Rick

Getting the bone and hiding it didn't work (like you were thinking), so seems I pretty much have to do what you suggested.

Why would it work in the model viewer though? That seems odd.

That would be the piece I was missing. I wasn't aware of that, so that's why I was thinking the LOD stuff would be a pain. Was going to try and avoid Lua altogether with this one, but I guess it's not the end of the world if I have to build the buildings with it. Do you know if each of the none base models that I load dynamically in Lua are accessible via name from none Lua code by default or would I have to set each one to be a child of the base model and access them that way?

Weird, I can see the building fine in the modeler viewer, but in the editor it's funky. If I have it selected I can see the building outline in the red selection color, but unselected it's invisible. Very strange. It's also doing that crazy mouse jerking thing. Maybe reboot is in order.

The other issue I would have with loading each floor separate would be LOD's. If the idea was to have a huge city with a ton of buildings you can go into, I would think it would be ideal that the LOD's are solid and you can't go into them, but the LOD that is within range turns into the one model that you can get into. I'll play around with the scaling from within UU3D and see if I can get it. Thanks! That assumes loading each floor as a separate model, which I would assume LOD issues come from that. Well not really issues, but it would be a pain to just make block LOD's for each floor, and wouldn't get the best benefit from just having 1 model for the entire building for LOD. I suppose you could make the 1 block building as the floor1 LOD and then check the distance manually fro the other floors and just hide them if far enough away. Was just trying to use the built in LOD system LE has. And plus avoiding the whole assembling each floor in the editor.

Really? I would have thought that if I could find a bone in a model and I move it, and the child model part moves, that if I hide it the child model parts would also be hidden. Isn't the bone the parent to the verts skinned to it? It's checked. The only thing not checked in the GMF save dialog is Export multiple uvsets and Export vertex colors.

So I must have done something wrong. I created the building by floor in 3DWS. Exported each floor out at a time to .x. Imported/merged each floor into UU3D and renamed each bone as I imported to Floor1, Floor2, Roof. Exported to gmf from UU3D. Converted the jpg textures I was using to DDS with mipmaps. Create mat files for each texture using the skin shader, but when I look in the model viewer I don't see anything. I try to import into the Editor and again I see nothing. I zipped up all the files, including the UU3D files of all floors merged. It's a pretty boring building just for tests with only 3 textures. What am I missing? http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1293842/TestBuilding.zip

Good call. So if I just merge these all in UU3D, each will have it's own bone and I assume that bone is attached to that .x model that I merged in? So I could just rename the bones when I merge the models to their floor number and then hiding that bone would hide that floor model? If that's the base, this might be easier than I thought. I could piece each floor in 3DWS, group them, and save each one as it's own .x. They would have the correct location also so I wouldn't have to line them up in UU3D. I'll give this a shot. Thanks.

Yes, they are all in the shaders.pak. You can editor and create until your heart is content.

Or even for testing purposes, if I could give someone my 2 .x files that I made, if they could combine them and assign a bone to each "floor" and name the bones like floor1, floor2. I kind of want to see how this plays.

Has anyone had any luck with importing some model they have made from 3DWS into another modeling program? I exported from 3DWS to .x format, and then in Blender (I know, but it's all I have) and it doesn't seem to work. Blender can import .x files but I don't see my model there at all. Any other ideas? I'm open to other ideas with this. Really all I want to do is be able to assign bones to a bunch of separate models but have those separated models be one model in the end. I have UU3D. Can I do this in there? It doesn't look like I can open multiple model file to combine them. The idea that I'm doing is multiple floors to a building, and each floor is a separate model, and I'll assign a bone to each floor mesh and then assemble them into 1 model so I can find the bones in code and hide/show each floor as the character is walking through them. I'd rather do this than deal with hiding/showing floor models as separate models.

So in short, Rekindled Phoenix, no LE 2 won't support this but LE 3 will. You can still do all of this manually however, which would be a large task but still possible.

Yeah I used to work with Allegro some time ago. I like it, I'm just not sure how I would integrate it with LE.

I can't remember the skin shader name exactly. Maybe do a search on the forums (if you can get it working), for skin shader. There might be an example in the LE folder of it also. There are a few tools on the forums that generate mat files for you and some know if your model is animated and will automatically put the skin shader in. I can't remember where these are and I'm not at home atm, but that looks like what your issue is.

That's why I'm pretty sure it's the shader you are using in the .mat file. .mat files are just text files. No need for a hexeditor, you can open them with notepad. Post what you have in the .mat file here for your animated character.

Does anyone know of an OpenGL 2D drawing library, where that's all it does? With the ability to draw images (bitmaps, whatever) and lines? I know LE can do this, and I know other libraries can do this and 3D, but I'm looking for a slim non bloated just 2D library for OpenGL.

I would say either check your .mat files and make sure everything is right (texture names) and make sure you are using the skin shaders in your .mat files also. Animated files I guess require this skin shader to work correctly.

1. Yeah, I think text for sure. Fading text is pretty common and in games. 2. I personally think artists should worry about this. If a 3x3 image system is used they will have complete control of how everything looks. 3. Good question. At first thought I'd say no, but it might be handy. Cursors could just be swapped for other cursors with the needed tint, but tinting widgets could help avoid the artist from having to make a bunch of the same images with different colors.

You can run some LE commands without calling Graphics(). You just have to call Initialize() to make them available, but yeah some commands require Graphics() to be called.

This is the one things I'm not a fan of in the LE community. Almost no one wants to talk about design. I think that's because a good number of people are artists and not programmers. I'd keep replying but I assume you would like a variety of people's ideas.

You can make a 3D plane and apply your sprite as it's texture.

To make a quick and dirty one, there is an even that fires when you set targets. So in each model you could run EntityDistance() between the 2 and return the result in a message box in that set target event. When when you drag one model over another it'll give you the distance between those 2 models.

It probably is, but gamelib is a crazy mess. It's nice to get examples from, but it's just messy C.

I created something like this at work. We have tons of programs that get data, format it, then load it into a database. They were all separate programs written by different programmers, and had no consistency at all. So I created a plugin based system. There was a class you would extend from that provides Start(), Process(), Finish() methods that you overloaded. It also provides a logging object and some standard config information. It works really well. I think someone around here also tried to do something like this if I'm not mistaken. Maybe on the old forums. I think it's a good idea, but one still has to create the game logic to make a game, which is where the real problem is.

The most versatile would be to allow the "skinner" to define offsets and such and to not rely on the image size. Artists can get very creative and funky that way with transparency and such. Having it hardcoded to use the image size could end up restricting what they want to do. But yeah, the 3x3 system is the best.