Progress Blog

I am currently working on new high resolution textures for Mission G (the construction yard). The texture I have been specifically working on the last few days is a decal of the construction blueprint that is sitting on a table in one of the buildings. The original texture is so low resolution that it is a blurry mess and you can't even read the text on it. Very hard to re-create the texture when you can't even see it well.

I started to do research into blueprints and such so that what I add to the new texture is midly realistic.

While reading the game's mission description and listening to the load screen dialog I noticed that the developers made a mistake with the location of the construction yard. They mention in the text Corona Del Mar as the location but that is far on the east side and is completely off the Swat 3 map of LA. They also mention the "hyperion water treatment plant" and when you Google that the neighbourhood most famous for that is Playa Del Ray. This location actually matches with where they placed the mission dot on the LA map.

Sure this is a very minor thing that doesn't affect much. I will simply correct this in the mission description. I find this sort of mistake interesting...almost like Swat 3 trivia.

MissionG map

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Nvidia Driver Bug:

I just installed the latest Nvidia driver and it causes issues with the Last Resort launcher. The latest driver (version 560.70) seems to not report to Windows all the resolutions that are available. 640x480, 800x600, and 1366x768 are not being listed as available even though they are. I am hoping this is a temporary bug that will be fixed in the next driver release.

The Last Resort launcher at startup will cross references with Windows what resolutions the system can do. Originally back in the CRT days you could actually damage your monitor if you forced it into a resolution it couldn't handle. I started this mod so long ago that CRT monitors were still around so I wanted to be extra careful.

For now I recommend not upgrading to the latest Nvidia Driver if you want to use the Last Resort mod. This bug doesn't really affect you if you play Swat 3 in 1920x1080 in both 3D and 2D.

Revert back to the previous driver (v556.12) if you are having problems (using clean install option).

Mission G "Construction Yard" fix:

While I have been working on upgrading textures for Mission G (the construction yard) I was painfully reminded of the mistake the Sierra developers made in one of the buildings. While playing you or the officer AI would get stuck at the bottom of the stairs and couldn't get back up it. This stair bug could potentially prevent you from completing the mission if you got stuck.

Well, it looks like we finally have the perfect fix for this. My kid who goes by the gamer name "Noisy" has looked into modifying the brilliant SCNedit app that was originally made by AlienAbducter long ago. This tool allows us to modify already compiled maps. Noisy figured out how to modify the vertices, surfaces, and bounding boxes of the maps and has updated the SCNedit tool (will be released with this feature in the future).

In the screenshot below you can see how the SCNedit app was used to stretch the "invisible ramp" to make it easier for the AI and the player to climb the stairs. If this ramp is too steep the game characters can't climb it.

missiong stairs

Much thanks to Noisy for spending several days on this fix and of course AlienAbducter for his original work and source code.

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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).

MissionG 2

MissionG 3

MissionG 4 MissionG 1

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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:

Mission A fix with SCNedit

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.

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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.

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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.