Jesco Topp ( http://www.planetunreal.com/jtonline )

Andy Ford ( http://www.planetunreal.com/fordy )

Documentation (v2.2)

by Jesco Topp

 

I. Introduction

UTX-Viewer is a small program that enables you to generate previews of UT's textures and view them without having UnrealEd started or having to load the texture-packages into UnrealEd. It can also create .UTX packages.

It does this by reading the texture files directly without the need to extract to temporary locations. It also allows exporting of textures in JPEG or PCX or BMP formats and will display any selected texture tiled. AnimatedTextures are displayed in full animation. The full Delphi 3.0 source code is also included in the download.

 

This tool would not have been possible without the work of Antonio Cordero Balcazar, who cracked most parts of the Unreal-Package-Fileformat.

 

II. View Packages

You can change the preview folder by clicking on "Change Directory" (lower left) and selecting another folder.

The most left listbox shows all currently installed texture packages in the \Textures directory. Select one by left-clicking on it. The viewer now shows all textures in this package. You can scroll through them by using the scroll-bar on the right side of the previews. The listbox in the middle lets you select a specific internal group of the texture package.

You can search for texture packages using the Search option at the bottom of the window. Entering a text like "Nali" would bring up all packages with a Nali in their name, e.g. NaliCastle.utx and so on.

The package-info box shows the internal version number of the package (69 is the most current one, when using UnrealTournament), the number of internal groups (the [ALL] group is counted, too, although this group is not part of any package, this group is generated internally by the viewer), the total number of textures which can be previewed in this package and the size of the package.

By right-clicking on a specific texture you can 

a) show a TiledPreview, so you can see if a texture is seamless or not, 

b) show a fullsize preview of the texture (maximum preview size is 512*512, larger textures are scaled down), 

c) export the texture to .BMP or .PCX or .JPG . (the textures will be exported to the default export-folder as specified in the "Preference"-Tab)

d) view detailed infos on the current texture (and full animation if it's an animated one) ny clicking on "Show Texture Details".

 

III. Texture Details

The "Texture Details"-Tab automatically shows the selected texture (from the "View"-Tab via right-click).

If you select an AnimatedTexture the app automatically shows the texture full-animated. Just make sure you select the first frame of the AnimatedTexture, otherwise you won't see the whole animation, but only a part of it. When available, the app uses the FrameRate settings from the texture, but if there's no such information it renders with 25 fps.

The preview window uses OpenGL to display the texture. If you experience significant slow-downs when previewing AnimatedTextures, this might be due to the fact that your video-card doesn't support OpenGL windowed-rendering. In this case the app uses the software emulation which is by nature slower than any hardware acceleration.

 

IV. Create Packages

On this tab you can create your own texture-packages without UnrealEd or even an Unreal Technology Game installed on your HD.

You'll first need to create an internal group, before you can add textures. so, just click on "Add Group" and enter or select a proper group-name. The package may contain up to 127 different groups. Each group may contain contain up to 127 textures ( = 161239 textures in the whole package ;-)

To add a texture, click on "Add Texture" and the following dialog will popup.

The texture you want to add MUST be a 8 bit palettized .PCX image. The size MUST be a power of two, e.g. 256*256 or 64*128. Otherwise, the app will produce an error. The dialog supports multi-select, so you can add more than one texture at once. Furthermore, you can decide whether to add a texture to the package without closing the dialog ("Add to package") or to close the dialog after adding the texture ("Add to package and close").

After closing the dialog, you can decide whether the texture should have mipmaps or not and whether it should be masked or not.

When you are satisfied with your package-selection, hit the "Save"-Button and specify a name for the new texture package. The UTX-Viewer displays a progress bar at the bottom of the window.

The "Reset"-Button resets all settings. In addition to this, you must hit the reset button after you've got an exception, for example because you've used an invalid texture.

IMPORTANT NOTICE

The package-writer is experimental. The textures created with the UTX-Viewer may differ from those created with UnrealEd from case to case. This is due to the fact that the package-file format is still undocumented in most parts.

USE THE PACKAGE-WRITER AT YOUR OWN RISK.

 

V. Misc

The viewer has been tested with Unreal1, UnrealTournament, Deus Ex and the RuneDemo. Other games are unsupported and therefore it can't be garantued that they will work, but they should work.

The package-reader, which is used to preview the texture-packages, should work perfectly well with Unreal1, UnrealTournament, DeusEx and the RuneDemo. Although other Unreal Technology Games are untested, they should work, too. Same applies to MODs.

At the current state of development, UTX-Viewer DOES NOT support FireTextures, ScriptedTextures, IceTextures, WetTextures and WaveTextures. The compressed-textures from UT-CD #2 are unsupported, too. NormalTextures and NormalAnimatedTextures (read-only) are supported.

Some users reported problems when using Windows 2000 as Operating System. We can't check this, because neither Fordy not I have access to a Windows 2000 machine.

 

VI. Version History

Development of the UTX-Viewer started in August 2000.

2.2:

2.0: 

1.0: 

0.9b: 

0.9: 

0.7: 

0.6c: 

0.6b: 

0.6: 

VII. Contact Information

Jesco Topp

E-Mail: Jesco@planetunreal.com

Web: http://www.planetunreal.com/jtonline

Andy Ford

E-Mail: fordy@planetunreal.com

Web: http://www.planetunreal.com/fordy

 


UTX-Viewer 2.2 is (c) 2000-2001, Jesco Topp & Andy Ford

THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED UNDER THE GNU/GPL