Leaderboard

Possibly. I've been acutely aware of the lack of attention I've gotten over the past few months, even when I was updating regularly, and I figured that everyone was just happy with Manic Miners and the demand for my own project just wasn't there, so I have been considering other options for my "first release". My current plan was to get out tiny demos of other ideas and then put it to a vote on my Discord channel on which project to develop further; my hope is to have that ready by Mid-May, at the latest. If the people here voice a lot of support for Mighty Miners in the meantime, I may come back to focusing on this, otherwise I'll make a post here announcing when the other demos are done and the poll is open, so that people here can take a look and cast a vote, either for Mighty Miners or another game, if one of my other concepts catches their fancy.

HEY SO IF YOU EXPORT MODELS OF STUFF WITH .UV FILES (PARTICULARLY THE LAVA MONSTER) and notice "well gee, there's hard edges visible in-game, why aren't there in the exported models?" that's because there seems to be a bug (probably?) in the game where it introduces hard edges along seams in the UV map: I'm not implementing it into this exporter cause a) it's probably a bug they never noticed or bothered to fix cause UV files were used on so few things in the vanilla game, and b) it'd be kind of a pain in the ass so if you reeeaally wanna mimic how the lava monster actually looks in-game, just add hard edges wherever there's UV seams I guess. lol. f****ing 90s 3D games man

Ok, so. Pushed an update that fixes hard edges appearing whenever vertices are split in any way other than by normals/shading - well, almost. Turns out that seams in UVs from a UV file will *always* cause hard edges in the shading. Why? Despite how the LWO and UV formats store things, at the end of the day, a vertex can only have one of each attribute - one position, one normal, one UV coordinate, etc. (Well there are such things as multiple UV sets but that's not relevant to how this works or the problem at hand pls don't nitpick I mean they're just yet another set of attributes anyway right so like it doesn't matter that they're UVs at all blarghghgh.) So when you have to have a seam in your UVs, or a hard edge on a corner, you'll actually ultimately end up with split/duplicate vertices - identical in every way, sitting in the same place, except they might have different UV coordinates for a seam in the texture, or different normals to form a hard edge. Here's a really nice visual explanation I always point to. Though in this case, the problem has more to do when this occurs with UV splits. So what's the problem exactly? Well, the LWO format doesn't store vertex normals - the game calculates them upon loading. If vertices are split, that'll result in a visible hard edge. That's a-ok. Except, when you add UV coordinates to the mix, suddenly you have to split some of your vertices for those texture seams. This is pretty much functionally identical to unwelding them to control the smoothing of your model. If you do this step *after* you've already calculated your UV coordinates, you're fine. Your new split/duplicated vertices will still have normals that line up with each other, and so there won't be any visible seam. This is what the game does for planar textures - after all, planar textures are just info on how to calculate UV coordinates. But when the game instead loads UV coordinates from a UV file, it splits vertices to accommodate them *before* calculating the normals. And so, there end up being a lot of split vertices - and thus hard edges - you didn't intend there to be, wherever there's seams in the UV map. That's what seems to be happening anyway. There could be more weird factors to it. God knows what the game's really doing. Have fun with that :DDD