Legendary Explorer 6.5 Changes

[Mgamerz]

Legendary Explorer 6.5 nightlies have a very large set of changes that may impact the way you work on things. If you want to continue to use the old way of things, please use Stable release 6.4.1.

This is not the changelog for the version of LEX after 6.4.1. This is for developer reference of changes to the Nightly branch on 10/06/2024.

NOTE: These are nightlies that haven't been tested. Due to the scope of changes there are very likely to be issues, especially in Asset Viewer and Live Level Editor. The interop features are very time consuming to test and fix so if you depend on these, and they are not functioning properly for you, please use Stable.

New features

• AssetViewer tool allows you to view various assets in-game, such as particle systems, meshes, and animations. You can click the 'play' button in Asset Database to trigger an asset to preview in-game. This is not 100% reliable at this time. This only works for LE games and will be expanded upon in the future.
• Static Lighting Importer - You can now import static lighting from UDK into Persistent level packages. Documentation on how to bake lighting will come in the future when export and baking in UDK is more stable. Right now this is an experiment in Package Editor
• Material Editor now replaces the Material tab in Asset Database, allowing you a more GUI-based view of materials. This will be updated in the future with more useful information, as some is not shown. This also can be used to edit materials in Package Editor and Live Level Editor
• Live Level Editor can now edit materials in-game, though the user experience currently is rather poor. You must select an actor, then select the material tab, then select the component, then select the material from the dropdown. Make sure to turn on live preview for it to work. This feature is very complicated under the hood and will certainly have issues
• New shader tools have been added - search for shader by HLSL code, HLSL syntax highlighting, import shader. These are in the Shader tab (formerly 'Material'). LE shaders are now decompiled to HLSL, with assistance from Nanuke.
• Experiment: Generate text mesh. You can generate meshes that have text like many wall textures do for levels using the experiment in Mgamerz' menu. This isn't perfect, and was only tested on LE3.

Changes

• LE1 supports sequence frames in Sequence Editor (hopefully)
• Sequence Editor how shows FloatList as a list, like ObjectList
• Exporting levels to UDK using the UDKify experiment now requires you to have a decooked copy of the game. This feature is not yet complete, please continue to use stable for this in the meantime
• WwiseBank parsing has been greatly improved for LE under the hood
• Performance improvements due to use of new TieredPackageCache
• All LE3 shader parameter maps have been serialized - we now have full serialization for LE3 shader caches. This does not directly have any impact but will enable future features.
• New Package Editor icons for DecalMaterial, MaterialInstanceConstant exports
• Live Level Editor and other tools that interop with the games no longer write to disk. Files are directly sent via interop into the game

Bugfixes

• Memory leak fixes for Sequence Editor
• Optimizations to cloning sequences
• Soundpanel works better with ISACT audio created by modders. The ISACT version we use is slightly different than BioWare's fork
• Fix Sequence Editor 'Create Input' not setting the label
• Lots of fixes and improvements for parsing UDK data
• Fix terrain material binary serialization
• Performance improvements when performing binary interpreter scans, especially for RefShaderCache.
• Fix application crash when converting texture in multi-thread scenarios

Legendary Explorer Core

• Tons of new sequence object creation methods were added to make designing sequences in code much easier
• Lots of changes to relinker to support scenarios such same-file relink (useful for repointing to another entry), resolving imports when moving under other parents, etc