Posted by E.Popov on April 24, 2000 at 14:01:17:
In reply to: New TREDITOR QUESTIONS posted by Bart on April 21, 2000 at 07:54:30:
> > It's coming... (I can already import a .3DS to replace a moveable with full
> > texturing, but I would like to export a moveable with texture too, and
> > there are 2/3 other things I would like to put in TRViewer before releasing
> > the next version)
> I'm so curious, what are those 2/3 other new features of the next TRViewer,
> and what is the status of the moveable import/export and textured 3ds
> import/export?
I want to be able to change the lighting values at vertices when a mesh has internal lighting / change the collision sphere (size & position) for a mesh / have the ability to drag a mesh/moveable from an opened TR level and drop it into another level / etc. There's so many things that I can't list all :)
As for the import / export: you can import a textured .3ds file and replace a mesh / moveable with it. You can export a textured mesh but not a moveable. So I have to work on this.
It will still remain a pb with textures: I don't try to "re-organize" texture tiles when you import a .3ds file: if your 3ds mesh uses 6 256x256 tiles, I will add 6 new tiles to the tile list of the level, even if you use only one pixel in each tile ! I think a tool which can optimize tiles in a level will be a major tool to code: letting the user do it manually would be very tedious. The pb is that I think it will be difficult to make such a tool work well: maybe we should have a tool which optimize a bit, then the user would have to finalize...
> I was thinking: If you export a tr1 Lara moveable and import it in a tr3
> level, you can play tr3 with the tr1 lara and crawl with her!
Yes, that's something I planned to test when I will have the moveable export: the only one thing to look at is that the Lara mesh from TR1 has the same number of meshes than the TR3 one. Indeed, TRViewer can't import a moveable if it has a mesh number different in the imported moveable than in the original one (it makes sense because if it's different, you can be assured that the animations will be broken, because TRViewer can't import animations: so using animations from a 15 mesh moveable for a 8 mesh one would make TR crash, I think)
> But the tr1 lara textures are in the tr1 level and not in the tr3 level.
> How does TRViewer handle this and does it exports the tr1 lara textures too
> (together with the .3ds) and creates a new texture tile in tr3 with the tr1
> lara textures in it?
In fact, it exports all the tiles of the level with the mesh (in separate .TGA files). So, during import, it reimports these tiles, if they can be found in the same directory than the .3ds file. There's here an inefficiency: even if Lara's mesh uses only 10% of, say, tile 3 & 4, TRViewer will import tile 3 & 4 wholly. That's the tool I talked about some lines above which should be able to copy used parts of tile 4 in tile 3, and delete tile 3 if not used anymore.
> And when will the new TRViewer be released?
Soon... I hope I can work during the next week end (could'nt this one), and then release a version. Maybe it will lack some minor features I will add later, but major ones will be the there.
E.Popov