The Enigma Code

I'm currently working on yet another tool to grease the wheels of the Team UnrealSP content pipeline. The latest problem is texture packages. For those unfamiliar with the Unreal archive format each unreal archive file list a number of exported objects and a number of imported objects. So a map file will export the geometry of the map and import...

Sorry you didn't get a journal entry last week, I've been pretty busy recently and struggling to get back in the swing of writing weekly journal entries since the big GDNet downtime (It's all their fault really, not just me being bone-idle).

Not really much I can talk about at the moment. I'm seriously looking forward to reaching the point where I can...

This journal entry was written a fortnight ago, but couldn't be posted then due to GameDevs downtime. Not much of interest has happened between then and now so I'm posting this old entry tonight and will get back on track next week.

Saving vertices in the problem map turned out not to be possible. Various possible workarounds were mooted, but before...

I spent my free time this week modifying my old Unreal map reader so that it could rebuild the file after parsing it into memory. I then went about investigating whether those vertices I thought were unused really were redundant. Unfortunately it turns out they aren't. I'd forgotten about the completely brain-dead manner in which Unreal handles its...

One of Team UnrealSPs mappers came across an interesting problem this weekend. We already knew about UTs zone limit (64, because a zone mask is stored in a 64 bit integer) and bsp node limit (65535, because bsp node indices are stored in unsigned shorts) but now for the first time we've hit the vertex limit. The limit is 128 000, which seems a little...

I've finished (the first pass of) my Jpeg2000 loader. I think I'm going to opt to call it Jackknif. That's Jackknife, the only English word I could find which contains a 'J' followed by two 'k's (J2K, get it?), with the e knocked off to indicate that it's not a complete implementation. Yes, there is method to my madness (or should that be madness to...

I've broken the back of the Jpeg2000 decoding algorithm. What really rankles is that all the publicly available implementations are at least a hundred thousand lines of code and my nearly complete implementation (admittedly with only a subset of the functionality) is only just about the hit a thousand lines. Here's what I have so far, the first...

Not really much to talk about what with Christmas and the new year. I've spent a little free time looking further into Jpeg2000 over the last couple of weeks. I'm now trying to get my head round entropy decoding and the MQ arithmetic decoder. I printed out 22 pages of source code to take away with me over Christmas. I think I understand enough about the...