Cshop 3 users
Community Forums/Showcase/Cshop 3 users
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| Small app I threw together that cshop3 users may find helpful. Removes tris from caulked surfaces ( completely ).. removes forced mipmapping and full-brightness. Recompiles the b3d. Only works on .b3d's exported from cshop3. http://www.viszero.addr.com/temp/cs_b3d.zip |
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| Nice. |
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| Sabata, You should have just released the Blitz source and make all the DB users buy Blitz to use your util. ;-) Just kidding, MK |
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| makakoman Since DB users can't use b3d files there isn'y much point really is there |
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| Adding suport for alpha, mask and sphere-mapping.. all handled by setting enity points or texturename pre-extensions inside the cshop editor. |
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| sabatha - very cool :) Do you export all other entities as pivots with entity data intact (I assume you do) ? |
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| Just wondering, Sabata, but I noticed that when I exported a six box room, it exported as six entities. Now they all had the same texture, same lightmap, same properties, so it seemed to me that they could have been exported as a single entity. Would it be possible to use something like SSwift's AddMeshToSurface() function in the code archives to combine identical surfaces into a single surface? |
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| Binary_Moon, Good point! I guess the facts got in the way of my joke. :) MK |
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| Sybixus - In some ways that would be good and in others not. I think being able to set up portals (just a box entity that can be resized) in Cshop would be a good idea. Surfaces within a portal would be joined together to create a single surface, and possibly parented to a pivot. The portal would be exported as a pivot with its dimensions included. These could be combined to make a simple vis routine. Makakoman - Sorry :) |
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| I see your point. But since there are no portals in CShop yet, and bearing in mind it would be entirely optional, I think it would probably offer more of a speed improvement for those of us who are doing our occlusion in avery different way. I plan on using CShop to create a lot of small maps, keeping surface count to a minimum and not hiding anything. I'll be loading multiple maps so I can switch back and forth between them with no loading times. I can see why it wouldn't be so good for a FPS with big levels, but if that's the case, don't do it. It only needs a do it/don't do it option in the post-processor. |
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| You are both correct actually; in my opinion, theres no real 'right' way of doing it 'yet'. But there are remedies. As it is the b3d is exported to a single surface (where like materials are found). Seeing how collision works well with LoadAnimMesh() on b3d models there are several tricks that can be applied there. One would be to export the b3d with hiearchy support.. Another would be to compile the b3d with a 'sidenote' .dat file listing coordinates of set enities within cshop itself. Theres a few others and I plan to investigate this to its fullest... Im also open for suggestions! :) |
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| Sybixus , so it seemed to me that they could have been exported as a single entity. You sure? Each one i converted; countsurfaces() is returning only 1 regardless of the entity count... The exports should in fact be a single surface mesh where like materials are used. anyone else verify this please? |
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| Sabata - seperate entities *cannot* share the same surface. Entities *can* have more than one surface however. If they could we would be able to have thousands of models walking around as long as they used the aame texture. Surface count is a big issue however. Binary Moon has the right idea with the merging of surfaces within each portal. BTW Sabata - you are probably counting surfaces on just the parent and not its childen - or something like it. |
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| I'm assuming cshop exports in this manner - has something to do with the lightmapping... only a guess though as the tool only adjusts by what cshop has exported. |
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| I've not had time to explore CShop fully, but I'm sure that I had 6 children on a 6 block room. Maybe five were pivots or null entities and all the room data was in one entity, but it seemed a bit of a coincidence that it just happened to be 6. I'll give it a quick test with something bigger and see what I get. EDIT: I made a very quick test. 15 blocks with identical texture properties. The b3d loads 25 entities. That's a lot. As I said earlier, I intend using CShop to create very complex but small scenes and I'm going to end up with a couple of hundred surfaces before I add anything but the architecture at this rate. I can write my own loader which combines as it loads, I suppose, but otherwise it's going to cause serious problems on GF2-class cards. |
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| Oh, and it's nothing to do with the lightmapping. I tested without a lightmap so that we could discount it. |
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| Why don't you just use the LoadWorld() function in the Singularity demo? It loads a .csm file, so you can just skip the intermediate format. |
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| To be honest, I haven't looked at Singularity yet. I've been working hard on several of my projects and I didn't really want to get distracted playing with it. I'll check it out now. Thanks for the tip. |
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