GTAV to Renderware Problems Part1

The time has passed and things changes, especially in technology. Rockstar Games improved the Grand Theft Auto graphics creating their own engine called RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine) with new formats in its assets adding nice effects like bunp maps and specular with high quality assets (3d models, textures, FX Effects) increasing the requirements to run the newer games. As you may know, Rockstar used in GTAIII Era Games the old but good Renderware Engine optmized for Play Station 2 and Xbox.

A lot of modders and fans did some conversions of RAGE assets to old Renderware with success, especially in the game GTA San Andreas (PC DVD Edition) that had better limits and other limits hacked, to handle RAGE assets originally with its limitations like:

No vertex colors blend materials
No bump maps: normal map
No specular map or good reflection (can be better with mods like ENB Series)
No height map (especially used for terrain effects)
Vertex Alpha blend with a lot of bugs and limitations

The first bad thing you notice in the GTAV's San Andreas map to Renderware is the lot of ugly faces over the models that we have in the conversion YDR > DFF 3d format are the decal shaders with vertex alpha blend (can keep it, but old GTA San Andreas has bugs with it) and Renderware Engine has problems to render multiple vertex alpha blend because of Alpha Draw Order. The Skygfx graphic pluging has a fix for dual pass alpha that fix some bugs. 

The second very bad thing is the fact that RAGE use terrain shaders, that mix with blend of vertex colors that without it, the materials or textures in Renderware looks not connected. I don't know if merging materials of terrains like by its type like grass to grass, dirt to dirt... would fix it in some cases, but will need a lot of work.

The third thing is the texture name length of texture that Rockstar put limit in DFF and TXD by 31 characters. There are two ways to fix this renaming the materials and textures removing the extra characters, or using hash name generator. Think that only removing the extra characters of textures would give texture merging materials ex:

Here we have 31 characters limit in texture name:

grass_texture_land_green_dark_tall_09.dds
renamed to
grass_texture_land_green_dark_t.dds

Look that we lose the _09 suffix that is important to not have wrong textures assigned to the model.

Bug we can removing the first characters keeping the suffix, that is better way to deal with it. Ex:

grass_texture_land_green_dark_tall_09.dds
renamed to
_texture_land_green_dark_tall_09.dds

With this way, we can almost not have merged materials, but we have to be careful with different preffix.