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kurt miller's homepage
( My development journal and homepage has moved to a new system here: kurtm.flipcode.com ) |
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The artist I'm working with for my game is most comfortable using 3DSMAX for his creations. This is good news for me, because it minimizes the number of tools I need to develop. We've worked out a nice little system to export scenes and game markers directly to the game engine. The key element is Flexporter, an excellent, free utility plugin written by Pierre Terdiman. Flexporter is designed as a plugin for which you write your own plugins. You can code in your own format using the plugin SDK and have 3DSMAX export to it directly. I did this once, but found it was easier instead to export using the text file format provided with Flexporter, then write a converter from that input to my own game's format. This way when changes need to be made, I edit only the converter rather than the Flexporter plugin. Its generally easier to work with my own code than an external SDK. One of the cool things about 3DSMAX is that you can set user properties for any object. So to specify special areas, triggers, and other tags for the game, the artist/designer need only create a primitive (such as a box to specify a volume in which a door auto-opens), and then set the user properties (Right-click on the object, select Properties, then User Defined) by adding tags that the game engine understands. There's room there to specify simple things directly, or perhaps just add references to more complex scripts that are to be executed by the game engine. This process has worked very nicely so far. The only case where I can really see using a commercial package like 3DSMAX for level content as a disadvantage would be when your player-base would otherwise have the ability to make mods. I suppose that's what gmax is for, but I've yet to look at it. |
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