Natural Selection 2 MeshTool

Posted on May 20, 2014

Not sure what the devs were thinking when they engineered the model format for this game. Their vertex buffer structure is 92 bytes long which could of easily been around 40 if they actually utilized common compression techniques like compressing the UVs into halffloats or store bone indices as bytes instead of 32bit integers. Anyway I don’t think anyone cares thats reading this so I’ll stop bitching.

Whats Included?

  • meshtool.exe
  • XY_Fix.ms
  • Mesh2Obj.bat
  • Mesh2Smd.bat
  • (bunch of txt files)

Instructions:

I’ve included some batch files to help ease the use since this is a command line tool it may be difficult for some people that aren’t very competent with computers, well actually I have no idea why you would even use this tool if you have no clue on how to use command line applications.

If you want the output to be an obj mesh just drag and drop a .model file onto the Mesh2Obj.bat it should then create an output folder with the resulting mesh. Same applies for the Mesh2Smd.bat just dragdrop onto it.

For more info on the usage of the tool just run the exe and it will give you the usage commands I don’t go through it because the Readme.txt has all the info you need.

As for the Maxscript file XY\_Fix.ms it can be used with 3DS Max to fix the rotation of the models if you’re exporting to SMD since it defaults to the Maya method (Y is Up/Down). Though please note some models may break if bones are not linked properly.

Lastly I’d like to thank chrrox for his help with this.

Download:

NS2_Meshtool_v1.zip