[REL] S3D - Silent 3ditor

[skwasjer]

Originally Posted by haegemon

By the way I'm having troubles with the rendering tool. I can see the origins, the grid, the axes icon and the bounding box, but I can't see the mesh. I got installed the NET. 2.0 and DX9c software. Also got the 3dmax 8 which works correctly...so What I miss? maybe I forgot to configure or installing something?

And there are keyboard buttons to zoom out and in, other than the mouse wheel?

You don't see meshes, even for ships/planes etc? Check if you have 'solo mode' turned off (the eye-w.-S button). I got myself (!) fooled once where I had left it on, and when I checked back again I was going crazy because I didn't see any meshes... I actually was debugging my code for half an hour until I realized this. :rotfl:

Otherwise, I have made some assumptions for device state (using default values) in v0.9 that are working ok for most, but may give you problems with your gfx card. Please stay tuned for the next release - due soon - which has a heavily optimized and fine-tuned render engine.

Also, keyboard support is not available in v0.9, but will be in the next. Check out the current changelog I posted last week.

[haegemon]

No, any mesh. Nor ships, nor planes, nor docks. I checked every button...anyway I'm using a little old Gforce4 card now, but 3dmax8 works normal (may OpenGL drivers have to be in it?). However, I still can use the origins as guide.

[skwasjer]

haegemon, S3D uses DirectX and not OpenGL, and requires pixel shader 2.0 and higher. I don't think gf4 cards support this. The (grid)lines, and origins are rendered without shader so that's why you see them. The meshes are rendered with 2.0 shaders.

[haegemon]

Ok, so I'll have to wait till I go for a another Graphic card.

[Nisgeis]

It's been a while since I did any windows programming, but would it be fairly easy to add some spinners to the x, y, z coordinate boxes? It would be nice to have a way to 'nudge' something into place, or just quickly move something around the 3D window. Which axis is which always confuses me, because I'm thick, so would be nice to have a shortcut to just move something one way and back again quickly.

[skwasjer]

Hi Nisgeis, spinners are not so much a problem, although I'd need to tie it to the zoom scale. The spin must not be under- or over-sensitive. ie. ships/units are viewed at a lower zoom level, compared to interiors. I had to also do this for camera operations. A problem with spinners though is that the undo-list currently takes each single change instead of merging similar changes. This could cause the undo log to grow superfast and makes it difficult to undo a change... This would need attention as well.

A big improvement for now will be the local axes icon, making it easier to see/understand how an individual object is oriented.

Possibly I might try doing an in-3D-view drag function to move/rotate an object (drag along an axis), but it's not a high prio.

[Anvart]

Originally Posted by Mikhayl

...
That plus a "scale" function linked to visible box/sphere models for the .zon files

You about Gammu?
:rotfl:
Sorry ... Full name will be GW Jammu ...

[skwasjer]

Hmm, that's good to know. Well, it's that or the .uvw file format is (partially) incompatible in between versions.

I only tested with Max v9, so if the files are slightly different with older versions, S3D may complain...


@all, as far as the new release is concerned, it's delayed for a bit. I have some difficulties with the texture loader leaking memory. This is the final thing that has my attention the coming days. In the mean time I will also prepare a new video walkthrough to talk about some of the newest (cool) features.

[nooanianqueetus]

Hello, First post here. I am new to the whole modding thing here and have been enjoying myself messing around with the game so far, I use s3d to try and make mods but i have a problem i think, hope sombody can help me.

When i create a new node, and import a 3dmodel and title from another ship, i assign it to it's parent node and all that, but when i add another item to the tree, the 3d model moves out of place out of the tree, i think it's still matched to it's parent but it's out of place and i can not move it back into place unless i assign it a new random ID, and pair it up again. but this will happen again when i create a new object in the file =(

Does anybody know what the problem is? sorry if this doesnt make any sense.

[skwasjer]

The link will break if the model it's position in the list (= index) is 'after' the node that references the model. To make sure the link stays intact, move the model to a position above the first node that uses it. You can use the green arrows to move chunks up and down. Most commonly, models are directly placed 'before' the first node that uses it, while materials are placed at the top of the file. After you've done this, you can fix the hierarchy again by temporarily specifing '0' as model id, and then specify the actual model id again. From here on, you shouldn't see the model jumping out of the tree anymore.

Note: It's easier to see the ordering in the 'list' view (the white-ish button in the toolbar switches between 'tree' and 'list').

It's a common error and I hope to add some form of validation at some point which ensures that S3D refuses assigments of models and materials that are incorrectly ordered, so these mistakes can't be made anymore.

PS: welcome to subsim

[nooanianqueetus]

woooooooo thank you very much =D . I

'm working on getting a playable New Mexico. and you just helped a bunch =D. Love the program by the way

[skwasjer]

You're welcome. Now get crackin' on that boat

[skwasjer]

Mesh animation support is something I've worked on for a while as well. There's still many small issues to solve, but I've managed to export/import animations already. The trick is the DAT-format stores floats of animations in a lossy compression format, and finding a solid and reliable compression method (not a lousy hack job that works on specific animations only) took me a couple of weeks.

While working on export/import functionality I didn't want to launch the game every time to verify if it worked, and since I've got a modelviewer working, why not try some more goofing about:

http://sh4.skwas.net/media/flags.avi



With mesh animations out of the way, the only trouble left is character animations (skinned vertices/bones) which are found in marine.dat. Not anytime soon though...

[rodan54]

Awesome, hopefully we can now do away with those ridiculously gargantuan flags.

One thing I'm curious about though, and I remember you mentioned it in the past a couple times, but what's the news on a zones editor? Don't mean to sound impatient, just anxious to get the last piece of the puzzle towards easy implementation of new units.

That said, I just can't thank you enough for all your hard work.

OT: And what's with all the forum white, nearly went blind for a second there. lol

[skwasjer]

In principal, a zones editor is dead-easy. Drawing the spheres and boxes is the least of the problem...

In reality though, S3D's way of working with files seperately (dat, zon, etc) in different windows, makes it a little tricky. If I want to give a live preview it requires that both files are opened simultaneously. But it must be easy enough to switch between both while maintaining 3D state (in DAT-window), and undo/redo support (in ZON-window). This is the hard part. So possibly I may drop this idea and make a seperate zone editor which is not integrated in the current UI/viewer.

I am still working out how to do this best. It will come, just not sure when yet.