[MatthTheGeek]

First of all, I'd like to clearly state that this is not a "u most make update" post, nor a "fix nao" post, nor a "I want this and this and this done yesterday" post. This is intended as a heads up about the current state of affair as I see it, and a brainstorming about what should be done from here.

The truth is, the pipeline for getting new ships into FSO is highly and fundamentally flawed. We rely on blender, which is full of his own defects, and an older version at that, which doesn't help in lifting the confusion, just to get stuff properly in PCS2, which is just the first step to getting something in FSO at all. We have several tutorials up, but they're not exactly clear (which I cannot blame the writers for, given how ridiculously retarded blender's interface is, and the fact that older versions are not relevant to current tutos you can find on the googles makes things even worst).

This. is a huge barrier to entry for potential new modders. I cannot possibly overstate this.

Next door we have Homeworld 2 and CFHodEd which lets you import any obj, manually put materials on it and even set up and preview animations on-the-fly and has done so for half a dozen years now. Now I know comparing to a different (and more modern on some points) engine is unfair, but it is still a fact that we are extremely late on this front, and I know of several people (veteran members !) who couldn't make it to the modelling contest deadline because of blender/PCS2 shenanigans.

So the first question is, who is working on PCS2 ? Spicious alone ? Is the code available, and is anyone helping him ?

Second, as far as I can see, the one biggest feature PCS2 is sorely lacking is manually assigning materials to UV areas on a mesh. If we could do that, we'd be one huge step closer to not depend on Blender at all. Is anyone familiar enough with the code to tell me whether that's feasible or not ?

From what I heard, and I mean no disrespect by that, Scipcious doesn't exactly take feature requests. Because of this, we are at an impasse, and I consider this state of affair absolutely unacceptable for the future and the growth of the community. We need to do something, and by we, I don't necessarily mean you. I am ready to put my hands deep into this if I can.

/rant

Please discuss.

[fightermedic]

Second, as far as I can see, the one biggest feature PCS2 is sorely lacking is manually assigning materials to UV areas on a mesh. If we could do that, we'd be one huge step closer to not depend on Blender at all. Is anyone familiar enough with the code to tell me whether that's feasible or not ?

yes please!

i don't get what you are trying to say about older blender versions though, i've never used anything but the newest version and didn't ever have problems with it (the strange way blender wants materials to be set up for proper exporting aside)

[The Dagger]

Why do you say we have to use an old version of Blender? I've always used the latest version as soon as it gets out.

Back to your point, I do agree that PCS2 is lacking in user-friendly-ness and so is Anibuilder32 (though Mjn has worked on his own, AFAIK it can't do shield icons for now). Changing materials on PCS2, setting default views (top, front, right, etc...), and moving points by mouse and constraining that movement by axes (like in Blender) would be amazing for the painfull task of setting special points and weapons firing points.
Although I can't help you with this I wish you good luck!

[niffiwan]

Just on the source code, it's available here: http://sourceforge.net/p/alliance/pcs2/ci/master/tree/#

Or this way: git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/alliance/pcs2 pcs2

In theory, anyone can make changes to the code then ask Spicious to merge them into the main tree.  Having said that, I know very little about models & modelling and thus I'm not in a position to add any of these features.  Best I could do for now (& not directly related to the original point) is suggest that PCS2 be added to Coverity in order to scan for bugs.  PCS2 is licensed under the GPLv2 so this should be completely free to do.

[rhettro]

We rely on blender, which is full of his own defects, and an older version at that, which doesn't help in lifting the confusion, just to get stuff properly in PCS2, which is just the first step to getting something in FSO at all.
Please discuss.

I know in the past FSO had some compatibility problems with the Collada exporter when Blender switched to 2.5. I don't think that is the case anymore. In any case, blend files are backward compatible, so one could model in the latest version of Blender and export in 2.49 if that is still an issue. If I could program, I'd create a plugin for Blender that would export FSO files directly, that would be my preference.

[niffiwan]

I'd create a plugin for Blender that would export FSO files directly, that would be my preference.

I think Kopachris was doing some work on exactly this.

edit: found the thread rhettro mentioned: for reference

[rhettro]

I think Kopachris was doing some work on exactly this.

Yeah, but it's been over two years since his last update. In the exchange between Spicious and Kopachris you can see that it would be no easy task. I'm still hopeful though.

[MatthTheGeek]

In any case, blend files are backward compatible, so one could model in the latest version of Blender and export in 2.49 if that is still an issue.

That would be solving the wrong problem. What we need to aim at is getting rid of any modelling program at all in the pipeline for getting stuff imported into FSO.

[Kopachris]

I think Kopachris was doing some work on exactly this.

Yeah, but it's been over two years since his last update. In the exchange between Spicious and Kopachris you can see that it would be no easy task. I'm still hopeful though.

Been two years since I've updated the thread, yeah, but I've made significant progress on the actual plugin since then.  That old proof-of-concept script was for Blender 2.49--I'm currently working with Blender 2.65.  I have a mostly working importer (geometry, texturing/uv, and a few helpers work already), and the back-end for the exporter works.  I just need to finish writing the actual export plugin for Blender.  Current progress is at http://github.com/Kopachris/bpof

Regarding the dialog between me and Spicious, (tl;dr at the end) it wasn't actually as hard as he made it sound (keep in mind I knew exactly 0 about how all this works when I started working on it).  The BSP tree generator is fairly close to a direct port from PCS2's C++ code to Python, though it could still use some tweaking.  Mine ends up dumping poly lists of length ~5-6 pretty often, while PCS2 will only ever dump ~2-3 on an average model, so models exported with my BSP tree generator might load slightly faster (smaller file size), but won't render quite as fast--probably not noticeably so.  Big difference is speed--it takes about three minutes to build the BSP trees for all the submodels in the Hecate POF on my laptop (i7 Sandy Bridge processor) with Python.  That can be dealt with by compiling the module with Cython later, though.

tl;dr, It's not hard, it's not even impractical, it's just a lot of work for one person who has to do this on his own time.

[Spicious]

I'm sure something has been left out, but the complaint seems to be that a modelling program is required to produce models importable by PCS2. As far as I can remember DAEs exported from Blender, 3ds Max and Maya have been usable. That was the whole point of Collada support.

On the UI sucks side, The_E volunteered to improve that at some point, but it didn't go anywhere.

Changing materials on PCS2,

With the same UV?

setting default views (top, front, right, etc...),

Not sure what you mean.

and moving points by mouse

<ctrl>/<alt>-left/right click and drag.

and constraining that movement by axes (like in Blender) would be amazing for the painfull task of setting special points and weapons firing points.

There are buttons in the toolbar that do this.

[MatthTheGeek]

As far as I can remember DAEs exported from Blender, 3ds Max and Maya have been usable.

Nope.avi

Like I said, the biggest issue right now is that PCS2 looses the material-UV assignation when importing. You end up with a mesh with no textures or wrong textures and no way to re-assign them to the mesh.

[Spicious]

Care to provide an example of this?

[rhettro]

Been two years since I've updated the thread, yeah, but I've made significant progress on the actual plugin since then.

That's great news!

[Darius]

I've been able to export DAEs from 3ds Max into PCS2 for many years now. The texture names get messed up but that's due to Max's material system rather than PCS2, and they are easily renamed.

[zookeeper]

I used to be one of the biggest complainers about PCS2 but these days I don't have much of a problem with it due to how many great little features it's gotten in the past several years; however, I too use 3ds Max and I have no idea how it differs from using Blender in this regard. I also do 95% of my model converting in Max and tend to only fix up a few details in PCS2, so that probably has something to do with it as well.

[JGZinv]

Only minor complaints I have with it are:

1. Dummy helpers (weapon/thruster) when imported from a Max Collada DAE - always are pointing the wrong way. Requires manual editing.
This goes back a long time, and is even covered in my old importing guide. The normals are either up (weps) or facing forward instead of back (thrusters).

2.  When you autogen a set of paths, it only creates a handful of them. You have to delete all the paths, and do another auto gen and it'll produce all of them.

3. Say you've saved a file, such as example.pof, if you go and try to save example.pmf, it'll still write whatever the last format was (POF in this case).
This can result in overwritten files, and you have to name files different each time (ie. examplePOF.pof, examplePMF.pmf, etc.)

Otherwise... I've not had much trouble. I'm only using a single diffuse texture though.

[MatthTheGeek]

Care to provide an example of this?

After a couple months of ragequit,

https://www.mediafire.com/?17qeefj87ybqyd7

This has to be the most frustrating modding experience I ever had. The whole process is utterly broken beyond any logic.

The UV data is right there in the dae. PCS2 just goes all "**** you man, you don't need dis".

[Spicious]

Your DAE seems to contain invalid effect elements. The spec says the texture element should contain a texture attribute referencing a sampler2D element. Yours seems to be trying to directly reference an image element. When textures can't be resolved you end up with untextured polygons.

[MatthTheGeek]

And why shouldn't it tolerate that ? It's the presence of the UV data that should matter, not the texture it's assigned to. Especially since you can change the texture in PCS2.

[Spicious]

Why should it work? If the input doesn't follow the spec, the output is unspecified.

The UV data is probably making it into the POF; the polygons are just set to untextured.