Announcing Jedi Knight & MotS 3D Preview - Brian @ 2:34 pm

Thanks to a very generous contribution to Massassi by Stephan Reiter, all our Jedi Knight and Mysteries of the Sith level pages now feature a 3D Preview! This lets you poke around the levels in 3D without having to load the game. In fact, you don't even have to have the game installed.

Stephan has made the code open source so anyone can contribute and/or use it on their own. The code can be found here: jkview on Github.

Here's an example of the 3d preview in action: MLP3.

That's really cool

If the textures are seen as purple, what does mean? It's 16-bit?

This is a fantastic feature! I wish the controls were better though. I mean my biggest problem is with the zooming which, as far as I can tell, is the only way to move around the level in the preview. It's painfully slow and laborious, at least on my end. I have another mouse that I don't use where I can unlock the scroll wheel to scroll freely instead of notched scrolling. That would probably make moving around in these previews a lot easier, but the mouse I actually use doesn't have that option.

Thanks!

That's a good question. Purple doesn't mean 16-bit; here's an example where 16-bit works alright: https://www.massassi.net/levels/files/1459.shtml

It's probably a wrong interpretation of the map colormap. Can you post a link to the map so that I can check it out tomorrow?

We're also not that happy with the controls and it's something we're trying to improve. We're using three.js for rendering and it offers different controls. Right now we're using orbital controls that allow you to move the camera around a target point.

Okay, I'm sorry, this is just bad ass.

Niiiice!

Hey!

Something like this has purple show up for me:

https://www.massassi.net/levels/files/3051.shtml

Thank you for the link. I’ll take a closer look tomorrow.

Wow, this is fantastic! Thank you, Stereo.

I do agree though that the controls seem slightly wonky. I'd kinda hard to zoom in close enough in some spots with the scroll wheel alone, as I just keep scrolling and scrolling and barely getting any further.

Well thats cool!

I made two changes to the viewer code:
- Zooming speed is doubled, and you can hold SHIFT to further increase the speed. I hope this helps, if not, please just let us know. I actually don't use a mouse wheel, but instead zoom using a gesture on my touchpad, which worked well.
- Hopefully no more wrong purple colors: The maps that show this phenomenon reference a wrong colormap, which makes materials appear with wrong colors. I was interpreting that data by the inofficial book, but the original JK may be doing something else, which explains why this wasn't discovered by the authors.

You'll see these changes when Brian gets a chance to roll out the latest version.

Please continue giving feedback and letting us know what you'd like to see added or changed.
Personally, I'm looking forward to getting light effects into the previewer. But I won't have time for this in the next weeks, so maybe someone else has a go at it. :-)

Super ****ing cool, nice work!

This is really badass and incredibly useful. It's a shame we didn't have this 15 years ago.. Great work!

I think WAR_ACID_ said it best in his review of MLP3: "One word: WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Very interesting. There are so many cool levels on Massassi that I never played. Most of the ones I browsed by chance were more than half-decent. Only a couple that were basically glorified boxes, haha.

Indeed! And finally we can find all the hidden places in a level. ;-)

I pushed the new version this morning, it looks good.

The weird thing about the mouse wheel controls is that the farther you zoom in, the smaller the move increment gets.

Stereo, have you looked at the "FPS Controls" example in Three.js? It seems like we need that, but with 2 additional keys, "c" to move down and "r" (or whatever else) to move up. There is also a FlyControls but it looks like that's designed for a flying game where you can tilt your plane. Anyway, I may poke around with it later and see if I can get the FPS controls working.

Also I'm not sure if you mean "shift + mousewheel" but that actually doesn't do anything for me. When shift is held down, the mousewheel no longer works to zoom. However, with shift held down the click+drag moves the entire map (instead of rotating it) and that works awesome.

Finally, there's a nifty easter egg built in you can use if you ownsgame. (full-page version only)

This is freakin' awesome! I'm now digging through old levels to see their previews.


I noticed this particularly with the "castle" in the MLP3 example you gave in your first post -- you have to get creative with the camera work to actually zoom in on the castle part.

EDIT: Or rather, I thought you had to. Being able to double-click to re-anchor helps immensely.

I did notice that the MotS ones (at least at a glance) seem to fail to load, whether it's the on-page or the full-screen option.

That's odd, I tested all the mots kfy levels and they all loaded. Maybe it's a regression in the latest version. Is it every mots level?

Here's an example of a failing one: https://3dpreview.massassi.net/level/1891/
And a working one: https://3dpreview.massassi.net/level/870/
A working motsmp one: https://3dpreview.massassi.net/level/787/

I bet Stereo can fix it.

Level 1891 will work now and hopefully other levels that failed to load, too. If not, just let me know the number.

Controls are tricky, hm? I am also not satisfied with the ones we have at the moment.

We need to discern between normal computers and mobile devices:

On mobile devices, I'd like to:
- look around by moving my finger on the display
- zoom using a pinch gesture

On a computer with a mouse, I'd
- drag with the left button to look around
- use the mouse wheel to move forward/backward
- or keep the right button pressed to move forward (for those without a mouse wheel)
+ double-click to fly close to the clicked location

Please make suggestions. When we have settled on something, I'll try to implement it.

Orbital and flythrough are both useful. I think the ideal would be to have both: default to the current orbital controls for a large scale overview, but have a button or key that switches to flythrough controls for looking at smaller details.

As a user, I would expect the flythrough to have controls similar to spectator cameras from other first person shooters. I would also expect it to start at a walkplayer (spawn point).

Extra credit if the viewer draws the sky in flythrough mode. Check the “ceiling” and “horizon” shaders here for example: https://github.com/jdmclark/gorc/tree/develop/game/restricted/misc/glsl

Shift+mousewheel works fine for me, much quicker than just the mousewheel. Shift+left click and drag works like you found but so does right click and drag.

Shift+mousewheel works for me on linux/firefox but not mac/firefox. Weird. It's possible I have some addon that is interfering.

Yeah, with something like Solidworks or Autodesk Revit (just an example from my experience and probably saberopus's as well), orbital viewing is definitely useful when paired with the ability to rotate about a selected object and slice through a model. The problem I have is that I can't really look into a JK level's cute little nooks and crannies with just orbital controls so a fly-through option would help a lot.

It's hard to see Drazen Isle's charming interiors.

How about clicking to move somewhere, kind of like in Google StreetView?

Or mimic controls of 3dpreview in jed.

Yo thats rad

This is awesome! Nice work

Wow, what a nostalgia trip. I can already tell I'm gonna lose an entire afternoon wandering around my old favorites. Thanks for the memories

Doesn't seem to work on Magrucko 3

Seems to be a timeout on the server. Magrucko 3 is a complex pack with several maps. Preparing them for viewing in the browser seems to take too long; that process is then aborted and we see a 50x error.

I can tweak some settings to fix that, hopefully can get to it soon.

While you're at it Brian, think you could replace a few words in a few lines of the readme files for a few of my old levels that have been kinda bugging me?

Thank.

don't you try, cone saber

How soon

This is now fixed. For example: https://3dpreview.massassi.net/level/3111/