'm going to take things one step at a time.
bad sword, stop stealing my hobbies.

Also I've been sort-of working on a C++ library for map file stuff. And by sort-of I mean started writing it nicely and then had to cut corners to meet a few deadlines. Not much in there worth keeping and will probably start over with it since it's not that far along. If anyone feels like getting a proper project going I'd be willing to share info, source and offer advice.
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sword
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by sword » Wed Jan 13, 2010 11:27 pm

Altimit01 wrote:
sword wrote:By the way, nil, modzy, I don't know what your plans are or where you are in life right now but I can say that colleges LOVE kids who teach themselves things to a high proficiency, and I believe especially love kids who can say that they have reverse engineered something.
alt is left out... :(
You, sir, are already in college :P
Almit01 wrote:
sword wrote:After that I still want to make giant robots a la gundam, but I'm going to take things one step at a time.
bad sword, stop stealing my hobbies.
no srsly, I'm going to try and start building small robots in my dorm with a few of the engineering kids.
Almit01 wrote: Also I've been sort-of working on a C++ library for map file stuff. And by sort-of I mean started writing it nicely and then had to cut corners to meet a few deadlines. Not much in there worth keeping and will probably start over with it since it's not that far along. If anyone feels like getting a proper project going I'd be willing to share info, source and offer advice.
It would be an awesome excuse to learn C++ this time around rather than do it in obj-c which no one uses (even though I don't think too many people play halo ce anymore lololol)
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Modzy
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Modzy » Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:35 am

Altimit01 wrote:Also I've been sort-of working on a C++ library for map file stuff. And by sort-of I mean started writing it nicely and then had to cut corners to meet a few deadlines. Not much in there worth keeping and will probably start over with it since it's not that far along. If anyone feels like getting a proper project going I'd be willing to share info, source and offer advice.
I've nearly finished a complete set of classes for RB that will handle pretty much anything Halo-related, and make it very easy to create new applications using the classes. It even allows for stuff like decompiling maps. Since that project is pretty much done and almost ready to be open sourced, I've also started working on an Objective-C port of it, hopefully will also end up open source. Perhaps when I get the Obj-C stuff closer to something usable, we can see about combining your library and mine and see what we get.

I was thinking about dipping into swordedit's territory with a SCNR editor, too. Using these new chunks of code I've been cooking up. As with the rest of it, I intend to make it open source as well.

Any help is very much appreciated. I desperately need help with reverse engineering every tag and having full documentation on them. I can handle the big classes(COLL, SCNR, SBSP etc.), but the grunt work of a lot of the other classes I'd rather leave to, in your words, Alt, "plugin monkeys."

Smythe
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Smythe » Thu Jan 14, 2010 2:47 am

Hehe Monkeys...

Excellent work Modzy the hierarchs will be pleased. this can only be a step forward in modding.
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Dirk Gently
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Dirk Gently » Thu Jan 14, 2010 6:10 am

lol, nil is already in college, and so am I. Both of us self-taught comp-sci material as well. I know that I am benefitting greatly from this prior knowledge and experience.

sword
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by sword » Thu Jan 14, 2010 8:50 am

Dirk Gently wrote:lol, nil is already in college, and so am I. Both of us self-taught comp-sci material as well. I know that I am benefitting greatly from this prior knowledge and experience.
I made the mistake of taking a comp sci class that, thought it was above introductory level, was well below what I wanted to take. I should have started with datastructures and algorithms. Then again, starting with datastructures means that I had to take discreet mathematics as a co-req and neither of these classes fit into my schedule either last semester or this semester. So yeah.
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Dirk Gently
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Dirk Gently » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:22 am

call me crazy, but wouldn't saving the map to a new file eliminate the problem of having it become unreadable after 1 save? We know how to write maps, so why not just have it write a new one when you save it? In the early stages of this program when I last used it seriously, I found it to be a bit unstable, but it seems to be fine now. Wouldn't eliminating the need to overwrite an existing map remove the saving problem?

@sword, yeah I wish I could have done that, learning how to use variables in C++ is quite boring when you write code that deals with NSMutableArrays that are hundreds of objects large.

sword
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by sword » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:26 am

Better yet, just have swordedit do what hexedit and some other programs do and copy the original file upon save and store it as something like bloodgulch.map~ or bloodgulch.map.original

I don't know yet what the problem with saving is, but I do remember that my cobbled together chunk cloning code for the scenario wasn't too good. It would *almost* work, but after a while problems would start popping up since I was still using bob's original scenario class structure. That class in particular needs to be rebuilt.
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Sparky
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Sparky » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:36 am

I'm now almost out of college... finally, and will have a masters degree. Foundations are very nice when you have them.

But anyway, since we're sharing our project ideas, I'm in the process of developing an online tag-sharing system. It's really a breeze to create, but I'm still brushing up on my programming skills, things I'm sure all you guys would consider elementary. It will basically be an online catalogue of halo tags that Eschaton can use, where you can add your own new tags with ease. A tag database at HDM.

After that, I should make an online gametype creator, where you make your own gametypes on a web page and the server automatically generates the file for you to download. Such an online app would be unnecessary if you want to use Taxi's Gametype Creator, or decide to make your own separate application on your own.

Which brings me finally to a Halo application patcher... but you guys will probably beat me to that one.
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Dirk Gently
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Dirk Gently » Thu Jan 14, 2010 9:44 am

I am currently attempting a run through of a set of saved maps from swordedit through a patcher program I wrote a little while ago. I will hopefully be able to say what the problem is after this is done.

Dirk Gently
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Dirk Gently » Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:26 pm

I must be doing something wrong. I can do multiple saves and it is working fine in my version of halo.

Altimit01
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Altimit01 » Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:27 pm

Re: chunk cloning. I know some of you guys would disagree with me on this since it's slower but I've found that disassociating tags from the map and recompiling makes it much simpler to work with.

As for collab work, as nice as Obj-C is (or not depending on POV) I'm leaning towards C++ and QT to keep things portable. One thing that has bugged me for awhile has been the composite map structure. It'd be nice to be able to move to a tag based paradigm possibly using proto-map objects that would act like project files. Yes I know, I've been living in a an OO world for too long.

So who feels like actually putting together some place for us to properly trade ideas and code? And who would actually be active? I've got a handful of OGL C/C++ functions that render mod2 files that I've been meaning to write and wouldn't mind having a good place to share it.
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Dirk Gently
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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Dirk Gently » Thu Jan 14, 2010 12:48 pm

I am more fluent in Objective-C than in C or C++ but I think I can manage. Would be nice to be able to work together on this and get something done with it than just throwing stuff back and forth between semi-interested parties. First thing I am going to need some a map that was broken in swordedit.

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Re: swordedit: An Update

Post by Amy » Thu Jan 14, 2010 1:43 pm

Moxus said that if you duplicate too much in swordedit, you can't import anymore tags. Is that true?
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