My kid, who goes by the name Noisy, has been working on upgrading the SCN Editor for Swat 3 for a while now.   This tool is very useful for this mod when upgrading the textures for Swat 3 and for fixing map mistakes.   An example of one of these mistakes is that sometimes the map makers would place a texture backwards.  Many of the original textures for the game were so low resolution that the developers didn't notice when they placed a texture backwards.   However when the texture gets replaced with a higher resolution version the error is very glaring.

Now with the SCN Editor I can flip a texture in a map and it won't break the lightmap.  Up until recently when we attempted this it would always break the light map and the texture would be rendered dark.

Thanks again Noisy for this great breakthrough!

Below are three images of textures from Swat 3's mission V known as the "Auto shop".

The first images demonstrates the size of the poster texture that can be found on the wall of the garage.  At just 128x128 pixels the details are completely lost.   When you view it in game stretched onto a wall it is just an absolute blurry mess.

The second image is using an "old school" AI upscaling software tool offered free on the internet.   Although the texture is now 512x512 it is garbled because the source texture had such limited detail.

The bottom image is using modern AI processing available today.   The AI did an amazing job of figuring out what each of the pixels represent and pulled the appropriate image from it's training. 

The AI even did a pretty good job of identifying text from the 128x128 pixel image considering how low of a resolution it was.  I had to take the image into Photoshop though to clean up some mistakes.  To be completely honest I thought the original poster texture was for some country and western musical concert.  It wasn't until I saw what the AI produced that I realised the true subject of the poster.

You may have noticed a few weeks of this website being down.   I tried to update the software and it failed badly (giving a ton of errors).   Since it was the holidays I was too busy with family things to focus on it and deal with restoring the website.

Sorry for that.   My fault for not reading the instructions better, lol.

The website is now fully updated.  Please let me know if you see any funky stuff happening.

I have released version 0.8.7 of the Last Resort mod containing a ton of new textures for Mission S (City Hall). It also contains some lighting fixes for Mission A (Martin Brenner's House).

General Fixes:
- Fixed lighting issues in Mission A (Martin Brenner's house)
- Updated AccountWizard.ini file for NuWon
- Updated game executables for NuWon
- Removed some duplicate textures in the .zip mod file

Mission S - City Hall changes:
- Added many new high resolution textures for mission S (City Hall)
- Fixed many misaligned textures (resized and/or moved)
- Fixed missing office 2502 door plate
- Fixed office 2402 door plate decal from showing twice
- Fixed 3 decals buried into office walls and never displayed before
- Removed 4 unused duplicate decal36 entities from .scn

Download the latest version of the mod here.

 ** Currently Nuwon is down but it is being worked on.  I will let you know when the game server is up for testing.

Nuwon.net

As mentioned in my last blog post the Nuwon.net website is back up.   Nuwon was a replacement for the original Won network and allowed us to play Swat 3 in multiplayer just like the golden years.

Recently I joined their discord and was trouble shooting with Ben, the owner of Nuwon, how to get the Swat 3 servers back online.   We were able to get the authentication certificate for the servers working which is a great first step.    I had to modify the game executable a little (to reflect the new server changes) but was partially able to get the server list.   It looks like we are getting close to being able to test out the Swat 3 game server once again.

Hopefully in a few weeks it will be back up and running (with luck).

Website template

This website runs on software that needs to be upgraded by this October to the latest version since my current version will no longer get security updates.  This also means that I have to start fresh with a whole new custom made template.

I expect the software upgrade won't be much of a hassle but making a new template will be a real chore.   If in the future you visit this website and it looks like ass for a few weeks/months you will know why.   I wasn't hacked.  It is just me slowly making a new template.

Vacation

Near the beginning of May I am off to (hopefully) sunny Dominican Republic for a week.   Don't expect much work being done around this time (before and after).   I am pretty excited due to the fact that this is only my second trip to the Caribbean.  We pick May to go on vacation due it being a lot cheaper in the start of the off season but the down side is that there is more of a risk of rain.   I will drink a few Mojitos on your behalf and promise not to pee too much in the Caribbean sea.