Does it make sense to still make texture packs for Rice?

mode7 · Jul 3, 2006

Hi,

if read in several threads that Rice's plugin is considered dead and that many re-texturers are/will be switching to the new Jabo's plugin that is supposed to come along with the new P64 1.7, which is not yet released. I also read the Jabo uses another dumping method what makes the Rice texture packs incompatible. Is this right so far?
Now I'm quite confused and i think others too.

Does it still make sense to make a pack for Rice, if everyone uses Jabo's?
Will there be an converter too make the packs compatible or is such an converter technical possible to make?
How can i beginn working for Jabo's if it is not yet released in public?

I'm trying to gather some pros and cons for both possiblities:

---Rice---
Pros:

Much documentation available about making texture packs
Many texture packs already available and many people working on new ones

Cons:

Limited texture size to 400%
Some glitches in games Jabo doesn't have (e.g. better framebuffer emulation)
It is not worked on anymore - new features are most unlikely to come

---Project 64 (with Jabos plugin)---
Pros:

Awsome features to come (Bigger texture sizes, widescreen support, possibly bump mapping(??)
I've read no CI textures anymore (is this right?)
Better emulation combatibility and therefore more users

Cons:

Not yet released to the public an because of that no documentation (correct me if i'm wrong)
No texture packs yet (At least Kman anounced that he will have one ready at the release)
Incombatible to the available packs for Rice

I'm aware that many of this has already been discussed in other threads, but i wanted to gather all information in one thread with a proper caption.
So perhaps you can give me some advice or tell me your opinion.

klasa · Jul 3, 2006

Another con for PJ64 is that you have to pay for it at the moment, and I don't think many people would like to do that, just for making textures. (at least I wouldn't...)

MuhMuh · Jul 3, 2006

I was invited to the Pj64 Forum once, but the new Jabo-Plugin was very buggy and dumping textures didn't work for me.
The biggest contra for me is, that it is not compatible with Rice-Textures. So I would have to rename everything... :S

Doomulation · Jul 3, 2006

But the new Jabo is far from finished

It might yet to come to make it compatible with Rice or a converter. As it isn't finished, I urge to wait and see. I think this subject is being discussed since there already are so many (and big) packs for Rice.

Im Bored · Jul 3, 2006

it makes sense to use what you want and not publicise it and almost make it in to a competition as to which is the better plug in.

Both show alternate textures. Use whichever you want. I know I do. I have the new Jabos and I use Rice's plug in as much as I use that.

Does it make sense to still make texture packs for rice? Does it make sense to still work on N64 Games?

I dont know about others, but I make textures for myself primarily, and release them publically because I can. Because of this, Id use whichever plug in suits my needs more. Both have their advantages.

I dont know, I just kind of find this topic a bit rude, though I know thats not its intention.

Terranigma · Jul 3, 2006

Wait what!? You have to pay in order to make textures for Jabo!? Huh? That doesn't make sense. Do we have to pay in order to use Jabo's new plugin as well? Something like Magic Engine or what?

klasa · Jul 3, 2006

I meant you have to pay to download it.

The Dave · Jul 3, 2006

What I've decided on, since I have a big pack nearly done and a website comming up, is that for the time being Jabo's pick isn't out. The people paying to get it our using a beta version, and until the final version is released, I'm not going to act like it exists. Then when it's released I can worry about making new tutorials and converting my pack to work with it.

mode7 · Jul 3, 2006

Im Bored said:
it makes sense to use what you want and not publicise it and almost make it in to a competition as to which is the better plug in.

Both show alternate textures. Use whichever you want. I know I do. I have the new Jabos and I use Rice's plug in as much as I use that.

Does it make sense to still make texture packs for rice? Does it make sense to still work on N64 Games?

I dont know about others, but I make textures for myself primarily, and release them publically because I can. Because of this, Id use whichever plug in suits my needs more. Both have their advantages.

I dont know, I just kind of find this topic a bit rude, though I know thats not its intention.

I didn't wanted to sound rude, i just wanted to start a discussion. I also make textures for myself, because it's fun and you eventually can make a great game better.
I just find it difficult that you have to decide yourself for one system, why making 100s or 1000s of textures for Rice, when the next week a plugin will be released with much better features and mor compatible emulation. (this is not meant as a disrespect against rice, since he made a great innovative plugin which is sadly more or less dead now).
I also don't like the idea that there will be two independent systems. It won't help to spread texture packs and it's unfriendly for gamers. Of course I don't blame the P64 developers for using their own texture dump method. But the best solution would be a tool that renames the textures to a compatible format. I don't know anything about the N64 and programming but wouldn't that be possible since Rice's is open-source?

BTW: Do you definitly will have to pay for future P64 releases, or will the final version of 1.7 be free again?

Doomulation · Jul 3, 2006

Terranigma said:
Wait what!? You have to pay in order to make textures for Jabo!? Huh? That doesn't make sense. Do we have to pay in order to use Jabo's new plugin as well? Something like Magic Engine or what?

You have to pay in order to download beta version of pj64 (which the newest jabo's plugin is: beta).

Mode7 said:
I didn't wanted to sound rude, i just wanted to start a discussion. I also make textures for myself, because it's fun and you eventually can make a great game better.
I just find it difficult that you have to decide yourself for one system, why making 100s or 1000s of textures for Rice, when the next week a plugin will be released with much better features and mor compatible emulation. (this is not meant as a disrespect against rice, since he made a great innovative plugin which is sadly more or less dead now).
I also don't like the idea that there will be two independent systems. It won't help to spread texture packs and it's unfriendly for gamers. Of course I don't blame the P64 developers for using their own texture dump method. But the best solution would be a tool that renames the textures to a compatible format. I don't know anything about the N64 and programming but wouldn't that be possible since Rice's is open-source?

BTW: Do you definitly will have to pay for future P64 releases, or will the final version of 1.7 be free again?

Final 1.7 will undoubtedly be free.
And the issue here is that Rice's and Jabo's plugins are not the same. They handle things differently so in short, Rice's format might just not be usable with Jabo's plugin the way it works. And that's why it probably has its own format. But don't give up hope, there might just be a converter of type to convert Rice's to Jabo's.

Kerber2k · Jul 3, 2006

I have been working with Jabu's beta plugin since texture loading was implimented, and it has always worked better at dumping textures properly. There are texture packs already completed for it my Mariokart 64 pack was converted, and my Goldeneye multiplayer pack was completed under the beta aswell. There are also afew packs converted from here. Kman, Djipi, Mdtauk, and I will be supporting Jabu, and Project 64 untill release. This means there will be plenty to occupie you when it does get released. I think as far as completely haulting development on Rices plugin is up to the user. There will definently be a texture converter program of sorts. There are indeed afew things you should keep in mind I think if you do continue developing on Rices plugin. When creating textures that are small even after 4X perhaps make them even larger then dumb them down for Rices plugin...so if you do plan on converting to the new plugin you can fully take advantage. Thanks, and stay frosty.

arty:

gamemaster777 · Jul 5, 2006

Yeah, that's what I was going to say, just make textures big and then save them and make them smaller to use for Rice's plugin. When the Project 64 1.7 comes out you have your bigger textures too that are now supported and can use them and you just have to name them, it's not that big a deal.

rprsplitter9 · Jul 5, 2006

There is also another advantage to useing the Jabo 1.7 plugin, you don't have to wait for all the textures to load, you just start the game and they are already there.

jontd · Jul 5, 2006

Jabo's plugin still has bugs when using high resolution textures. Until that's fixed, no thank you.

Doomulation · Jul 5, 2006

But it's still beta and not public so bugs are to be expect - and to be fixed before the public release.

Vanit · Jul 8, 2006

I'm all for the stability and other features that Jabo's plugin is bringing in and especially compatability with sprites in the near future. However, I find it strange that most people are anticipating the ability to exceed 4x as the main feature. I think that 6x will become the new standard as any higher than that and your textures would be exceeding the resolution most computers run at. I think by far the main feature is no loading times. When I was working on Goemons Great Adventure, a pack of mine which has recieved about 50 downloads over a period of a year, it had upwards of 18000 textures having to be read before it would dump new textures. My computer is pretty decent and it would take about 10 minutes to read all the textures and each level of the game would introduce another load of 2000 or more textures.

Also there is no reason why people still can't use Rice's plugin to load packs available to it. I would not see any reason, unless that game was particularly buggy, to convert it to Jabo's just for the sake of it.

Lastly, I'm a little worried if you would see people, in the situation where a converter wasn't available, manually converting other peoples packs and taking more credit than the original author.

There a lot of issues the new plugin will cause, but I'm keen to see how it pans out.

legend of zelda · Jul 8, 2006

i think if there was a conversion program, that would end all the confusion of "omg should i make my texture pack for jabo's or rice's?????!!!!!!" you could just make it for either one and then convert it, then you would have it for both. except, if you originally made it for rice's, you would have to stick with the 4x sized textures. and if you made it for jabo's, you'd have to downsize the images if you made them bigger than 4x to convert to rice's. but, i don't think it would matter much bcause there arent too many textures that really need to be bigger than 4x anyways.

Rice · Jul 8, 2006

For the 4x texture size restriction, I believed that there was really no need to use bigger than 4x textures. Besides the texture size and memory restriction by the video card, there is really no restriction to be enfored pertically by my plugin source code. Changing the upper limit from 4x to 8x is probably just to change on a very few lines in the source code, to change numbers of '4' to '8'.

I didn't pay attention to the loading time when I implemented the hirez feature. If I noticed it, I may have used some methods similar to XML which used by Jabo. Such XML files serve as the preprocessing step, so the plugin won't need to check and parse all texture files in the texture folder (and subfolders) at runtime before running a game. However, maintaining such XML files manually is very labor intensive. If someone cares, it should be easy to implement a sort of proprocessing step into the source code of my plugin, so it will only check and parse the texture files once, saves proprocessed data to disk and uses it in later game plays.

I believe there is or will be a filename converter, since it should be fairly easy to make one by given the dumpped textures and hirez textures from both plugins, even no need to understand how each plugin works. Having said this, one does not have to wait for PJ64 1.7 before trying to make your own texture packs.

NoeOM · Jul 8, 2006

Standard, standard, standard

Nice to see you Rice,

as you an Jabo are currently doing a great effort for hires texture support in your plugins, I think you both may propose an "standard", speciall if, as you did, one if recognising each other's great ideas (such as the XML index) and trying to implement them.

This will help the texture paks makers to create packs that works with both plugins (and the new plugins to come!). It would be nice for the overall community and your efforts will be more productive.

There are "standards" for graphics plugin API, so several plugins works with several emulators. You (Rice and Jabo) may propose an "storage standard" for hires texture packs, so the same pack can be loaded by every plugin supporting hires.

Always IMHO, and very proud to say hello to you, Rice and Jabo.

but2002 · Jul 12, 2006

Rice, Are you going to Finish the Beta?

Does it make sense to still make texture packs for Rice?

For what plugin will your pack be released for?

1964/Rice

Project 64/Jaboo

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