@foone Cool that you got to be a part of it. I do open mic every once in a while with a 3d modeler who’s been working on that project. Last week’s open mic he was excitedly talking about driving to WA the next day for the wrap / ship party.
@foone reminds me of that one time some dude on irc asked me to decode a snippet of a x86 executable .. supposedly from canon fodder, and as far as i remember it was decompression code and i told them and it was apparently enough to be asked how to be mentioned in the credits... but i never heard of them again 🤷♀️ must have been between 2010 and 2016
The story is just that they were apparently having some trouble re-opening the original assets of Riven. Like, they had them all, but I guess it hadn't been well documented which version of the software they had used?
So they got in touch with me and I did some minor software archeology to figure out
Which version (of softimage, I think?) they were made in
How to convert that to something they could open in modern 3d software.
That was a couple hours of work a long while ago, and I didn't accept any fee from it, as I was just happy to help with such a classic series. I just hadn't heard anything about it since, so I wasn't sure I was going to be thanked in the credits, since who knows if my one bit of help got forgot in the shuffle?
okay I found my communication with someone from Cyan. It was indeed Softimage, which started as Softimage 3D, and then later became Autodesk Softimage.
I was contacted back in 2022, and I was able to load the Riven datafiles up in Softimage 3.7, then 4.0, and finally I confirmed that Autodesk Softimage|XSI 1.5 could import them (if not open them directly). Once imported into Softimage|XSI 1.5, they could be saved back out, and then Softimage 2015 (the latest (and last)) version could open them
So it was mainly just spelunking through old versions of the software on various XP VMs and trying to open the files, until I found an appropriate combination that let them be opened in something modern.
I got permission. Here's my first attempt: This is that 5-way rotating room near the start of the game, and I was able to open it in SoftImage 3D version 3.7 (in an XP VM). This is a version from 1997, so probably close to the original version they used to make the game.
I believe that was mainly for verification that I could open the files at all. Next I moved forward a few versions, up to SoftImage 3D 4.0, the last version before the SoftImage|XSI rebrand.
Then I moved to SoftImage|XSI 1.5. This version couldn't open the project, but I was able to make a new project and individually import the scenes/objects/textures/etc. This version is apparently a complete rewrite of the codebase, so it's a much more modern version of SoftImage.
So yeah! that was what I did, and what I gave to Cyan. They needed to import the files into SoftImage|XSI 1.5, then save out that project, then open it in SoftImage 2015. From there they could export into Blender or Unreal or whatever.
@foone It's hard to express how incredibly cool this is (to me). It's also cool to know that Cyan doesn't mind calling on the services of someone with a pride flag in their name.
@marcotietz ahh, no: that's actually for a different project. There were some softimage SDK files in the 3D Movie Maker source tree at microsoft, and I was trying to get permissions to release them alongside the rest of the source. I never got it, so those never got released
@Thorsted it was mainly just reading up on the history of the 3d software and locating a bunch of old versions and running them in VMs, until I could find a viable version and conversion chain