Where in the World is Jesse Buhagiar???

Don't worry, I'm not dead and sh3redux is CERTAINLY not dead. For anyone that actually reads the blog (hahaha) I'm currently super busy with uni and it's sucking all my time. I really want to just sit down and program sh3redux, but I have zero time and zero motivation... During the year break (when I started sh3redux) I was working on it for 4+ hours per day everyday, which I just can't do between work, school and life (Read:girls... [don't get me started..]). Alex is also super busy, as he's currently doing his thesis which can be found here!

For anyone eagerly anticipating to play some modern SH3, don't worry. I'll definitely sit down and work on it some more when I've got the time. We definitely need more devs (I'm going to ask Mike to get involved) so we can have a better dev cycle.

Until Next time
Quaker

Textures are done

After a total of 8 days of trial and hardship, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you 8-bit paletted textures!!

Stupidity

I am a victim of my own idiocy. In my rush to try and implement palettes and the 8-bit textures, I neglected to see that the palette needed to be rearranged... Alex has got it done.. Textures work with no noise now and I can finally stop obsessing over 768KiB pieces of shit and get on with my life (and sleep).

Pictures tomorrow.

Updating

So me, having the short attention span that I have (in regards to programming), decided to take a bit of break from sh3redux and work on a small auto-updater that I plan to distribute with my builds of sh3r when it's done.

I'm using wxWidgets for the user interface, and while it's really good, at the same time I hate it because of some of the really weird things, like having a macro for the main function...

Nonetheless, I have a small frame with two buttons that can connect to the Palm Studios github page and send a GET request, though I'm going to have to work out a way to check if the versions are the same. Shouldn't take me too long, and is a pretty fun side project!

"IT'S WORKING! IT'S WOOORKING!"

WORRRRKINNNNGGG
No but seriously, the 8-bit textures work perfectly (well, the palette is still a little bit weird, but we can tweak that). We can now successfully load up 8-bit textures and dump them to disk, or bind them to the GPU. Thank you so much de_lof (and the rest of the SILENT HILL 3 Modding community!!!).
It didn't work initially because it turns out I had an entire section of code inside the for loop when it should have been outside of it...

I spent a full day debugging this...

Encryption

Still working on Paletted textures, but I've hit a bit of a snag... It seems that the textures are 'encrypted' or packed in a really weird way (probably encryption). The loader I have by de_lof handles all of this, (though the output is corrupt) but the code is extraordinarily hard to read, and there is hardly any explanation on what the encryption actually is. This is going to take a while, but hopefully we can get some actual goddamned textures loaded soon.. Grabbing colours from the colour palette works 100% though, which is a start. The only issue is that converting the textures inflates them from (for example), 512*512 bytes (256KiB) to a whopping 768KiB, close to a megabyte! Hopefully we can reuse textures and don't need to load in more than a hundred of so per scene, if so, we're in for a very VRAM hungry game..

Textures (again)

So, I've decided to redo the entire texture Load() function, as I've realised there isn't just 24-bit and 8-bit textures... I came across some code where someone had figured out where the colour palettes are stored, how they are stored and the fact that some textures are RLE compressed. There isn't apparently some form of 'encryption', but I have't seen any of this so far. Anyways, I've managed to dump the palette of sys_konami.tex, and by the looks of it, this is all the colours used in the original konami logo. The palette is below (there's a lot of different types of orange and grey, who knows what they are for). Now I have to actually dump the texture are stepping through the palette and copying each colour into a buffer!! Progress!!