Suggestion: Show nodes of models in 3D viewer

[stan0033]

I think it'd be a good idea the site's 3D viewer to show the nodes of a model, just like war3 Model Editor can.

 

[Retera]

If the viewer showed too much information about a model, though, then you could risk seeing model data that the user isn't supposed to see. For example, for one of my contest submissions I was tired of the reviewers always using Sanity Test to "test" if the model was good instead of their brains, so when I had a dirty model with like 50 extra unused nodes floating around and I didn't feel like cleaning it, I embedded a text graphic under the model where the geometry forms the shape of "F U" and it links to all the unused nodes and tags this geometry with special Reforged-only corrupted concepts so that the "F U" graphic does not display, and as far as I know no moderator ever found out because the model perfectly passes the Sanity Test in every way and is just absolutely perfect.

By contrast, a lot of times if I upload Warcraft III assets by Blizzard that I am trying to immortalize like from a Beta version of the game, these will get tagged as "needs work" and "has errors" because they are the Warcraft III assets by Blizzard and don't have the "F U" embed graphic.

Kinda makes me wish I was joking... Maybe it was at a rough patch in my Warcraft III modding careers when I did that.

But, I'm not, and this is a screenshot of a model I uploaded that was not rejected by reviewers, who never found this.
It's vertices are carefully attached to the unused data, so that they pass sanity checker and count as used. Then, the geometry is tagged with LevelOfDetail=3 which is a broken Reforged concept that makes all our Hive viewers and stuff avoid rendering the geometry.

So if you had more advanced data previews and information, reviewers might catch this kind of thing like what I did last year. Do you really want that?

Luckily, the guy who wrote "View in 3D" for Hive and also wrote the Sanity Checker is probably gone from our website, because he felt like no one appreciated him. And that also means nobody can fix the viewer and nobody is going to upgrade Sanity Checker to alert people if the model has "F U" graphic to pass the Sanity Check with the tag that makes it invisible to our viewers. So, also, it is probably very unlikely that anyone would do what you are suggesting.

But, who knows? I suppose I could be wrong.

 

[stan0033]

I hope he was at least well paid That;s enough appreciation

 

[Retera]

It was probably a volunteer effort if I had to guess... I'm not in the know about that, though.

Edit: So, anyway, how about you volunteer! It sounds like you want the feature, why don't you write it?

That's how I've done Retera Model Studio for 10 years, writing what I want. So now you can spread the love and do the same thing and write the feature you want into Hive Viewer!

The code is open source online here: GitHub - flowtsohg/mdx-m3-viewer: A WebGL viewer for MDX and M3 files used by the games Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 respectively.

And you DEFINITELY do NOT need Bobby Kotick's permission to download the code and modify it and make your ideal version!

Happy modding!

 

[stan0033]

It was probably a volunteer effort if I had to guess... I'm not in the know about that, though.

Edit: So, anyway, how about you volunteer! It sounds like you want the feature, why don't you write it?

That's how I've done Retera Model Studio for 10 years, writing what I want. So now you can spread the love and do the same thing and write the feature you want into Hive Viewer!

The code is open source online here: GitHub - flowtsohg/mdx-m3-viewer: A WebGL viewer for MDX and M3 files used by the games Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 respectively.

And you DEFINITELY do NOT need Bobby Kotick's permission to download the code and modify it and make your ideal version!

Happy modding!

I don't know how, and also those who make suggestions are not obliged to get things in their own hands.
Writing what you want? I bet you got some help writing your 3D editor.

 

[Retera]

I bet you got some help writing your 3D editor.

We exist in a social continuum. I would be stupid to say that the things I did were done alone.

But at the same time, have you seen the absurd kind of code going on in Retera Model Studio? It took the Twilac fork like a year to get used to what's going on in that code while I was ignoring them. And I believe that to be largely affected by the fact that the code was mostly brain vomit out of my head, with very little other people giving me advice or saying, "Wait, what you're doing here is stupid!!"

And that's why if you look inside Retera Model Studio, you will see a lot, lot of stupid...

Retera Model Studio exists in the form that it does today because of existing libraries and tools that I was able to copy from that were on Hive, but these are credited in several places such as the tool download itself and on the GitHub page. In many cases, I look at the project as being mostly my own work because the biggest help from other people was using their code, sometimes even when the people whose code I was using were already gone and didn't talk to me, much. I had a few lucky cases like messaging with Ghostwolf and DrSuperGood about their code while I learned to use it, but others like OgerLord and PitzerMike and Deaod who I used code from probably don't even know my username. Similarly, even if the author of "View in 3D" is gone, if you read his code and learn that and then upgrade that, I suppose it's kind of true you would not be working alone in that case. But I think it would be a life-enriching experience for you to try, and it doesn't have to cost that guy any more of his time, for example. We can get a lot done from our own initiative.

You're surely not obliged to do it yourself. Maybe the Hive has some obligation if you're a donor, which I'll admit I didn't bother to look up right now. But wouldn't you also say that even if I might be able to add the feature you are talking about in 2 hours but it might take you 20 hours for example because you would have to learn more to touch that codebase (whereas I copied that codebase extensively for some of my projects), basically even if I'm in the "in crowd" so to speak of having the knowledge, isn't it also true that I am also not obliged to do that for you in any way?

And I think that's where it gets a bit weird because when we're dealing with a proprietary game like Warcraft III we train ourselves into thinking that there is someone who deserves to be an expert, like Blizzard having their power over the game to make patches even though you cannot. And it gives me a weird perspective because for me, having something that adds a lot of value to my life like the mdx-m3-viewer repo created for Hive definitely adds this value and is life-enriching for me. And yet, at the same time, I don't think I would ever go ask the guy who created it to upgrade it for me. The closest I ever got to something like that was to edit part of it myself and submit the code change for him to optionally add to the repo using GitHub's system for that. [Or maybe to tell him about a bug I found or a new way to understand the models, giving him the option of using my knowledge if he wanted it for his own benefit.] And it has been 1 year almost to the day and he never bothered to look through my code change to decide if it was acceptable and never bothered to incorporate it into the official repo, because he is moving on with his life and that is what he is doing.

I feel no guilt to him for his decision. I feel no sense of him being obligated to me. If I wanted a change, I would make a change.

Why would you want to treat people any other way than that?

 

[Ralle]

Long live GhostWolf. May his path be bright.

I wouldn't mind being able to toggle on-off nodes. Nodes are the joints of bones right?

 

[stan0033]

Long live GhostWolf. May his path be bright.

I wouldn't mind being able to toggle on-off nodes. Nodes are the joints of bones right?

nodes are diffent types of bones. Bones, helpers, lights, particle emitters, ribbon emitters, attachments, lights.

 

[stan0033]

Also I think that the sanity test must also require at least one collision shape. Collision shapes are what determines if you can select and hover on the object with the mouse and where.