All Maps Have Been Retextured news - Unreal PSX Rework - Rise Of Jrath mod for Unreal

An important milestone has been reached for this project, all the original maps have been retextured. It took about 10 years in total since the recovery of the files, but it is here finally. Originally this involved frustrating long work of manually rescaling them using unrealed, comparing images side by side. But this was highly unprofessional and too much of a labor work, so after a while I noticed that either I should get the original scaling values and panning through the t3d, or that I request a feature say for the 227 OldUnreal fan patch to show it in the stats dialog. This was granted on my request originally for the psx project, but I am sure it is useful for many mappers now. So with that in mind I still did it manually but now with the values so they would match the old ones with some calculation applied depending on the texture. Some psx textures were even 3 times smaller and other like the playership light textures were actually larger by one, so it wasn't all universal honestly, but they all were lower color/had some processing on them. Unlike the s3tc technology or simple drawscaling, these textures were tied to the surfaces and used special psx packages. Naturally after retexturing the shadow/detail on the maps becomes crispier as many of the original psx maps had flags on surfaces that set high shadow detail, because otherwise it looked too bad so for minimum performance hit they did that to enrich the detail.

Either way after I became more and more expert with the engine, I found out that its best to apply commands right in the log after selecting certain surfaces, for example for universal scaling up and down there was this:

poly texscale relative uu=0.5 vv=0.5 for scale up
and down 2.0 both
Doubling value poly texpan u= v= take the same value and apply it the times scale and apply negative/subtracted value if scaling up instead, for example vpan 31 must become 16 in that case, so you do 31/2 and then you add that as a negative value so poly texpan u=0 v=-16

This might be too technical for some of you and it's still annoying but it was progress and it allowed for completely accurate retexturing as a base.

Now later on during yrex's time, I told yrex what I was doing and how I was doing it and he modified his unrtt3d tool to allow for automation of this scaling process I did. Even though the tool cannot count for differences like with some textures, it was vastly superior and faster now and the few extra textures/differences I could do without a problem using those commands I mentioned. The downside of this is that the geometry had to be rebuilt again, while technically speaking if there was a map that gave bsp problems before, i could simply just rebuild lighting and not bother with the rest and the movers I could simply copy over so no need for rebuilding inside that particular copy of the map.

This is on the history of retexturing and I ended up doing 99 percent of all the retexturing work from the original psx maps. But now after 10 years it's finally done! Despite my hellish IRL problems and all kind of discrimination I have to face day-by-day and the fact that I was sometimes absent for half a year completely without ability to talk to anyone on the internet.