Shockeye on 28/4/2005 at 09:15
Great work, Shadowspawn!
We do the dance of Joy!
Shadowspawn on 28/4/2005 at 15:54
:mad:
What an annoying, fussy, anal program 3DSMax is! After much messing around and a ton of debugging, I FINALLY got it to read in a simple 3DS file (the training footprints). It's about as simple as it can get.
3DSMax hates my 3ds files. It doesn't like quotes around any names, it doesn't like texture names bigger than 8 characters. It just seems generally unhappy, and it won't say what's wrong (except incorrect file format).
I'm trying more complex objects, and it just keeps bitching. None of my other conversion programs dislike my 3ds files. I'll bet 3DSMax can't open the majority of 3ds files out on the internet, they're too variable for it.
Anyway, back to messing with it. Damn! :mad:
OrbWeaver on 28/4/2005 at 16:51
I am curious - what is .E? Is it some additional format that 3DS uses, or is it some external format you just happen to have used before?
Shadowspawn on 28/4/2005 at 17:35
It's a legacy format from Thief 1 and 2. All AI and objects were first converted to .E format (from 3ds or a Maya output format) and then converted to Thief binary.
It's an easy ASCII format, and I already had the Eto3DS tool. So it was a logical first step.
Eventually, we'll be able to go from TIM to 3DS and back, directly. But for getting people started, this should work for a while.
OrbWeaver on 28/4/2005 at 18:18
Just tried it on CLKtowerroof.tim and it crashed with a "Send Error report?" dialog. A .E was generated but it was incomplete. I can send you the error report text if it helps.
Also, the POINTS{} block is empty, the PARTS{} has stuff in it but the PARTS_MAPPING{} is just a list of (0,0) triples.
Shadowspawn on 28/4/2005 at 19:18
I'll take a look at that one. Stay tuned.
EDIT: Thanks. This file contains a tag field I hadn't encountered before. Looks like I need to figure out what's in it. I'll upgrade TIMtoE once I get this figured out.
Let me know if anyone else finds one that doesn't work.
EDIT AGAIN: Found it. It's a different tag name for a data structure I already knew about. I'll get a new version up to my web site tonight.
Shadowspawn on 29/4/2005 at 02:04
OK, I updated the version on my web site. It's version 1.10 - it should work better. I may not have all the worms out, but it's better.
Still beating on the 3DSMax compatibility - it's tough when you know it's wrong but not what went wrong...
Shadowspawn on 29/4/2005 at 02:43
I think I finally found the 3DSMax import problem.
3DSMax insists that text strings imported from 3DS can't be longer than 10 characters. As long as I truncate them, my newest Eto3DS works fine. (I did fix a number of problems in it, though).
Other conversion programs and 3D editors (Truespace for example) can handle the longer names, or truncate them automatically.
It sounds like I need a command line option for Eto3DS to use "3DSMax" mode, which will truncate strings (texture names, objects names, etc) to 10 characters. I'll also need the option for the TIM <-> 3DS program, but I'll make that a checkbox option on the settings panel.
However, texture names and the object names in T3 are much longer. Somehow I need to allow the user to edit them during the 3DS to TIM conversion... I'll have to think about it. Suggestions?
Crispy on 29/4/2005 at 08:20
You could pop up a dialog giving the user a list of all the original names that are too long, and giving them the opportunity to change them. (Ideally through a two-column list view control, where only one column is editable.) You could pick sensible defaults as well. (Say, the truncated names, with numbers on the end if there are naming collisions.)
If you want to automatically restore the names when a conversion is done back the other way, you could have the TIM->3DS conversion generate a simple text file in the same directory as the new 3DS file, mapping every original name to each new name (even unchanged ones). Then the 3DS->TIM conversion could look for that file and map the names back. (If the file is missing, you could pop up a reversed version of the name editing control I mentioned above, and/or give them the opportunity to browse for the file.)
Unless I'm misunderstanding your question. :)
bukary on 29/4/2005 at 10:16
So... the newest converter version still does not work with max, right? Sorry to hear that... :(
Anyway, thanks for your efforts, Shadowspawn! I'll patiently wait for GUI version with max support... (few weeks? more?) I hope you'll be able to fix all possible problems.
Once again, thank you! :thumb:
