Category: Research and Development

Here we go again! This is pretty much an update on what I have been doing over the last few months. Long story short, “real life” sucks. There is nothing but a bunch of work and school keeping me busy. I currently don’t have internet, television, or phone in my current apartment due to it being temporary for the next few weeks. Then I’m moving into a more “permanent” residence.

VeniceFX Progress:

• All players now sync correctly (less/no jumpiness via spectating at a distance)
• All sounds work properly when in free-cam mode
• Spectator mode re-implemented
• Xbox 360 controller support should work…(untested, no controller)
• Fixed bug preventing spectating a player
• Commands can be saved in a text document in BF3’s root directory for tweaking VeniceFX colors/plugins/commands
• Fixed click breaking everything
• Removal of the need of the Alt-Tab “fix”
• Ray-casting added to “jump” to a player
• First person spectating is experimental and may not work/crash
• Updated to work with the latest release.
• v4 uses 100% engine functions (using 100% engine functions means the code base shrank a great deal)
• Spectator text is now pretty 🙂

VeniceUnleashed:

• Soon “TM”
• Closer to completion than not
• Still being worked on
• Sorry for not more information

IceEditor:

• Backend code base has been re-designed to be closer to official DICE
• Will probably be re-done one more time to support BC2 and BF4
• Light BF4 support added
• More ITexture/Data->Raw formats added (Now supports DXT1,2,3,5, ARGB8)
• Decompiling original map support added
• Decompiling some patch’s support added
• Delta patching experimental code first success.
• Decompiling a map broke once more
• UI re-design. (Thanks to rukqoa)
• SHADOW implementation

Any other questions or concerns, just leave a comment below.

As many of you may have seen, I started working with DirectX 11 and Battlefield 3 to create some modified textures etc. Primarily for movie/machinima makers. The project has changed from TeamCanineConfig to venicefx for the updated framework and using quite a few engine features in Frostbite 2. Here are a few videos that show off the features so far.

EDIT: The newest video of VeniceFX is up, it will use everything through console commands. Thanks DICE for re-implementing that 😉

Continue reading “VeniceFX – Progress Update 2, 3 & 4”

I will try to do my best to update this with most of my newest research as I continue on with the project. I plan on making beloved Mod Tools for Bad Company 2. So far we can remove the “safe play area” so you can go exploring outside of the map with no problems. I do think something similar will be done for Battlefield 3 (Frostbite 2 Engine) but you never know. So far from what I can tell most of the files are way different and look just like raw data at a glance. (I will post/talk about my Battlefield 3 Venice Mod Tools at a later date).

It seems like no body has really taken a crack at the game files. Or if they did, its incorrect except for 1 or 2 items, which won’t cut it at all. So far my current tool does not extract all the files that are found inside of the fbrb archive. It extracts the majority of them which is a hell lot more than what I can say for other bms scripts. (~39 Files :: ~10MB of data???? wtf, versus ~348 Files :: ~90MB of Data)

        struct fbrb_header
        {
            public char[] m_magic; // "FbRB"
            public int m_firstFileSize;
        }

        struct fbrb_containerHeader
        {
            public int m_version;
            public int m_fileNameTableSize;
            // String Data Here
            public int m_numFiles;
            // Not part of struct, adding for ease
            public List szItems;
        }

        struct containerHeader_Item
        {
            public int m_fileNameOffset;
            public int m_fileFlags;
            public int m_fileDataOffset; // Inside Data Container
            public int m_fileDataSize; // Inside Data Container
            public int m_fileDataSize_1; // Unknown
            public int m_fileTypeOffset; // Read As String to Figure out what kind
            // Not part of struct, adding for ease
            public string szFileType;
            public string szFileName;
        }

Thats all for now folks.

Thanks to many people that have helped me out along the way with either the database work, online server work, and random bugs that occur in Halo 2 and C++ in general. I finally got a build of breeze working that will fetch the rank off of a server and continue to run. After a few bug fixes are implemented and some configurations can be made there will be a private release of Breeze to a select few server administrators. You as the client need to do nothing but join a Breeze Enabled server and just play normally. You will not need any modifications to your game in any way. There will be a few patches made available for the mainmenu to re-align the rank symbols and other various fixes, but as the video below shows it will run on a vanilla Halo 2 Vista.

Continue reading “Breeze – Halo 2 Rank System Update 2, 3, & 4”

So far, this is a work in progress. Thanks to fatboy88 from uc-forum for helping me along with the reversing even though I am currently reversing from a laptop that can barely run Battlefield 3. I want a beta of this to be available for the public when BattleRecorder drops for Batlefield 3. This will give you Wireframe mode, Anti-Aliasing tweaks and some of the color correction issues that you can do with the FXAA Injector. I will have more later, but for now here is some screenshots.

Continue reading “TeamCanineConfig – Battlefield 3 Movie Config”