[Kazan]

if they have the original COB there is no point for them to load a POF in PCS2 and save it as a COB - if they have a PMF they don't need to...... looks like the only meaningful option is to  perform the generation... but i think i'll make it an optional (checkbox) on POF loading

[Scooby_Doo]

Any chance of a simplier turret naming layout?  With less "turret0X" all over.

[Topgun]

um, in POF's, is everything faceted or smooth or (smooth or faceted like in blender)?

[Bobboau]

in POFs there is no smoothing data at all, it's totally decomposed into surface normals.
in order for Kaz to find the angle he'd need to, for every polygon, find the angle between every normal on that polygon and the normals on every other polygon that shared that point, and then he'd only get a guess, a _range_ of values that _could_ have been used to generate those normals, he'd then probly have to do a **** ton of comparasons between polygons to try and find the fewest sets of angles that would fit into this range, it would probably be a good guess on very complex models, but I can almost garentee that you'd end up with totaly diferent groupings of polygons in the materials it generates.

now, we could cach the data in some extra chunck that would get ignored by FSO, or we could use a trick I've been itching to use for a while were we tack data to the end of a polygon, and just set the offset and size values of the subchuncks so this data exsists outside were FS would look, but still somewere easy to find.

but realisticly, the best option for now would probly be to check if a polygon is full-smooth, or flat, if it isn't either it's auto-faceted, and just use 32 as the angle (truespace's default) it'll probly be good enough most of the time.

oh, hey, kaz while you are tinkering with that code, there was something I wanted to try for a while, could you make it so that if the reflectance shader in the material used on a poly was 'translucency' then it would flip the lighting normals of that polygon? I think that could be used for some very neat efects.

[Kazan]

oh, hey, kaz while you are tinkering with that code, there was something I wanted to try for a while, could you make it so that if the reflectance shader in the material used on a poly was 'translucency' then it would flip the lighting normals of that polygon? I think that could be used for some very neat efects.

lighting and collision normals are the same

[Topgun]

but realisticly, the best option for now would probly be to check if a polygon is full-smooth, or flat, if it isn't either it's auto-faceted, and just use 32 as the angle (truespace's default) it'll probly be good enough most of the time.

so there are smooth polys in POF's? just full smooth and totally flat? (Like in blender?)

[Kazan]

POFs have full shading - per-vertex normals so everything from faceted to full smooth and in between

[Nuke]

you could just generate a normal map for models converted from pof to whatever. actually scratch that, it would just screw up on cap ships which use of tiling and thus shared uv space.

[Bobboau]

lighting and collision normals are the same

nope, the normal used for colision is the per poly normal, the vertex normals are used only for lighting.

[Bobboau]

but realisticly, the best option for now would probly be to check if a polygon is full-smooth, or flat, if it isn't either it's auto-faceted, and just use 32 as the angle (truespace's default) it'll probly be good enough most of the time.

so there are smooth polys in POF's? just full smooth and totally flat? (Like in blender?)

it would be easy to see if a poly was (past tense, ie in the cob) fullsmooth or full flat or somewere in between, it would not be easy to tell were in between it was cause polys do not have smoothing data.

if it was flat all vertex normals would be the same as the face normal, if it was full smooth the vertex normals would all be in the average kocation for the poly normals that use that vert, if some were the same as the poly and some were in the average locaton then that poly would be autofaceted.

[Kazan]

some polies also have the capability to be neither - some vertices could be faceted while others are smoothed, but based upon the modeler's desire not an autoangle (atleast [V] models may be - i'm not sure of 3DS, or the [V] POF converter's, capabilities)

bob: i am thinking it may be time to define OBJ3

[Kazan]

i know what i'll do - PCS2 nor FS2 needs to know the autosmooth data - both use the vertex normals for lighting.... when you go to save to .scn it'll do a full smoothing calculation and reverse engineer it - here is how I'll do it.

Make a list of all unique points present in the subobject mesh
Compile a list of all polygon normals for polygons sharing that point
iterate across all polygons and their verticies - check if all points no-smoothed, check if all points full-smoothed, calculate smoothing angle for all points - use smallest angle as autofacet angle (if a check succeeds, skip the rest).
Record result in PMF
write to SCN

that recording result in PMF is important - because then you can save the PMF and keep the smoothing data.

[Bobboau]

it might help things run a bit faster if (assumeing you simply didn't mention this cause it's sort of obvius) you worked on all polys that share a texture, and did one texture at a time, rather than all polies at once, it would reduce the complexity of the numerous comparisons.

[Kazan]

it might help things run a bit faster if (assumeing you simply didn't mention this cause it's sort of obvius) you worked on all polys that share a texture, and did one texture at a time, rather than all polies at once, it would reduce the complexity of the numerous comparisons.

yeah.. but what if you want to smooth between those textures

[Bobboau]

well, the thing is, if they are diferent textures then you know they were diferent materials, and the auto-facet angles should be independent (though they will likely be the same, and they will also likely be 32)

[Kazan]

true

[Bobboau]

I just thought of something, you could add into the options a check box for fast model loading, and if it's checked make sure the user know this means auto-faceting will be disabled. so if someone just want's to quickly import to screw around with a wip model, they can without haveing to wait through the blarg of auto-facet calculation.

[Col. Fishguts]

Can I just throw in that an option import 3DSMax ASCII files would still be awesome. They have per-polygon smoothing groups stored in them and are relatively easy to parse.

Because all this work going into autofacet generation isn't really useful for models made in max.

Or alternatively, make a button that recalculates all the collision data for a loaded POF. That way we could fix those POFs that were generated with the Max exporter and now have holes in them.

[Kazan]

Can I just throw in that an option import 3DSMax ASCII files would still be awesome. They have per-polygon smoothing groups stored in them and are relatively easy to parse.

format reference pls

Or alternatively, make a button that recalculates all the collision data for a loaded POF. That way we could fix those POFs that were generated with the Max exporter and now have holes in them.

the only reason that PCS2 doesn't already recreate the entire BSP tree already is it cache's the BSP - i can make a function to "Clear BSP cache" on a loaded model.

[Kazan]

what did you use to edit main_panel.cpp?! it's line endings are corrupt!

[edit]
had to clean the file, remove it from CVS and readd it with a clean copy