NeuWon Not Dead Yet - July 13, 2023
As you may be aware of NeuWon has been down for a while now. Just when I was about to declare it officially dead I notice that the owner has paid to renew the domain names Neuwon.com and Nuwon.net for another two years.
This is potentially good news to the Swat 3 community since the NeuWon network can be used to play Swat 3 online just like the old days.
All hope is not lost.
Write comment (0 Comments)More Texture Work - June 6, 2023
I have been concentrating on finishing up texture work on Mission B - Ghetts House. A lot of the more difficult textures I have avoided and left for the end. Procrastination is my super power.
Swat 3 has a lot of duplicate and re-used textures in the maps. For instance b_door.bmp might be the same in many other maps except renamed c_door.bmp or d_door.bmp depending on the mission name. Right now I am also cross referencing the names of all the new textures I have made over the years and copying them into other maps that use these duplicate textures.
I have a database that I created of all the texture names in the official Swat 3 maps so it is easy enough to do a search for these duplicate textures. The only complication comes from the maps released at the end of Swat 3's life because they break the naming conventions of the earlier maps (ie Civil Unrest, Abandoned, etc).
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Activision Shuts Down COD Mod Project
This story scares the crap out of me. A mod group called X Labs got a cease and desist letter from Activision and have deleted everything. While I know the Swat series is old and pretty much forgotten about compared to COD this is still my biggest fear that some uncaring lawyer is out for a notch on their belt.
It's also worth noting that X Labs was not distributing complete Call of Duty games—it was just a mod pack, meaning a normally-installed version of the game was required for it to work.
Hopefully the fact that Swat 3 hasn't had online servers in over a decade saves us from the hangman.
Write comment (2 Comments)Lack of activity - May 2, 2023
Sorry for the lack of activity lately. I am terrible at multi-tasking and have been busy getting ready for a week long vacation trip to the caribbean as well as various things that needed to be done around the apartment.
I haven't been out of the country since before Covid and I have never been to the caribbean so it is a big deal for me and the wife.
I really want to push out the next version of the mod after I get back so do not fear I will be back at work on it in a week's time.
Write comment (2 Comments)AI Upscaling Process - March 29, 2023
I am in the process of using AI software to upscale some of the textures for Swat 3. To keep costs low I am using free open source software that can be buggy and lacking features.
I was using Cupscale but that it hasn't been updated since 2001 and is pretty buggy. You can't rely upon it to work when you are in the mood to do textures.
Recently I switched to Upscayl that seems to be a lot more stable but has file format limitations (only PNG, JPG, WEBP). This means I am forced to convert the .BMP files to 24-bit .PNG files using FastStone Photo Resizer.
Upscayl comes with 3 models for upscaling that have proven useful: real-esrgan, remacri, and ultrasharp. Most times I use a combination of all 3 to make a single texture.
real-esrgan gives the best result generally but will frequently give strange artifacts in textures that have repetitive fine details. It also tends to make the texture look "plastic" and fine details will be lost. I will often delete parts of the image (or make it partially transparent) and use sections from the ultrasharp and remacri versions of the same texture.
the ultrasharp model creates a noisy texture with a lot of grain. I usually combine it with the remacri version to help keep details in the texture.
the remacri model is somewhere in between real-esrgan's plastic look and ultrasharp's grainy image.
Write comment (0 Comments)Forum Reactivated and File Uploads - March 20, 2023
I took the forum down for a few days when I noticed it was displaying birthdates that people provided in the forums. Perhaps it always did this and I never noticed. Either way it seems like a potential complaint from users who don't know that they would be public so I did an override on the template to hide them.
Since I am now paying for website hosting myself I have unlimited file space (in theory). I started to upload the custom chat mods into the file section that I had stored on my hard drive. This is a time consuming and boring task so expect me to do it slowly over a period of time.
One additional file that I recently uploaded was MPEG4 versions of the Swat 3 movies. The original movies that I re-encoded years ago were done in XVID format. The new MPEG4 versions are probably bigger but more compatible with modern versions of Windows. You only need to download these if you had problems still with the XVID versions.
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