Pixel Perfect

did you manage to get the Dark Basic AI Lib working in some form or another with Leadwerks then, I know you asked about that in one of your early posts?

Hi again Dicon, yeah thanks for the feedback that certainly explains things a bit more. To be honest if you're used to more sophistocated 3D modelling tools then 3DWS is probably not for you (as a modelling app that is) I'd probably stick with Blender; although there is no reason if you intend doing some game level design for not sticking with 3DWS for that as it really is a nice level design tool once you get used to it. Most of us end up playing to the strengths of many tools to get the overall job done. In terms of recommending a light mapping tool... Giles has always had a good reputation although I've never used it personally. It's now freeware and available here: Giles Lightmapper so you might give that a try if you're not happy with 3DWS. With regard to the Leadwerks demo I'm not sure whats going off there but I wouldn't let that put you off as it's a fantastic engine and the Editor that comes with it is a nice tool. Your timing is unfortunate, as Carl indicated, as the owner of Leadwerks is currently at GDC but give it a few days and email support requesting a fixed version of the demo and I'm sure something will be sorted out. Good luck!

Just some friendly advice Dicon. It might help if you tell us what you are trying to do with 3DWS and what you intend to use it's output with. From what I can gather from your posts so far: 1. You are having problems mapping textures (UV mapping). 3DWS is designed primarily as an easy CSG modeller and level designer and as such is set up to auto UV map textures to objects. Although there are options to alter the UV mapping it is not an application that pretends to have professional and sophistocated UV mapping capability, if this is what you need try designing your gemometry in 3DWS and exporting it to have the textures UV mapped in a more suitable application like Ultimate Unwrap 3D. You can still bring them back in afterwards as models for placement in levels and subsequent light mapping. 2. Sounds like you might be trying to load levels from 3DWS in Dark Basic. If thats the case then export them from 3DWS in the DBO format (that's the native Dark Basic format). This format supports the most features of 3DWS and works well in either Dark Basic or DarkGDK. However, if you want my opinion having worked with both in the past ... save yourself a lot of bother and use another engine such as Leadwerks Engine or Unity. If you think you're having problems with 3DWS these are nothing compared to what awaits you in Dark Basic further down the line!

Should be interesting ... lets hope they do.

Attaching verticies to 4 bones and weighting them is complicated enough ... I can't imagine why anyone would want to use more although I suspect there are maybe some circumstances - maybe facial animation!

I'd open your exported gmf file in Notepad and search for the word 'material' to see if it has exported the material names. The name of the texture file will follow the material key word ... for example: material oildrum.tga If you can see your texture names in the gmf file then the problem is not with the export and you need to ensure you have all your texture files in DDS DXT5 format with mipmaps enabled and a material file for each texture.

Yes, you are right. I'd previously converted the Balm, Cherry, Birch and GiantWood trees from the vegetaion pack which all had seperate textures for the trunk and foliage (bbarkCo.tga and bBushCo.tga in the case of the balm tree ... normal and specular textures are included too). Following your post I've now checked the oak_01 and oak_02 models and they do indeed only reference a single texture. I had never converted those as I wasn't that impressed with those particular models. Not really sure what you can do about that other than find some alternate textures for them and UV map them in something like Ultimate Unwrap 3D Pro or some other suitable application. This was one of their earliest vegetation packs and does not have the quality of some of the later one's imho.

This is going to be fascinating to watch. A great start Dave, looking forward to seeing more.

His STALKER inspired map/mod 'Lab X2' is actually using the crytek engine but I never really believed STALKER was really about the graphics but much more about the immersion and the game play ... it just happened to have some pretty nice graphics for its time too!

All my trees from Dexsoft packs came with two textures .. one for the trunk and one for the leaves, so I'm not quite sure whats going on there. They sometimes provide an image of the whole tree to be used as a billboard for the final LOD.

This is a quote from the wiki:

Welcome aboard Dave. I'm familiar with your work on the Stalker Mod 'Lab X2' from your post on the Call Of Pripyat GSC forum. Very nice work, looking forward to your contributions

I haven't experienced any of the other issues you were referring to but the incorrectly weighted verticies on the hand is common, as you say re-attaching these is all that's required.

Exactly ... but I suspect this is what the original poster is probably meaning. He's talking about a graphical shell sitting over an existing Operating System rather than creating a brand new OS which, as we all know, he is just not going to do!

This thread brings to mind a quote of Carl Sagan's: In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe

You are probably the only person I know that would say that! The game developers at the time couldn't wait to get away from DOS as a game development platform and into DirectX and Windows that offered hardware abstraction! OpenGL would have done just as well but it didn't turn out that way... this is all a completely pointless argument!

Anyone who is familiar with the PC gaming platform knows that typically game developers take up to 2 years to fully utilise any new version of DirectX so no surprise there are no fully DirectX11 compliant games as yet; although quite a few are using some features. DirectX 10 was never taken up by developers as it really offered little that couldn't still be achieved by DirectX 9 and also was restricted to Vista at the time which, as we all know, was a still born gaming OS! I find this knock DirectX attitude somewhat childish as its equally as capable of producing quality game engines as OpenGL and some of the best game engines have been developed using it. As far as serious gaming platforms are concerned there are currently just 3 ... Xbox360, Playstation3 and Windows and of those 3 two are dominated by DirectX

Really ... I haven't played a game on the PC in the last 3 years that hasn't been using DirectX. Granted most were using predominately DirectX9 features and the odd one supported both DirectX and OpenGL. Not that I have anything against OpenGL, I think it's great but that statement doesn't equate with my experience at all! But with regard to running Leadwerks on 7000 series cards, that really hasn't been practical since about version 2.2. I had no choice but upgrade my previous 7900 card as lots of features just didn't work anymore or ran so slowly as to be impracticable.

That's looking pretty good Red ... well done!

Coming along nicely Kevin

Well good luck with the presentation at GDC 2010 guys.

I'm normally a big fan Michael but this is just not working at all for me. I don't quite know how to put my finger on it but something does just not feel right. The trees in particular seem cold and sterile with no contrast and light variation. There seems to be some essential ingredient that is just missing and I wish I could say for sure what it is. Sorry, I did wonder whether I was better just not saying anything ... but that is my honest opinion.

Just a tip ... you don't need to do this if you don't want to as Leadwerks simply uses the filename of the embedded texture and ignores the extension. So if your texture name was text1.png it will look for a material file called text1.mat and so long as that references the dds file (it doesn't even need to be the same name) all will be well. I seem to recollect the red look can be caused by having the animation option selected when exporting models with no animation. Ensure you don't have this option selected when exporting to gmf. Although the screen shot does look like its just selected in the editor!

Looking good ZeroByte!

That is the nicest 'in game' shot I've seen in Leadwerks. Wow ... I think that's worthy of a video