Mafia Blender Toolkit 1.0.2

A projector projects

A projector carries no mesh: it is a volume and a material, and the game works out as it draws which surfaces the volume overlaps, maps the texture across it and paints them. Blender has nothing of the kind, so the viewport drew the outline and left the rest to the imagination. It now draws the paint — onto the surfaces the volume covers, against the depth the viewport already has, so it lands on what can be seen and stops at the first thing in the way.

Everything the mode decides comes with it:

• the volume — Orthographic, a box the same width all the way through, or Perspective, the pyramid inscribed in it, sized by the frame's own scale;
• the depth falloff — constant, or full at the near face and gone at the far one, or nothing at either face and full between;
• the blend — added to the surface, or drawn over it.

The texture is the one the material builds, so the transparency a material keeps in a second image is part of what is painted, and a colour key cuts its own colour out. Project Textures in the 4DS Model tab turns the whole thing off; it is drawing only and changes nothing that is written.

Measured rather than eyeballed — rendered into an offscreen buffer looking straight down at a floor: a box two units across covers 3.92 m² against the 4.00 it should (one pixel of the buffer), twice as wide is four times the area, the pyramid ends exactly as wide as the box, a floor past the reach takes nothing at all, and the falloffs read 0.000 at the far face for both the linear and the triangular, 0.498 half way down for the linear and 1.000 for the triangular.

One thing the viewport cannot do. Blender composites an overlay over the scene rather than adding into it, so an Additive projector cannot brighten the surface it lands on. Its brightness is carried in its opacity instead: black shows nothing, the brightest paint shows fully, and the falloff fades it away rather than blackening it. The shape, the texture, the falloff and where it stops are exact; only the brightening is not, which shows on a light surface more than a dark one. Alpha Blend is exact. Said plainly in the panel, the guide and the manual rather than left to be discovered.

Also in this release

• The volume is named for its shape. The panel offered a Straight On tick, which said nothing about what it picked between. It is two buttons now — Orthographic and Perspective — named the way the engine names them. The stored value is unchanged.
• New made the wrong kind of material. The picker on a projector, and the one on each lens flare element, used Blender's own New — which makes a material the add-on knows nothing about: no flags, and none of the graph that previews what the game draws. All three pickers now offer a button that makes one set up the way the game reads it.
• A projector's Material Settings ran into its own settings. Opening the material drew its rows into the same box as the falloff and the blend, so the two read as one list. The projector's own settings come first now, and the material's sit in a box of their own.
• The shader warned on every build. Two matrices are the only push constants left — 128 bytes, all a backend has to promise — and the settings ride in a uniform block.

Documentation

• The Field Manual had no projector section at all. It has one now.
• The wiki has pages of their own for Lights and Projectors, a line for cameras which nothing covered, and a walk-through of switching a model's light on in game — both halves of what the .4ds and the mission's scene2.bin have to agree on, with the two traps that cost the most time.

Tested

What	Result
Checks	285 passed, 0 failed
Models, format layer	3,123 exact, 2 refused for their version
Animations, format layer	2,695 exact — 52,132 tracks, 13.7M keys
Animations, back through Blender	2,690 compared, every key within a 32-bit step
Movement tracks	283 exact, 10 refused for their version
Shadows	37 exact
Playback	all 33 models with an animation of their own, and 48 character runs, identical

Requires Blender 5.2 or newer.