[Akalabeth Angel]

Wow, I had no idea this was such a huge thread.  I ought to split it and make it a sticky in FS Modding or FS Upgrade.

Where should I split it?  I think when the Collada exporter was finished is a good place, but I don't know when that happened.

      Speaking of "finished", if it is, when does the dude get his prize because no one's asked me for any pledged money.

[chief1983]

It's finished when no one else runs into any problems on his end of it, and the documentation is finalized so people know just how to use it.

[Akalabeth Angel]

It's finished when no one else runs into any problems on his end of it, and the documentation is finalized so people know just how to use it.

Ok cool, sounds good.

[chief1983]

Actually I'm not the final authority on that but if it was my money that'd be my criteria.

[chief1983]

Also, I don't know about you guys still having problems, but I'm using a build labeled PCS 2.1 Alpha Release November 16 2008 20:21:36, and I opened the MediaVP Aquitane, saved as DAE, and reloaded from that DAE, and had no crash at all.  At first glance everything looked pretty good.  I'm impressed with how far this feature has managed to come.  I'm not sure where you can get this build but I may upload it somewhere if everyone is having a hard time finding a stable one.

Edit:  Of course, I didn't have any trouble doing this with the latest one from his signature, so I'm not sure what's up.

[chief1983]

Found some issues.  After saving to dae and reimporting as pof, I noticed a few things missing.  The glowpoint normals were reset to 0, the MOI was lost, and the overall scale seemed to have been changed ever so slightly.  The last part may not matter much as long as everything lines but, going between dae and pof over and over and over is likely to create problems if that has to remain the case.  But losing data completely I hope could be avoided.  Of course, this may not really be the intent anyway, since it still seems the model and the bulk of its data were retained, which is fantastic.   The scale problem could also be due to the changes to the POF export side of things now too as the starting pof was made with PCS 2.0.3 and this using the changes that have brought it up to 2.1 Alpha.

Also, when I open the file as a DAE, its size values are drastically different from those of even the output POF, which are much closer to the starting POF.  I just found this bizarre, as long as the end result is fine it's not a problem.  For example, the original POF had HWD of 79.46, 66.87, and 65.15.  When I saved as DAE and opened the DAE, those values were 49.74, 54.80, and 61.24.  When I saved that as a POF and opened that, the values were back to the original numbers.

[Spicious]

It's finished when no one else runs into any problems on his end of it, and the documentation is finalized so people know just how to use it.

I have to say that just screams loophole.

Glowpoints are still rather lacking in completeness, mainly because no one has expressed interest in their Collada format. Similarly MOI isn't stored due to lack of interest. I'd blame small discrepancies in numbers on rounding errors.

Weird dimensions are probably due to a small issue with subobjects - the big differences, at least. It should be fixed now. Again, lack of interest is not very motivating.

[pecenipicek]

glowpoints... okay. here's my take on it, similar to the eff's for animated texture.



when setting them up, this would go under the main glowbank.

Code: [Select]

$Texture_name: <insert_tex_name>-xxx-gp.<insert_ext_here>
$FPS: <rate at which the glowpoint changes, as with eff, in case of animated gp's>

this would go under the glowpoints themselves

Code: [Select]

$On_time: <insert time for the gp to be on in miliseconds>
$Off_time: <insert time for the gp to be off in miliseconds>
$Blink: <insert condition for blink, as in yes, no, permanently on>
$Blink_delay: <insert delay between blinks, ms only>
$Blink_transition: <insert transition time between full on and full off>

i am thinking of this as in the subsys and subob properties, manual entering of these details either via helpers or literally in the editor in PCS.

more to come when i refine the idea a bit, but tell me what do you think of the general idea.

[chief1983]

It's hard but I can guarantee you that there's no shortage of interest in this support.  Glowpoints probably just need to be some meta property that can be edited.  I also forgot to mention that the paths were absent as well (for the turrets), which I'm also guessing was due to lack of interest.  I don't do much in the modeling apps myself so I hope someone who would be using these features can pose some suggestions for how they should be stored so Spicious can implement it.  Any takers?

[Spicious]

Uhm, I don't believe there's anything in glowpoints about FPS and the on/off times would do essentially the same thing as your blink fields.

Correctly associated paths should be preserved.

[chief1983]

The paths in the defense satellite (nb_ds) are not present when this file is saved as a DAE, nor in the subsequent re-save to POF.  Is there something wrong with them then?  Used the build I just downloaded from your sig.  The DAE file's dimensions are also still off by a large factor.  The Height value went up from 49.74 to 66.62, but the other two values are still the same.  You can experiment with it yourself and see what I mean.  If you do see any peculiarities in the model please let me know.

[pecenipicek]

i didnt exactly think the whole deal through, just a 5 minute quibble out of my brainfart... XD

the fps thing might help if someone uses an animated glowpoint. then again, animations speed should be in the eff.. meh. basically, just keep the on-off thing. + enter something for more intuitive control

[chief1983]

I would make the way it's stored as close to the storage method in POF so it's easy to translate, it's just how to put it in the DAE so most modeling apps can set it reliably.

[Spicious]

The importer expects path to be all lowercase.

The two other values seem to be correct. The global X and Z bounds are identical to those of LOD0.

[chief1983]

Can the path casing requirement be changed then?  Because it's never been a requirement before and would hurt functionality with existing POF files.  If not I suppose it can be worked around.

[Zacam]

It's finished when no one else runs into any problems on his end of it, and the documentation is finalized so people know just how to use it.

I have to say that just screams loophole.

Glowpoints are still rather lacking in completeness, mainly because no one has expressed interest in their Collada format. Similarly MOI isn't stored due to lack of interest. I'd blame small discrepancies in numbers on rounding errors.

Weird dimensions are probably due to a small issue with subobjects - the big differences, at least. It should be fixed now. Again, lack of interest is not very motivating.

I'd say a cash prize indicates the counter to a lack of interest, we just may have a lack of qualified people (or those people have a lack of available time) to effectively and constantly test as needed. If I knew more about modeling than I do and about model structure, I can assure you, I would be doing a post a day.

[Spicious]

Can the path casing requirement be changed then?  Because it's never been a requirement before and would hurt functionality with existing POF files.  If not I suppose it can be worked around.

Thanks to some refactoring from a while back, yes I can and have made all node names (except -trans ones) case insensitive. Now VC just whines about strnicmp quite a lot when compiling.

[chief1983]

I've been starting to wonder if a lot of my problems I'm having came from using a case sensitive mac filesystem, instead of the insensitive one.

[Spicious]

I'm probably going to next look at this around boxing day or the weekend after it. If anyone cares about sensible storage of glowpoint timing, types etc. do post your suggestions before then. I would prefer to avoid rewriting things a few times this time around.

[Aardwolf]

Hey, I exported a POF from PCS2 to DAE, and I can't open it in Blender... Possible bug, it happened with the Mihos, and I think earlier with the Aeolus (not positive on which ship it was earlier). The import script (v1.4) crashes, and the python console says the error was opening some geometry mesh.

On a slightly less grave note... I have no idea how to create a DAE I mean, I opened the model I made in Blender and it can export to DAE, but I have no idea where or how to input any info (nor do I know for sure how to name things or create a hierarchy)