New Tool Announcement: AgeCreator 0.0.0 pre-pre-pre-alpha

[Lontahv]

Pretty interesting tool. It reminds me a bit of the old PrpExplorer the way it groups the objects. I see a problem though: wavefront obj files don't store vertex colors. Maybe in the future 3ds would be a good format for importing mesh as (although the file format is much more complex than obj).

[Branan]

Pretty interesting tool. It reminds me a bit of the old PrpExplorer the way it groups the objects. I see a problem though: wavefront obj files don't store vertex colors. Maybe in the future 3ds would be a good format for importing mesh as (although the file format is much more complex than obj).

I just did OBJ because it was easy to implement, I'll eventually add support for other formats.

[Branan]

R22 snapshot packaged. Now with a basic preview render. left click and drag to turn camera, up/down arrows move forward/back in the direction the camera is facing.

This package definitely includes all the right DLLs. I double-checked with a DLL dependency walker this time.

[Aloys]

If I understand correctly your idea is to make a tool whose job is to import external datas of all kinds and create the actual PRPs.
That looks like an interesting idea, but won't you run into a world of trouble with all the imports issues?
You need to import everything. Meshes and UV datas should be doable, but there are also materials, lights, particles, GUIs, animations, and all kinds of datas and flags that are notoriously hard to export... (not to mention all the alcscript stuff.)

[Branan]

If I understand correctly your idea is to make a tool whose job is to import external datas of all kinds and create the actual PRPs.
That looks like an interesting idea, but won't you run into a world of trouble with all the imports issues?
You need to import everything. Meshes and UV datas should be doable, but there are also materials, lights, particles, GUIs, animations, and all kinds of datas and flags that are notoriously hard to export... (not to mention all the alcscript stuff.)

Materials and lights will be handled in the tool itself (a minimal material editor is my next planned task, actually). Likely the same for particles and GUIs. I haven't even thought about animations and all the messages and responders yet.

[Tayrtahn]

Whoa, very cool. This sounds like exactly the way I want to be able to work on my Ages.

You get many thanks from me!

[Branan]

Materials and lights will be handled in the tool itself (a minimal material editor is my next planned task, actually). Likely the same for particles and GUIs. I haven't even thought about animations and all the messages and responders yet.

To clarify one thing: UV maps will likely still have to be created in your modelling tool of choice. It would be a lot of effort to match all the features of the UV mapping in modelling tools, for very little gain.

Whoa, very cool. This sounds like exactly the way I want to be able to work on my Ages.

You get many thanks from me!

Thanks Compliments are always good motivation.

[Paradox]

In addition to .obj import, might it be possible to add the (growing in popularity) Collada (.dae) format? I know Blender has good support for it, and I imagine recent versions of other 3D modelling programs should as well.

[Branan]

In addition to .obj import, might it be possible to add the (growing in popularity) Collada (.dae) format? I know Blender has good support for it, and I imagine recent versions of other 3D modelling programs should as well.

like I said earlier, I just did OBJ because it was easy. Any other formats are on the table, but not very high priority at the moment. We need to crawl before we can run, after all.

[kaelisebonrai]

well, considering collada is a /better/ open model-format... it would, well, certainly fulfill the "crawl before run" type thing. and collada shouldn't be much trouble, it is an open format, iirc, after all.