Shadowspawn on 15/3/2005 at 20:38

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My latest mis-guided effort is to do direct conversions from .TIM to 3DS, and eventually back again. (3DS -> TIM). However, some stuff won't port over, so I'll create a .EX (extras) file, which is just text. It will contain skin texture assignments, Author, etc. Anything which I can't figure out a way to shoehorn into 3DS. The 3DS -> TIM will look for the file, and grab the nice extras from it. It'll also work without it, so I'm not forcing this on anyone.

The collision hull will be another object, simply named hull. I'll extract it during conversion so it only shows up as the collision information. I've currently got the hulls showing up as a transparent red object, which generally just barely encompasses the object. (I have to try a few doorways and see how they look). So us poor non-3DS MAX people will have to build our own collision hull, instead of having a script which does it for us. Should be pretty damn easy. Also, not all objects need a collision hull, the first object I converted didn't have one (blahfeet1, the training footprints). You can override the hull in the Static Mesh Browser and assign an OBB or Sphere model, just like in Dromed.

Hardpoints will probably be something like the old "vhots" from T1 and T2. What I'd like to be able to do is actually have the object you want positioned where you want it, and by naming it "hp_handle" or something like that, I'll just extract the position and translation matrix for the object in the correct orientation. Then I'll filter out the object during the conversion.

As soon as I get some breathing space (2 Thief 2 FMs in the works, this stuff, custom AI, and then there's RL!) , I'll try and get a first cut at the TIM -> 3DS converter. Then folk can play with it for awhile and find out the bugs and the stuff I'm not handling right. And I have to figure out a new library for export to 3DS, since my old home grown stuff never worked right for 3DS MAX.

The 3DS -> TIM will take a little longer. There's still stuff I don't understand in the TIM file, but I'm figuring out more everyday.

Thank God I'm going on vacation before I try and tackle the AI mesh format. :joke:

Krypt on 16/3/2005 at 17:29

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I believe that in most cases the artists built mesh collision hulls manually anyway, because if you let the auto-generator handle it the hull would often be too high-poly and sub-optimal.

Krypt on 16/3/2005 at 19:56

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No, that would be fine I'm pretty sure. For example, the collision hull for a fancy doorframe with a lot of little geometry details but is still roughly the shape of a standard door would probably be a rectangular cube for both sides as well as the top. This ends up being concave (at least on one axis) and is much simpler than calculating collision against every little poly on the mesh.

Shadowspawn on 4/4/2005 at 00:54

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I was on vacation this past week. I'm back, with my mind finally clear for once.

I hope to have a version of TIM-> 3DS available in the next week or two, then eventually an upgrade to both directions. I'll keep you guys informed as things develop this week, hopefully this won't be too insane.

mrys on 21/2/2006 at 07:29

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I was trying to make my custom door for TDS. They have all that I read that is need for: hp_handle, hp_lockA and hp_lockB. But when I placed them in my testing room doorknob was mounted in the center of rotation in down left corner of main mesh (mrys_door4x8). Door worked normal, but this doorknob... I tried to modify individual center of objects, mounting them in new places on main mesh - but with no result. Only if I move center of main mesh to the point, where doorknob should be it was where I want. But center of rotation also was there:(

Could anyone help me with finding solution? Maybe someone make custom door before and have knowledge that I haven't?