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[wallworm]

Several big things are on the horizon for Wall Worm. Aside form enhancements to the standard Wall Worm tool set, there is a package coming soon that will probably be a big game changer for many users.

Wall Worm Pro:

Wall Worm Pro is a C++/C# port of many core functions in Wall Worm. To do this I've brought Orvid King onboard to the Wall Worm development team. The exact feature list is not finalized but will likely include the following tools rewritten in newer code on the 3ds Max SDK (meaning it won't be the current MAXScript implementation):

• DMX Exporter with Wrinklemaps
• VTF Importer
• SMD Exporter
• SMD Importer
• VTA Exporter
• VTA Importer**
• VMF Exporter
• VMF Importer
• FGD/Entity Parser
• DMX Importer*
• VMap Exporter*
• VTF Exporter*
• More...

* Those with an asterisk will not be part of the initial release but possibly added after the launch.

** This function was already added to WW Free during development of WW Pro.

Wall Worm will continue to be developed alongside Wall Worm Pro. But I strongly encourage users to buy this new tool when it comes out as it will speed up many aspects of using Wall Worm. We will be announcing pricing closer to the time of release.

Stay Tuned.

[Joris Ceoen]

This sounds incredibly interesting!

[wallworm]

Just a little report on this.

The SDK-driven SMD Exporter is now done. It exports lightning fast, even with Skin and Edit Normals. It's pretty exciting. In the case of a scene I have been testing from a WW user that is composed of a rigged model, concave hull, two bodygroups and a dozen bodygroup submodels: the time difference is this:

Export AND Compile 12 Skinned Models

Wall Worm: 38 seconds
Wall Worm Pro: 8 Seconds

In the second case,  the compile time is 6 of the seconds listed above.

The current focus is now on the FGD parser. In WW Pro, it parses the FGD and makes all entities in only a couple seconds. But it still has a couple bugs.

It's pretty exciting.

[Orvid]

And another update on this.

Most of the bugs in the FGD parser have now been resolved, and the memory used by the entity script has also been reduced by a little over 1/3rd.

Next up is the material library importer, because 45 minutes to import a meager 17k materials (All of the materials in TF2) is just too long.

[Orvid]

Next update.

The initial implementation of the VMT parser is pretty much complete, and, after hooking it up, it imported those same 17k materials in just under 4 minutes. Please note that, while this time is impressive, it will likely go up (hopefully not too much) as support for more of the properties that the original importer supported is added.

It's also worth noting that the VMT parser in WallWorm Pro takes a slightly different approach to parsing than the current importer, because the one in WW Pro performs a best-effort style parse, meaning that it attempts to account for the errors present in various VMT files in TF2 (really, who sticks a "TODO:" in the middle of the file?!?!), this includes going to some pretty extreme lengths for a tokenizing parser to be able to deal with the places where someone decided they didn't really need to quote that color value, which would normally produce multiple tokens, and break parsing for the rest of the file, but that the new parser deals with as a single token, and parses it as if it were properly quoted. Another good example of where the new parser differs from the old in parsing style is that the new parser realizes that a developer trying to pass a color to $envmapsaturation was actually wanting to make it the $envmaptint, and accounts for that fact.

Unfortunately, I have yet to figure out whether passing 0.5 as an argument to $phong (which is supposed to take a single boolean value) was intended to represent true, or false, and have, for now, assumed that the presence of a value is intended to represent true. Sometimes you've just gotta wish VMTs were generated, not written by humans :)

[Joris Ceoen]

It sounds really like something I would want right now :D

[Orvid]

Next update, but first I have to ask, how many ways can you misspell $baseMapAlphaPhongMask?

Well, as it turns out, Valve can spell this undocumented property 4 ways in TF2, none of which are correct. (basealphaphongmask, basemapalphaphonemask, basemapalphaphonmask, and basemapalphphongmask)

Even while dealing with the large number of misspellings, and deciding that the English language spells recieve wrong, I've managed to implement the rest of the properties supported by the original VMT importer, although I've not implemented support for blend textures (usually used on displacements). The good news is that it has barely effected the total import time, still sitting at about 4 minutes for all 17k textures. When I implement blend texture importing, I do expect this time to go up at least a moderate amount, due to the fact most of the time is currently being spent by 3ds Max creating the actual materials. (Parsing all 17k materials only takes ~2.5 seconds with a hot cache) I've also added support for importing a few properties that were previously only exported for VMTs. The importer is still far from complete in my eyes though, as there are still another 364 properties that the parser knows nothing about.

[wallworm]

Well Orvid and I have been pounding our way to the initial release of WW Pro. It's getting closer day by day. It's pretty exciting stuff.

[wallworm]

Just another update on the progress of WWPro.

So far Orvid and I have tackled and succeeded with massive performance increases in exporting SMDs, VTAs and VMFs. The FGD parser and the Material Library Generator are also now very fast. We may release an alpha version at a discount in the coming couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

[Orvid]

Next update.

The test map that we've been working with originally exported to a vmf in a little over 180 seconds. That same map now exports with WW Pro in ~36 seconds, and I'm not done yet. I hope to be able to get at least another 5 seconds out of it, if not 10.

[wallworm]

Just another update.

We now have VTF support integrated in WW Pro for Max 2012-2015. At release-time, this will just be VTF read/import. We will have VTF write/export soon too. (To clarify, WW already exports VTFs but that is based off of the Valve VTEX.exe compiler. In WW Pro, VTFs will be writable directly from Max natively as with any other standard bitmap Max can write.)

[wallworm]

Just some input on the progress of WW Pro.

At this point, DMX exporter with wrinklemaps are done. Also, VTF import is done, and many features that spead up functions (like the SMD exporter with Skin/Edit Normals, VMF Exporter, etc) are done. The last major feature on the list that we need to tackle is the VTF Writer. After that, we will address all the current known bug. You can see that list here: http://www.wallworm.net/index.php/topic,1211.0.html

The original list of features included VTA importer. That feature was moved into the general WW and is not going to be limited to WW Pro. However, when we get around to adding a DMX importer, the DMX importer will be limited to WW Pro.

At that point we'll move the beta. At that point in time WW Pro will no longer include a free copy of CorVex. So if you are interested in WW Pro as well as CorVex, feel free to get the current Alpha version of WW Pro that still comes with a free copy of CorVex.

[wallworm]

Wall Worm Pro is now out of Alpha and is in Beta. This change reflects a change in status due to consistent and positive results at this stage. At this point, we believe Wall Worm Pro is stable and ready to release, but we will not remove the Beta label until after more testing from more users. We expect this phase to last at least another month, in which time I expect we'll also have added 3ds Max 2016 support.

[Joris Ceoen]

Fantastic! I will keep on providing feedback with the level design tools as I upgrade pontifici. For the entities my current marbletrack should be a great scene to see if there are still some problem there, although right now I have been adding some extra entities and got no problem so far.