Hello there! Since Wald Deliglide is away on vacation, I'll be posting this 3-month status update.
Particle Effects
By Wedo Wrixbreather
We have just over 3000 particle effects in the XML format which the ForgeLight game engine stored them in. These files include things such as any explosion effect found in the game, most minigame powerups, and most weapon effects like muzzle flashes. Unity has no support for importing files of this type into it's own particle effect system and manually translating these files into the Unity equivalent would take hundreds of hours.
In an effort to avoid such a large amount of manual work, we are working on a tool to parse the original particle system files and convert/import them directly into Unity. Once complete, the tool will allow us to import all 3000+ original particle effects into Unity in seconds with a very high level of fidelity to the original game.
At present moment, all of the content from the original files is understood and about 75% of it is supported by our tool. The final 25% of the implementation is bringing some new challenges as some of the content is not directly supported in Unity such as emitting particles from a character skeleton, or an elliptical orbit of particles so we are having to figure out ways to support some of the ForgeLight particle modifiers within Unity.
Attached are GIFs showcasing some examples of these converted particles.
Rails (Splines)
By Jam
The ForgeLight engine utilized rails for pathing, cameras, and, potentially, some other functions.
Notable use-cases for the rails include nearly all moving objects in Republic Defender and Starfighter, as well as several background objects in maps such as moving vehicles and cameras.
The majority of the data for rails was included in the client pack files, and using the information available to us, we have modified an existing Unity Package to suit our needs.
Using our map importer, we can visualize the rails (sorted into geometry IDs, which group rails together into groups that would be used on a single map) and compare this to existing footage to determine which map each group belongs to. Fortunately, we have already determined which map the majority of the rails belong to.
There are also a special kind of rail referred to as relative rails. We believe that they spawn in relative to either an existing rail point or the player position. The unfortunate part is that we don't know when or where exactly they are used, except for the fact that they were only used in the Starfighter minigame. We can only visualize them all and match them up to existing footage, until more is known.
Attached is an unfinished video demonstration of the rails in Level 1 of Starfighter and screenshots of Unity Editor showing what it might look like in a more generic map, such as JediTemple.
Closing Thoughts
By Jam
Ordinarily, I don't write these closing thoughts sections, so bear with me here.
In general, the sentiment has remained the same as the previous update. However, there have been numerous background and/or infrastructure changes, and we are steadily working on getting all the individual pieces together to create the bigger picture. So, there are less of the aforementioned blockers and we are steadily making progress. Additionally, since the previous update, we have also introduced two new developers!