Rendition card

[sharangad]

Ok, this is live on the Microsoft Store now. Once the app updates from the Store, running dosbox and dosbox-staging through the launcher should update the installation.

[sharkticonnz]

Has there been any progress on getting all tracks working on this?

[sharangad]

Not yet. I have a lot to do at the moment,

like the upcoming windowed mode:

https://youtu.be/B-mqRt-XSlU

The track issue is a limitation of the Rendition version of the game. The game will probably have to be patched to support all tracks/carsets.

[sharangad]

Frame generation at 60 fps, better capture with ShadowPlay, the frame rate does dip below 60 fps with it at time:
https://youtu.be/PVKElUBSDL8

The intermediate frame should be visible in while advancing frame by frame.

[sharangad]

*************************************************
RReady Alpha November 19, 2024 (Fully tested release)
*************************************************
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady.Alp...119.001.7z
MD5: 9f10a82d3bd689044ff1407c019b1931

19 November 2024
-Frame Generation support for select 30 fps DOS apps to run at 60 fps. (interpolate=1 in Rendition.cfg)
-Windowed mode support (this will allow alternate frame generation through "Lossless Scaling" (Steam, not-supplied) when a custom resolution less than the screen is used. Knocking one pixel off the horizontal resolution (i.e. 1919x1080x60 for 1080p) will work without any scaling artifacts in Lossless Scaling.
- Restores generic VESA support for non-Rendition apps in Dosbox-Rendition, such as setup.exe in TR1, for audio config.
-Adds Rendition 32 bit mode VESA support for CGL demo “21s Century Digital Boy.” The CGL 3D sections do not work currently.

It'll be live on the Microsoft store by tomorrow.

[sharangad]

If I just knocked up something to unzip, resize non-compliant textures (separately for carsets and tracks) and then zip up the package again shouldn't that allow automated conversion of Rendition incompatible tracks and carsets?

The texture coordinates should be the same, I think if they're in floating point format (0.0-1.0 range). If they're texel size based then the meshes would have to be converted, but even that I'm guessing should be doable, but with a bit more effort.

[checkpoint10]

Yes, you could make such a tool. If you did, that would be awesome.

The tool should unpack a .DAT file (although some mods keep the files unpacked), resize textures and/or convert .MIP files to .MI4 which generally would also reduce file size. I believe a good strategy for tracks is to convert as many .MIPs to .MI4s as possible to keep the image sizes the same while keeping memory usage down (and to avoid modifying the .3DOs). For carsets, it would have to start with resizing to 128px width, and then maybe convert to .MI4 to further reduce file size.

If we modify .3DOs, the texture coordinates in .3DO files are expressed in absolute u, v coordinates (not 0.0-1.0). So the tool would need to open every .3DO and find all the flavors (i.e. Flavor 2) that relate to textured polygons and then find all the vertices (i.e. Flavor 0) that have a (u, v) for the image, in addition to the (x, y, z) points for the 3d modeling. I assume the tool would only need to modify the (u, v) to the scaled values. The file format should be fairly well documented in this file: https://www.simcyberworld.com/text/bbb/n13do.txt

As for understanding .MIPs and other file formats, I would refer you to documentation from BB&B: https://www.simcyberworld.com/html/bbb/fileinfo.shtml

For .MIPs there is also a thread of me figuring out the format: https://www.icr2.net/forum/showthread.php?tid=1286
This also resulted in a Python script to unpack and pack .DATs and handle .MIPs: https://www.icr2.net/forum/showthread.ph...12#pid9012

I don't know if there is good documentation of .MI4 files but I believe it contains both a 16-color palette and the image data - probably not difficult to figure out. The MIP files rely on the 256-color SUNNY.PCX palette which is unique to each track. Carsets use only the standard game colors from 0-175, as I illustrated on my web site: https://skchow.com/indy/palette/

[sharangad]

Thanks for that. The converter is next on my list.