Leaderboard

(this was technically done a ways back, but I wanted to post it here, to spread awareness of it.) For a little while now, me and some friends have been doing some research on the music of LEGO Island. In our research, we managed to find a vst that contains all of the sounds for the Hospital theme from the game. Synamax, one of the main researchers, got to work on making a full recreation of the song, and put this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuW7Yf3Qx6E A nearly 1:1 recreation of the Hospital theme from Island, using the original sounds, and in High Quality. As for where you can find the instruments we have found so far, you can check out this spreadsheet here, under the Video Games tab, by searching for LEGO Island: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JJBlHHDc65fhZmKUGLrDTLCm6rfUU83-kbuD8Y0zU0o/edit#gid=325792768

For those who don't know, in the days of Rock Raiders' development, LightWave didn't have built-in functionality for UV mapping. This wasn't exactly great. So another company, CineGraphics, made UView, a program that could interface with LightWave and do UV mapping! It cost like 700 bucks. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.graphics.apps.lightwave/Z4eU-fBcF5g/7QCmsagFK2YJ http://web.archive.org/web/19981205124926/https://www.cinegraphics.net/Products/uview.html It seems CineGraphics is still around, but their own link to UView leads to the web archives: https://www.cinegraphics.net/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010803011902/http://cinegraphics.net/product.php?location=UView Karl thought that UView was probably used for LRR, but wasn't sure: Later, LightWave overhauled their format and also added built-in support for UV mapping, rendering UView obsolete. But, there's a plugin that loads ye olde UView (.uv) files into newer versions of LightWave, turning their data into modernized UV data stored right in the LWO file: http://www.dstorm.co.jp/dsproducts/FreePlugins/Image_IO/UView_Import.html And lo and behold, it works with LRR's .uv files! Guess that confirms DDI did use UView. For like, the two creatures in the game (triman and lava monster) that use .uv files, anyway. Just be sure to read the readme; in short, you have to manually select the texture image and assign it to the surfaces due to a limitation in the plugins system. But it works! So is this useful for modding? Not really. In order to make .uv files that LRR can read, we'd either need UView itself (seems to be lost to time?), or a custom tool. I'm currently working on the latter. But hey, we know what originally produced them, at least. And if for some reason you want to directly upgrade LRR models to newer versions of LightWave, you can I guess, lol.