Restoring Beta Units to Editor

I know that Blizzard is no longer supporting any new Content for SC2 however I would appreciate it if we could get the rest of the old Beta units like the Shredder and Soul Hunter returned to the Editor, weapons and abilities included.

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I doubt it’s possible, but I would like it too.
I once searched for the Shuriken (a melee-type interceptor) image without finding it, so stuff is really thoroughly removed, but even if it’s not the full units, having the material for modders to recreate them would be good in itself, even if there’s no certainty one would make good and full use of it in a too near future.

For units like Shredder, these models still exists in the editor since they were in beta of post year 2010. About units like Shuriken, well those units were in alpha so if they didn’t add it to starcraft 2 liberty campaign mod, then is most likely lost. At the moment I am trying to restore old Battle cruiser model from beta which has few more animations than the current one, such as B animations (battle cruiser with missile pods) a C animations (battle cruiser with defensive matrix), but that model is in old beta format MD33, if you how to easily convert them from MD33 to MD34, please reply and I will share the results happily with the community.

Can you post an example of a model in MD33? Also where did you get the Beta files from?

Where did i get the file, well since i was the participant of WoL Beta, i had the game and to my luck i did not erased the installer, unlike the beta game. For example of beta model here is link to google drive with Marauder drive.google.com/file/d/10NxGlp7EOhd4ubv5fsSzA-2basR_yhi1/view?usp=sharing. I will also redirect you to this sc2 mapster page which contains infested queen model, I can confirm that that model do exists in the starcraft 2 beta mpq and do have the same size and are binary same so link is sc2mapster.com/projects/sc2betaass.

I did take a look, and difference between the formats wasn’t signficiant. I made a small script to convert these models to MD34. You can get it here.
https://github.com/SC2Mapster/m3addon
In general this is a plugin for Blender to import m3 models - which as of right now also supports MD33, but I’ve noticed some issues with Queen in particular occurring when model is converted into something Blender can work with.
So if you don’t need to actually edit the models, and only make them compatible with current version of SC2 then I’d recommend using standalone script that’s part of the repository MD33ToMD34.py.

You’ll need Python3 to run it. You can get it here:
https://www.python.org/downloads/ - 3.9 version is fine.

$ python MD33ToMD34.py --help
usage: MD33ToMD34.py [-h] [-O OUTPUT_DIRECTORY] src [src ...]

Convert Starcraft II Beta model (MD33) to its supported variant (MD34)

positional arguments:
  src                   source .m3 file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -O OUTPUT_DIRECTORY, --output-directory OUTPUT_DIRECTORY
                        output directory for converted m3 files

To convert the model you’ll have to open command prompt and call the script as such:
python MD33ToMD34.py test/md33/Marauder/Marauder.m3
It’ll print something akin to:

test/md33/Marauder/Marauder.m3 -> test/md33/Marauder/Marauder_MD34.m3

Where test/md33/Marauder/Marauder_MD34.m3 will be the converted version of the model.

Preview of Marauder: https://i.imgur.com/MRxxOx0.png

It’s quite likely that further adjustments will be required in order to support all other models. And I can make it happen but you’ll need to deliver the models :stuck_out_tongue:

Oh thanks a lot, since it works as suppose. I agree it needs further adjustments since i run that script upon all of the available .m3 file in beta assets. Thus to greatly accelerate your work i will share all of the assets + list of models which failed to be converted by your scripts. Its in zip (compressed as much as possible) file encrypted and protected with password which is your username (aka “Talv”). & once again thanks for your work. Link is https://drive.google.com/file/d/1px5mDFzhAFSm5RUeZg2T2t9FaPbXXnRd/view?usp=sharing
Also here is nice preview of your nice work :smiley: https://imgur.com/a/Kgl7XCo

Seems like more than half is working already - that’s not bad I guess :stuck_out_tongue: I’ll try to fix the rest sometime this week.
Some of these use really old data formats for stuff like particles, so it’s gonna take a bit to understand the differences.

Alright, it’s done - no more errors. Link to the script is the same.
Although it seems like a lot of models which previously failed conversion due to ancient data structures (ThorTech.m3 ; Infestor.m3 etc.), are also not being loaded by current version of SC2/SC2Editor.

I might take a look at these some other day - hopefully there’s a way to fix them all in bulk. For now, if there’s a specific model you’d like to load and is currently not being loaded by SC2 then let me know, I’ll see what can be done.

EDIT:
NVM - I was trying it out on wrong files, lol. Everything seems to work.

Nice, thanks a lot for this. If you will ever want the whole beta installer (if you are interested in this or just for check the beta data files), I can send you this. And one last favour, since i dont have twitch account, if you want, you can upload those beta assets to sc2 mapster for those who are interested, maybe there are some people who want this. Once again thanks a lot :smiley:

Also there is little showcase of battlecruiser model in use https://imgur.com/a/9C2cD11

Np! It was interesting to understand the differences between these formats. And it also actually helped me uncover some of the bugs in the code.

Well, now that you mention that - yeah it could be useful. I’m curious how did the data XML setup looked like at that time, and not only that - maybe I could find some other useful things from other areas.
So yeah, if you got some time to upload all of it somewhere then I won’t say no :slight_smile:

I do have account on sc2mapster, and I agree it could be worthile uploading it there, but my internet connection is just too bad for this - the upload speed is capped at 1Mbit or something like that, so it’d take a loooooong while.

Anyhow, if you keep that google docs link working then I’m sure people will find it via other means - I’ve already sent that link to some other person :stuck_out_tongue:

Ok i wrote the link to the file on discord, hopefully it was you since I assumed its you. No need to reply to this unless that person od discord was not you.