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 textures, decorations etc. An added complication exists in that imports are referenced via the archive filename, minus extension. So no two unreal archives can share the same base filename as they would conflict and one would be inaccessible.

We have a good texture artist on the team who has produced (and continues to produce) a number of texture packages. Unfortunately some of those texture packages have ended up needing to be renamed. Worse, some of our maps already depend on the texture packages in question. Up until now the only way to fix this has been for the mapper to load the map in UnrealEd and manually switch all the textures involved, then close and reopen UnrealEd and reload the map to check that the dependency on the old texture package had been removed. Any decorations that used old packages would need to be rebuilt completely.

Since this is obviously undesirable, and since I already had a lot of the base code written from other utilities, I decided to put together a small utility to automate the replacement of packages. The first version went together really quickly but unfortunately I'd not accounted for one thing. If the map uses a texture from the package being replaced for which there is no equivalent texture with the same name in the replacement package you end up with the default texture. The mapper would then have to go through the map after replacement looking for default textures and manually replacing them, which would be no better and maybe even worse than replacing all the textures manually to start with. So I've been working to identify such situations and require a replacement texture to be specified. It's taking longer than I'd hoped but I'm getting there. By the time Battle for Na Pali is finished we shall probably have quite an extensive set of tools available to us.

In other news, deque is now officially pronounced "de-queue" in the UK and not "deck". I was talking about deques at work and, thinking to err on the side of caution used the (apparently) more common pronunciation - "deck". Nobody had a clue what I was talking about until I switched to my normal pronunciation - "de-queue". So there you have it. I do love working for a British company. Colour and normalise are spelt correctly and now even deque is pronounced correctly. On the flip side, if I ever work for an American company I'm going to lose a good few percent productivity just through all the misspellings I'll make!

?nigma