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by Aardappel on 01/05/2002 01:55, 15499 messages, last message: 12/08/2021 21:22, 8825811 views, last view: 12/09/2021 01:14

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#2045: Re: New model format AND Editor

by mortfurd on 11/20/2003 23:51, refers to #2042

What I'm gaining is the ability to create my own models, which I could not find a way to do under Linux with the MD2 files. Yes, I could have gone on and done MD2 once I got the kinks worked out - but I don't miss MD2.

I'm not losing a lot, since most MD2 models that I've seen deal in mayhem, blood, and death.

I'm working on some things that would be more in line for small children, and another thingamabobby that is definitely not for little kids - but where blood and ugly monsters also don't belong.

In both cases, I need structures finer than MD2 can provide. I also do some odd things with my models that would result in normal sized structures being treated as small structures with MD2.

One of the the things that I've done is to make a framed picture that hangs on the wall. The offset to the bottom of the picture is acheived by relocating it in Blender - the picture is six times its own size above the origin. With MD2, this would lose me a lot of precision in the actual model.

Since I'm using floats in my format, I don't have to worry about precision until things get REALLY big.

Other than that, I gain not having to worry about id lowering the boom. Not that I think there's a big chance of that happening, but still.

Also, since Blender and Python are available on many platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux,) you can make your models anywhere you need to - just like cube runs anywhere you want to.

Also, just to clarify - The Blender Exporter is done, and I have a massively hacked version of cube that uses it.

The massively hacked part comes because I've expanded the scripting language by a lot of stuff that I needed. Mostly just small functions that make life easier, but also some deeper reaching stuff. My version can change models for each entity on the fly and specify the frame range to use. It can also do a sequence that starts at a specified frame, runs to a specified frame, and then returns to a preciously specifed range. You can also change the animation speed for every figure individually. There is a timer callback that executes code in your script while the timer is active, and there are functions to set, start, and stop the timer. I also added a set of functions to overwrite the standard HUD stuff. I can change HUD icons on the fly, and put whatever data I want up beside them.

Next up on the block is an improved collison detection and generating bounding boxes for the figures. I need these things because I intend to do animated doors using my models. Since the doors are so large, they don't do too well with the standard mapmodel collision detection - and they tend to disappear if you turn at almost a right angle to them because cube assumes that if you can't see the origin of the mdoel then you can't see it at all.

To do these things, I will modify my rendering routine to check how close a specified point is to all the points in the model. This will be tied in with the unproject collison detection - when something is right up in my face, then (and only then) will the renderer be requested to do a proximity check for the point returned by the unproject detect.

The renderer will also be modified to return a bounding box to the entity when it renders the model. I will then use this in the culling routine to tell when to continue rendering an object (when it is still visible.)

All of this would be harder (and slower) to do with MD2. My files have the coordinates as floats already, so all I need is a shitpot full of comparisons to do the detection. With MD2, I would have to convert from scaled bytes to floats to do it - which is not really a hard job, but it would add more multiplications and type conversions to the process and slow it down.

Yeah. Anyway, I wouldn't be trying all of this if cube weren't so easy to work on