This post is going to be confusing and probably boring for most people.

In the last two weeks I have been going hard making new and upgrading old textures from Mission K (the Steiner parking garage).  This mission in one of those downloadable Sierra missions that wasn't released on the original v1.0 game disc.  You can see a list of these maps in our forums here.

I am working towards a new release of the mod.   Since the release of the previous beta the only thing I have been working on is the upgrading of textures.

One thing that these downloaded Sierra missions have in common is that they don't always follow the naming convention for textures established in the original disc released missions.   The "disc" maps have textures that start with a letter prefix of the map (all mission A textures start with "a_" in the name and all mission B textures start with a "b_" in the name, etc).  The downloadable missions break this naming convention and often have no prefix (they might just call a texture "car" or "vent" for example).

This has the potential for causing texture name conflicts.

Now to the point of this post.  I am getting ready to compile all the new Last Resort textures for release and it is starting to get messy trying to keep them all sorted.   Some maps share the exact same texture so I started wondering if I could just lump all the new textures into one giant folder.  Any duplicates would just get overwritten thus making it easy to ensure each texture is only included once in the final release.  The question is will this have a negative affect on the performance of Swat 3?

This got me thinking that I don't really understand how Swat 3 handles textures.  Over the years I have just made basic assumptions that seem to work.

How does Swat 3 load textures?

When the game first starts up there is a loading progress bar.  What is it doing exactly?  We know for sure it has to be loading in the 2D menu graphics and the game's user interface but does that also mean it is loading in all the game textures all at once into memory?   Does it instead just compile a list of map texture names for later loading?

When we start to play a map we again see a load screen before entering the 3D part of the game.  What exactly is happening in this second load screen? Is this actually when the map textures are loaded into video memory?

The reason why I am asking these question is because the Last Resort mod is increasing the sizes of these textures 2 to 4 times their original size.  Will we eventually hit a wall with regular memory or video memory?  Does the game even care about folders in .ZIP files and .RES files or does it automatically lump everything into memory anyways?

I was chugging out a ton of fancy new HD textures on the mod the last month and started to prepare the files for a new release.   Progress was going well.  Then Starfield was released.

As a huge Fallout fan and Sci-fi fan in general this game is right up my alley.   I can't stop playing it!   Part of me hopes I will get burnt out with the game soon and return to working on the mod.

Since I am so slow at working on this mod I have to worry about hard drives failures and the possibility of losing work.   I use the Windows feature called "File History" to backup my Last Resort files and have trusted it for years.

A few months ago I switched to Windows 11 and just assumed this File History feature would carry over from the upgrade from Windows 10.   Today I had something in the back of my head nagging me to check that all was working fine.   It appears that Microsoft has changed how File History works and has basically crippled the interface for it.  Ugh!  I don't think I can trust this to back up my files going forward and need to look for an alternative method.

On a more positive note I tackled upgrading a few more textures in the Bank map for Swat 3 the last few days.  The next release should include a substantial amount of texture upgrades to the game and finally start to justify the purpose for the mod.

As you may be aware of NeuWon has been down for a while now.    Just when I was about to declare it officially dead I notice that the owner has paid to renew the domain names Neuwon.com and Nuwon.net for another two years.

This is potentially good news to the Swat 3 community since the NeuWon network can be used to play Swat 3 online just like the old days.

All hope is not lost.

I have been concentrating on finishing up texture work on Mission B - Ghetts House.   A lot of the more difficult textures I have avoided and left for the end.  Procrastination is my super power.

Swat 3 has a lot of duplicate and re-used textures in the maps.  For instance b_door.bmp might be the same in many other maps except renamed c_door.bmp or d_door.bmp depending on the mission name.   Right now I am also cross referencing the names of all the new textures I have made over the years and copying them into other maps that use these duplicate textures.

I have a database that I created of all the texture names in the official Swat 3 maps so it is easy enough to do a search for these duplicate textures.  The only complication comes from the maps released at the end of Swat 3's life because they break the naming conventions of the earlier maps (ie Civil Unrest, Abandoned, etc).