Below are some of the new replacement textures included in the next release of the Last Resort mod.   For now I am concentrating on making new textures for a single mission at a time and then releasing them as an update to the mod.   I am currently working on Mission G (the construction yard).

While I have been working on new textures for the Last Resort mod my son has updated an invaluable tool that we use called "SCNedit".   This tool was originally made by the brilliant community member AlienAbductor back in 2010 as a way of making edits to compiled Swat 3 maps.    My son, who goes by the name Noisy, is a much better coder than I am and recently has updated it so he could compile it using Microsoft Visual C++.  He has of course also added a few more features.

Below is a screenshot of one of these new features and how it helps the Last Resort mod:

As you can see in these screenshots of Mission A (the Martin Brenner map) the original developers made a mistake and made it so that the front fence doesn't cast a shadow on the grass and the rock path.  While this is a minor mistake it is something that has always bugged me with this map.    With version 0.4.6 of the SCNedit app we can edit the flag assigned to the grass geometry and to the rock pathway geometry so that they both receive a shadow from the fence.

An updated version of Mission A with this fix will be released in the next version of the Last Resort mod.   We will also be releasing version v0.4.6 of SCNedit in the future for mod makers.

I am getting very close to releasing a new beta with a lot of new replacement map textures.   I am hoping to get it out before Christmas but I don't want to make a promise since of course it is a busy time of year.  It may be early January instead.

I just finished down converting all the bitmap textures to 8-bit dithered images of 256 colours.   Why you may ask?   Swat 3 runs in 16-bit colour mode in Windows which only gives a maximum of 65,536 colours.  With Bitmap images (.bmp files) you only have two choices.    You can have either 8-bit images (256 colours) or 24-bit images (16.7 million colours).    I have a theory that using 24-bit images leads to horrible colour banding in the game since it can't handle the extra colours.    When they released all the original maps with Swat 3 they did exactly this (down converted to 256 colour images).

The added benefit to using only 256 dithered colours is that the file sizes are about 50% smaller so I assume it will allow the game to run on video cards with limited VRAM.

Don't worry though.   I am keeping all the textures on my hard drive backup in full colour 24-bits in case somehow we magically figure out how to hack the game into giving a larger range of colours.

Below are examples of some of the new textures I am working on for Mission T (the hospital).

Most textures are too low of a resolution to simply run it through AI software to get newer higher quality textures. It turns into a melted looking mess that doesn't really contain any more detail than when you started. Some of Swat 3's original textures are only 64 or 128 pixels.

Lately I have been using reverse image search websites to find source material. Once I find an acceptable images to pull from I sometimes combine it with the AI upgraded version of the Swat 3 texture.

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This post is going to be confusing and probably boring for most people.

In the last two weeks I have been going hard making new and upgrading old textures from Mission K (the Steiner parking garage).  This mission in one of those downloadable Sierra missions that wasn't released on the original v1.0 game disc.  You can see a list of these maps in our forums here.

I am working towards a new release of the mod.   Since the release of the previous beta the only thing I have been working on is the upgrading of textures.

One thing that these downloaded Sierra missions have in common is that they don't always follow the naming convention for textures established in the original disc released missions.   The "disc" maps have textures that start with a letter prefix of the map (all mission A textures start with "a_" in the name and all mission B textures start with a "b_" in the name, etc).  The downloadable missions break this naming convention and often have no prefix (they might just call a texture "car" or "vent" for example).

This has the potential for causing texture name conflicts.

Now to the point of this post.  I am getting ready to compile all the new Last Resort textures for release and it is starting to get messy trying to keep them all sorted.   Some maps share the exact same texture so I started wondering if I could just lump all the new textures into one giant folder.  Any duplicates would just get overwritten thus making it easy to ensure each texture is only included once in the final release.  The question is will this have a negative affect on the performance of Swat 3?

This got me thinking that I don't really understand how Swat 3 handles textures.  Over the years I have just made basic assumptions that seem to work.

How does Swat 3 load textures?

When the game first starts up there is a loading progress bar.  What is it doing exactly?  We know for sure it has to be loading in the 2D menu graphics and the game's user interface but does that also mean it is loading in all the game textures all at once into memory?   Does it instead just compile a list of map texture names for later loading?

When we start to play a map we again see a load screen before entering the 3D part of the game.  What exactly is happening in this second load screen? Is this actually when the map textures are loaded into video memory?

The reason why I am asking these question is because the Last Resort mod is increasing the sizes of these textures 2 to 4 times their original size.  Will we eventually hit a wall with regular memory or video memory?  Does the game even care about folders in .ZIP files and .RES files or does it automatically lump everything into memory anyways?