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Volition Watch
Registered: Jul 2000
Location: I am everywhere, and I am nowhere.
Posts: 1184 |
FreeSpace: HH on Model Editing
Posted by IceFire:
Couple days ago I sent a message to Heiko Herrmann about the possibility of DNet taking POLYTRON32 and turning it a similar concept of it into an editor for FreeSpace and FreeSpace 2 models. Those who have modeled things in the past know that the current utilities, although capable of quite a few things, are tedious and time consuming to use and the process is separated into several different programs. So this is what HH told me:
I guess you mean Descent Manager POLYTRON32, which was started coding by
Luke Schneider (with the name "Polytron") and then at the time he was hired
by Outrage taken over by DNet, specifically Steve Klinger and myself.
The problem with this program is that it is fully written in Visual Basic.
Visual Basic is a great language for stuff like the VPViewer and other
relatively incomplex tools. However, for a modelling editor Visual Basic is
in most cases far too slow and unpowerful. It didn't really matter for
Descent 2, since in Descent 2 there were practically no models with more
than 100 polygons or points. In FreeSpace however, the models have a lot
more polygons (up to 2000) and also have much more detailed textures (D2
only had 64x64). Which would totally blow up Visual Basic's capabilities. I
mean, it would be possible, however very very slow, even on P3-1000
machines. Visual Basic is just not made for projects like this. Conclusion:
We can't use the existing code, we would have to rewrite it.
So the only possibility would be to use a fast, optimized and compiled
programming language, such as C++. However, even in Visual Basic the tool
costed multiple man months to create. In C++ it would cost at least three
times as much. And that is far beyond of what time I (or anyone else here at
DNet) has :/... Plus, keeping in mind that the number of modellers is not
*that* high, it wouldn't be used by so many people, that it would be really
worth it. POLYTRON had about 20 users who really created work with it.
Compared to the man-months of work, thats pretty few. Plus, kept in mind
that there is alternative software to create models (TrueSpace along with
COB2PM, which is like COB2FS, just for Descent 2), and there is such
software also available for FreeSpace (COB2FS), it doesn't really motivate
us, to put that much work into a such complex tool.
So, as of this time, DNet won't change the situation. It's just a too
complex tool. What I am working on however, is to add some POF editing
capabilities into MODELVIEW32, which will replace FSMM/FSMM2. It will work
nearly identical as FSMM/FSMM2, however with the WYSIWYG model next to it,
you can directly check the changes out.
BTW, Frank Krueger once planned such an editor. If anybody can contact him,
maybe he can post a status of his tool. My understanding is that it pretty
much died, looking at the time where he last spread news around, which would
be pretty sad. Maybe if he does not want to continue his project, he could
post the source code or give it to somebody to continue work on it.
Unfortunately died projects go to seldom to open-source. Same with
FSMM/FSMM2. I posted the source code of multiple Descent Manager modules
already, I wished the others would do the same :/...
This is my take on this.
Heiko Herrmann
The program Segultuch which was under development and was even moved from Restricted Access to FreeSpace Watch (can be accessed here) had the features that MOD teams were looking for. Unfortunately, the author has not been heard from since and I've held little hope on this front.
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09-22-2000 10:37 PM
