GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[jan]

Hi Everyone,

this is my first post here, so: Hi!

First of all: this place is amazing!
Back when I was 14 (or so), i played Goldeneye to death.
Even though I am not a big "Gamer" GE has a very special plac ein my heart and is arguably the game i have played - by far - the most in my life. I don't regrett a single second of that. Me and my Friends meet to this day over Christmas to spend the better part of a night playing away on GE (and occasionally MarioKart .
It is really mindblowing for me to see a group of people like you guys that keep this great game alive with such overwhelming passion!

When i was youg i also remember working with the UnrealEditor that shipped with Unreal Tournament and this probably eventually sparked my career in computer science
It was probably only a decade with the advent of really well working emulation for the N64 when I realized that and found that there is a lively modding/mapping scene for Goldeneye.
Over the last 10 years I have come back to this thought at least 3 times thinking: "Hey, it can't be too hard to create a custom map for Goldeneye"...

Now comes the sad part.
Somehow, I always got stuck at some point.
Now, please don't get me wrong, I don't want to complain, or anything, the work being done by this community (names like SubDragg keep popping up EVERYWHERE is nothing short of impressive!
However, I always got put off by the toolchains and the tediousness and somewhat lacking documentation of the tools that are needed to get a barebones level with one room and nothing else in it going.
I think these days this is even more of a problem since some of the websites that hold the respective information are half down or being rebuilt (or is it just me?).


I looked around a bit for the last days and I saw that there is an Obj exporter (looks like it applies some tweaks like rounding vertex locations, swapping some dimensions etc..). The exported files, however then need to be imported into the visual editor again where some further steps like clipping etc are being performed.

My first question is: what's the gap of doing more of that work in a tool like blender?
We could, for instance, somehow tag clipping geometry and use empties with a certain convention for something like spawn points etc..

I magine that, by this point, the map format and the inner workings of the GE rom are reverse engineered to a high level.
Another question I have: is this knowledge documented somehwhere? (back in the days i wrote a quake3 renderer and some people had already reverse engineered the map format way before the source code was released as open source)
The setup editor, for example can obviously read and write maps and inject them in a rom.
I am aware that there is probably quite a bit more to that process, like visibility precomputations and the likes.
In my oppion a better workflow, however, would be to do pretty much all modelling etc. in a tool like blender and the use the setup editor to pretty much only handle the injection, ideally without having to go through 30 more or less obscure steps .
Question: is the setup editor open source? i could not find anything.

I want to reiterate that I think this community is pulling of so much amazing stuff!
I just think it could have a lot more traction if we would improve the tools a bit and I would be happy to help out and am willing to invest time in this..

Sorry for the long read!
I would be happy if some of you could point me to some resources and maybe even join a discussion here.

[CrashOveride]

I highly suggest you join the N64 Vault Discord, it's easier to answer your questions and get you help there. https://discord.gg/Ha6Us26
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Playing old, low poly games since 2003

[MRKane]

There are lots of tutorials rattling around, and also plenty on the N64Vault website too. About the most up-to-date ones are being produced by Loofadawg with a strong focus on mapping in Blender and level generation. His youtube is here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeef0E4YcdzHMciLIDzApsw

But all up it's a very good idea to hop onto discord as you can get more immediate feedback too
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No Mr. Bond, I expect you to be re-coded!