MM2 65k vertice limit...

[zoot]

Hey all. I think I have found out why MM2 has a 65k vertex limit.

I suspect that MM2's *.pkg format is heavily based on the *.3ds format, which Autodesk Studio DOS used before 1996. The *.3ds format has a vertex limit of 65536 vertices.

* 65536 (2 ^16) is the number of different values representable in a number of 16 binary digits, also known as a short integer in many computer programming systems

* The number of vertices and polygons per mesh is limited to 65536.

Also, I must assume, that, like Driver 1, MM2 has a memory limit. This can be fixed. But only by partially reprogramming the game. This has been done by Someone972 for Driver 1. It may not be possible for MM2, though. Makes sense?

[aaro4130]

I'll verify how much is based off of 3ds (EDIT: Close to 80%). And mm2 reprogramming is impossible.

[HummersRock]

I thought Riva beat this limit.

[Kunal2045]

I thought Riva beat this limit.

Indeed, I was thinking the same thing.

[RacingFreak]

The story with Driver is different, by far Driver is the only game from whole Driver series that can be modified on model side. But it originally has limit to 260 (citation needed), but the limit is increased to 1000+ (another citation needed) using Jeff's (someone972) obj importer. There's nothing in the re-programming, tho. It's more in additional files that expand the memory.

But the thing leads to that there's a hope that Driver's original developers still have game's code and files (proof is the iPhone release from 2009), unlike Midtown Madness and Angel Studios.

And even Martin Edmondson (part of Reflection's team) was impressed when he saw the modifications done for Driver.

I know that the above is a bit off, but I think 65k is enough for old game like MM2. It's even a lot.

[Riva]

I've wrote a reminder few years ago about the famous 65k limit for a single mesh, limited in general by Direct3D (ZModeler and MM2 in this case).

There's not a limit for the polygons (except your rig) because the complexity of MM2 is based on two details :

• You can't exceed 65.000 vertices per single mesh object (BODY_H, WHL0_H:m e.g.) limited in general, by direct3D (ZModeler and MM2).
• Sometimes, even if the parts of your 3D mesh don't exceed 65k vertices, the fact is that there's too much details in one spot.

But ... (there's a but). By curiosity, I've checked two high poly models made by C

[Franch88]

What Riva wrote about the 65000 vertices limit issue was about the BODY_H object of a car for MM2, that can't exceed that number of vertices to work in-game. He explained a way to avoid this, that's by splitting parts of it as breakable objects. This limit affects all the objects, but when it happens most of the times it's only about the BODY_H object. However yes, there are some cars examples that exceed that number of vertices and have more than 100000 polygons, always only for the BODY_H object.
Essentially all depends by the way used to make the model: too much and little polygons concentrated in a part and also the polygons placement, I would say the one that looks like a web, will give problems for its working in-game; the polygons and vertices number doesn't really count. Curiously, when the modeling way is done so, only if the model is called BODY_H happen in-game working problems, not when it's called BREAK01_H:m, for example.

Here's what Midas said about this. The vertices and polygons limits are very high, but the game memory use limits and leaks because of how has been written the game engine can't allow the managing of an amount that can also be way less than that very high value. Then, the graphic cards of the year 2000 weren't powerful and advanced to manage many vertices and polygons, obviously.

Nothing special really. The PKG file format has already been cracked by fre_ber. Didn't look into it myself though.

Each LOD can have a maximum of 4 ^ 16 (4294967296 or 0x100000000) vertices because the number of vertices is actually stored in a long integer (4 bytes), not a short integer. So this means that there is a memory leak in MM2. The PKG file supports holding more vertices though... In my opinion this shouldn't be fixed as there is no need to have more vertices.

Also if you look at the PKG spec you can see that it isn't based on 3DS at all.

[Riva]

Thanks for the precision about the Midas' message Franch.

Indeed, it's so much amazing in 2011 with a pretty old video game, released eleven years ago to get so many very detailed addons (most of the time, a bit excessive for a video game ...).