Allegiance MDL file library for .net

Your_Persona · Post by **Your_Persona** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 5:32 am

Looking for testers and contributors on the following project

https://code.google.com/p/allegiance-mdl-file/

Today I ran this library against all the files in my current artwork directory and got the following results.

Successfully read 3129 Binary MDL files
Skipped reading 165 text MDL files

Errors on the following files:
animinvest.mdl
animlaunch.mdl
animloadout.mdl
animradar.mdl
animsector.mdl
animteam.mdl
cap503.mdl
cube.mdl
font.mdl
gataaranbmp.mdl
ss106.mdl

----

I have almost finished porting all of the loading code from MDLC.exe to get this far. Obviously there are a few methods left to port.
Once that is finished, we can start porting the saving methods.

As for the loading methods, there are a few IFunction:Read and IFunction:Apply that still need to be done. I expect that this will fix the rest of the files that had errors.
If you find any implementation of IFunction in the source for MDLC, then that will be the complete list of what is possible.

I recommend running MDLC.exe with the -Info command against some file, and placing breakpoints on the methods (ReadApply, and ReadBinary) in mdlbin.cpp.
Then stepping into the function pointers call to ->Read() or ->Apply() and make sure there is a corresponding method in the .Net project to perform that action.

So we are 99.648% of the way there for reading existing binary MDL files. (Hopefully the ones that have exceptions aren't just corrupt!)
And no bytes are being tossed during the loading, so being able to edit and save will be possible.

Anyone interested?

Looking for testers and contributors
https://code.google.com/p/allegiance-mdl-file/

madpeople · Post by **madpeople** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 10:10 am

Your_Persona wrote:QUOTE (Your_Persona @ Feb 28 2012, 05:32 AM) animinvest.mdl
animlaunch.mdl
animloadout.mdl
animradar.mdl
animsector.mdl
animteam.mdl

These are animations. I don't know if mdlc adds any data / sets any flags in the mdl when it encounters an animation (presumably it recognises animations by the fact they aren't square and their sizes aren't powers of 2 - and not by the fact they are prefixed by 'anim'?).
QUOTE cap503.mdl[/quote]I don't see anything special about this one, maybe a buggy mdl file? I would doubt it since I think it's an MS one
QUOTE cube.mdl[/quote]I don't know what this is
QUOTE font.mdl[/quote] This is a binary file containing the information on what fonts to use for what "sytles" of text (different parts of the code and other mdls reference styles, this maps sytles to fonts, and also contains the glyphs for the fonts allowing non-standard fonts http://www.freeallegiance.org/FAW/index.php/Font.mdl
http://www.freeallegiance.org/FAW/index.ph...definition_file
QUOTE gataaranbmp.mdl[/quote]odd, this isn't in my converted artwork. I don't know what this is
QUOTE ss106.mdl[/quote]same as cap503

Have you poked around https://faz.svn.codeplex.com/svn/branch ... nce/MDL.cs ?

Your_Persona · Post by **Your_Persona** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 3:52 pm

Thanks for the info MP.

And yes, I have looked at and used KG's MDL.cs It's pretty good stuff, I use it in MDLUtility2. However it is not complete, and discards some information that is needed to be able to save correctly.

I initially started with trying to make MDL.cs do what I needed but found it would take to long and just decided to copy what allegiance was doing.

madpeople · Post by **madpeople** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 7:49 pm

madpeople wrote:QUOTE (madpeople @ Feb 28 2012, 10:10 AM) QUOTE cube.mdl

I don't know what this is
[/quote]
I lie, cube.mdl is probably a cube.
I imagine it was converted from: http://svn.alleg.net/svn/AllegArt/branch/FAZDev/256/cube.x
This is probably the texture: http://svn.alleg.net/svn/AllegArt/branch/F...56/cubetext.mdl
Here you have a nice simple test object to compare saved things to (assuming cube.mdl is a valid mdl - see if it loads in mdledit).

QUOTE However it is not complete, and discards some information that is needed to be able to save correctly.

I initially started with trying to make MDL.cs do what I needed but found it would take to long and just decided to copy what allegiance was doing.[/quote]
I approve

Imago · Post by **Imago** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 1:24 am

ok good, madpeople approves. you may continue working on this now.

/troll

Compellor · Post by **Compellor** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 1:44 am

.

Thought I saw something reliant but I was wrong.

Your_Persona · Post by **Your_Persona** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 8:21 am

I added support for the anim*bmp.mdl files.

The image loading part has a bug in it though, some of the frames come back a little scrambled. Anyone who understands images want to give that part a peek?

Adaven · Post by **Adaven** » Mon Mar 19, 2012 4:53 am

For someone who has never touched .Net, how can I use this? For instance, how can I create text mdls for existing binary models? I'd like to be able to view them manually to help my own understanding of the format and for figuring out what I can of the original tool chain.

I've got Visual Studio (although I've almost never used it) and I can see your unit test where you load up fig20.mdl from the Alleg art directory. How would I go about writing that model out to text?

Your_Persona · Post by **Your_Persona** » Tue Mar 20, 2012 1:08 am

Adaven wrote:QUOTE (Adaven @ Mar 18 2012, 10:53 PM) For someone who has never touched .Net, how can I use this? For instance, how can I create text mdls for existing binary models? I'd like to be able to view them manually to help my own understanding of the format and for figuring out what I can of the original tool chain.

I've got Visual Studio (although I've almost never used it) and I can see your unit test where you load up fig20.mdl from the Alleg art directory. How would I go about writing that model out to text?

ATM it doesn't have a method to output the text-mdl. You can only see it in the debug window.

I'll move that code to a method you can call and give an example of passing a file to it from the command line and catching the text-mdl output.

Your_Persona · Post by **Your_Persona** » Tue Mar 20, 2012 3:12 am

Your_Persona wrote:QUOTE (Your_Persona @ Mar 19 2012, 07:08 PM) I'll move that code to a method you can call and give an example of passing a file to it from the command line and catching the text-mdl output.

I have updated the code and added a new console project that decompiles binary mdl files to text mdl files.

Code: Select all

mdld.exe /file:"pathToBinaryMdl.mdl" /out:"pathToOutputText.mdl"
   Reads from a source files and creates and output file.
or
mdld.exe /file:"pathToBinaryMdl.mdl" 
   Reads from a source file and writes to stdout
or
mdld.exe 
   Reads from stdIn, and writes to stdOut