MOUL site change

[MustardJeep]

3DMax plugins are not compatible with blender.

The best you can hope for is that Cyan's plugin is written with a halfway respectable API so it can be ported over to blender with a minimum of difficulty.

@Aloys

The GoW Plugin has a UI? Seriously?

[Lontahv]

Blender is completely different from 3dsMax or any other 3d modeler. Most notably it deals internally (and in the API) very differently with faces and vertices.

I don't even know how you'd even start porting something so totally different. Plasma2 has been entangled with 3dsMax since it's start.

Unless you want to rewrite Blender you're not in luck. I think you'd better spend your time writing a completely new 3d modeler than vastly modding Blender to work like 3dsMax.

The APIs and internal structures just don't line up, period.


Well, I guess you'll see sooner or later when Cyan finally does release the plugin.

[J'Kla]

Blender and 3DSMax will probably meet in Uru Open Source there will be people working on ages others working on Avatar animation and KI interface each will use the best tool for the job and we will kludge and and workaround whatever problems we have like we always have in the past.

Yes there will be some who torrent illegal copies of 3DMax and we cannot condone software theft no matter how valuable the developers think their product is ultimately it's value is set by what people are willing to pay for it.

People think Blender is free. If you measure what has gone into Blender over the years in terms of development. Everyone who uses it is an unpaid tester that's a lot of wages not being paid. The ultimate payback is Blender does not support shareholders or venture capitalists. The ultimate payback is the more you use it the more valuable it becomes. If you load it on your computer and never run it then you loose the bandwidth you used downloading it.

But download it and develop something sweet with it then it's name grows programmers cut their teeth developing add-ons and that is it's own payback it has kept the wolf from Ton Roosendaals' door and not done any harm to Guido van Rossum the guy who thought of Python.

Open source as a route to fame if not fortune may be unorthodox but just because you don't rip off the punter doesn't mean you don't get paid. Sure as hell the profit margin on 3DMax or any other commercial software for that mater supports a lot more hangers on than any open source package. Just ask Linus Torvalds

[Aloys]

Yeah, 3DS Max is very...complex looking. I like Blender. though I wouldnt mind a Maya3D Plugin, Maya is friendly.

See, it's all a matter of taste. Personally I dislike both Maya and Max. I've had to use them both and I dislike them equally. I'm really picky about interfaces though.. I've tried most major 3D packages these last years and my favorite interface is by far Softimage XSI.. *shrug* (I've yet to try Modo though..) If a XSI plug-in popped up out of nowhere I'd kiss Blender goodbye in an heartbeat.
I disliked Blender initially, I still dislike it, but at least I've learned how to use it, so I'm slightly productive with it.. But in artistic creation the result is not the only important thing, the creation process has to be enjoyable as well. (at least when you're not doing it professionnally.. )

[Nalates]

I may be wrong, but I am assuming we will get the code to Cyan’s plugins, scripts or whatever they mean by tools.

Once we know what the output is, I don’t see why writing a Blender plugin or script would be that hard.

I’ve also seen modules added to the basic Blender this year for special uses. So, if there is some special “thing” missing, it can likely be added. The update rate on Blender is impressive.

3DMax usues Plazma 2.x and can use python so since Blender is producing models that work with Plazma 1 (ver ?) and Python now, I can’t see it being that hard to make a change. We will know when we see the code.

[GPNMilano]

3DMax usues Plazma 2.x and can use python so since Blender is producing models that work with Plazma 1 (ver ?) and Python now, I can’t see it being that hard to make a change. We will know when we see the code.

Plasma 1 was REALMyst, Plasma 2 was Until Uru/POTS, Plasma 2.1 and above was MOUL and Myst V, while Plasma 3 is Hex Isle and Cosmic Osmo (i believe)

It isn't really that hard to update pyprp to be compatible with MOUL. The trick (and i could be wrong about this) is that the devs want pyprp to export both Plasma 2 and Plasma 2.1 so that it is compatible with both Uru offline, and online versions. Something that the 3DSMax plugin Cyan uses wasn't (They used a different plugin for each version of plasma) Ours, in theory, is going to support two versions simultaneously. AFAIK

[JWPlatt]

The Developer page says "Plasma20 plugin." Is this a problem or error on someone's part?

[Tsar Hoikas]

The Developer page says "Plasma20 plugin." Is this a problem or error on someone's part?

Nope. If you look deep inside UruExplorer.exe, you will see that it's called Plasma20 on the build machines... For Plasma 2.0

[JWPlatt]

Then what's this about: "...Plasma 2 was Until Uru/POTS, Plasma 2.1 and above was MOUL..."?

Just curious.

[GPNMilano]

Then what's this about: "...Plasma 2 was Until Uru/POTS, Plasma 2.1 and above was MOUL..."?

Just curious.

Because MOUL was a backported version of the Plasma 2.1 engine used in Myst V and Crowthistle. Even though it's designated as 2.0 in the exe file, it's techincally still a different build of Plasma that sort of falls between 2.0 and 3. (the MOUL shaders for example were backported from the 2.1 build used for Myst V, and are one of the things that wasn't compatible with the shaders from 2.0. Something I know for a fact is strue because shading for me in Uru POTS sucks (It's completely non existent because of my graphics card, No avatar shadows, and tons of texture glitches, non existence on anything with shading enabled flags) while in MOUL it worked beautifully. Some people go by what the exe says, others, like myself, recognize that there is a supreme difference in the way MOUL worked versus POTS, hence the need to call it something else. Since it's more like 2.1 thats what I call it. Some call it 2.05.

Uru Live (beta) was something like Build 63, AMB and POTS were all like Build 63/63.x etc of Plasma 2.0, while MOUL was Build 69/70. such a jump, with such drastic changes in preformance, IMO indicates it requires a different notation of Plasma version numbers.