[JohnnyS]

disc, on 13 October 2015 - 04:29 AM, said:

Or are there .s exporter plugins for 3Ds max, or blender?

A blender exporter can be found here: http://www.elvastowe...342#entry133342 Be aware not all features are fully implemented. The wagon models provided here: http://www.elvastowe...318#entry190318 were constructed and exported with blender.

[Lindsayts]

For what its worth for my own sim work I am currently uisng 2 file formats and will probably add quakes md3 format for animation of figures (people), the other two formats are .obj and .b3d. All general animations are being handled by the Openbve's animation format. One of the reason for including B3D is at has a neat facility for generating simple shapes (box's and cylinders are two of them) without needing any kind of mesh so such shapes can easily be generated on the fly in the route editor. Note all these are text based files. As far as I am concerned one ____HAS____ to be able to fall back to a text editor if all other methods have failed,

As for Blender, its not user unfriendly it is very different though and to use it one must study the interface access (what keys and mouse actions do what), then its a breeze. There are at least 3 freely availble books around on leaning Blender, its not a program that is simple to figure out without outside help. Note Blender's interface is total scriptable it would be possible to write a trainsim obj creator interface with some effort.

One of most 3D object creation programs problems are is a lot of them are designed to be able to create a complete scene with all lighting etc. A tool for this sort of work for a game program does need most of this complexity. Blender is no different here just take a look at "Sintel" for instance (Sintel is an open animated movie just under 15 minutes long completely done in Blender).

The Australian navy also used Blender to create a virtual model of the HMAS Sydney, (a light cruiser sunk with the loss of all hands early in 1941 by the HSK Kormoran, Note 1 ). This model was of an incredibly high detail and included all equipment even in the ships small boats. Sadly this model no longer appears to be around.

Note 1: This sinking is a famous Australian mystery the Sydney simple vanishing in november 1941, as the Kormoran was sunk in the engagement also the was no claim of its sinking.

Lindsay

[Guille592]

SP 0-6-0, on 12 October 2015 - 02:50 PM, said:

I still tinker both in TSM and Gmax and would like to be able to at least still use Gmax for ORTS. Yes, Gmax is old and way out of date. But, Gmax is free and everybit as powerful as the $3500 dollar programs that have too many features we really don't need in a modeling program for train simulation

Oh god, no please. Trust me, as a content creator, I've only exported with GMAX when having trains with no interiors and lo-poly models... I know you can export heavy models but at least it my computer, it takes aaaaaaaaaaageeesssssssssss to export something that would be exported in 3 minutes or less to DTG's TS.

Not to mention that when texturing a model in Gmax, it can be really exhausting and desperating, as you can't see what polygon you're actually "painting", now 3dsmax solves this by highlightning the selected polygon, whereas in Gmax, you just see a darn cross, wich can actually lead to painting the part you actually don't want to.

If we are building a new sim, I think it's time to implement things from 0, not from scratch as this, should be something temporary.

I do have hi-poly models wich I can't export as it's just, too much for that old crappy program, and a new format, would become really handy, but this format, must be something that the mentioned programs at "http://openrails.org/contribute/building-models/" share all together, so we can develop new models with no barriers at all.

Thanks!

[Guille592]

disc, on 13 October 2015 - 01:51 AM, said:

Modeling not depends on format. All formats are polygonal/triangular. Nothing will change, just there would be possibilities to use new material, and maybe new naming conventions for the parts, and avoid the pain of using .s format.
I can add my TS20xx models to OR after renaming the parts and replace the TS20xx materials to MSTS ones, but i don't want to wrestle with the .s format, also the MSTS materials are not enough.

.s format is currently repelling the new content developers/coming from TS20xx or trainz, as it's an ancient format with bugged, old, limited, and payware tools. That is one reason why the most of the MSTS models doesn't look so good.

This is what I'm talking about, thanks m8.

[ATW]

I agree with the new shape formats making even some other sim content compatible with ORTS. To save time an buy content from TS20xx developers I especially want 3D cab contents but don't want to completely lose .S format stuff from not being compatible anymore.

[R H Steele]

Genma Saotome, on 13 October 2015 - 08:05 AM, said:

I'd much rather see an investment of scarce resources applied to replacing .XNA, which, in case you didn't know, would allow multiple threads to submit draw calls to the GPU and thereby break the existing performance bottleneck. IIRC it would also open the doors to using modern graphics features -- tessellated grass anyone? Water that looks like water?

I hope anyone from the development team reads this. This would present an overall advancement for the OR sim platform.

[disc]

JohnnyS, on 13 October 2015 - 08:18 AM, said:

Be aware not all features are fully implemented.

That's the problem. There are exporters, but there always something that not 100%. BTW as i remember this exporter is a python script, which not so user friendly, because python plugins are very unstable.
And what if i use 3dsmax? There is no plugin for that. Of course making plugins for every major CAD softwares would be much work, so i think it would be better to create a converter from a popular intermediate format to .s, for example a collada to .s convert, as collada is supported natively by all major CAD soft.

ATW, on 13 October 2015 - 09:16 AM, said:

lose .S format stuff from not being compatible anymore.

Who said that .s support should be removed? It's already implemented, since that 0 resources needed to be in game. Even if no one uses it, there is no benefit of removing it.

Genma Saotome, on 13 October 2015 - 08:05 AM, said:

I'd much rather see an investment of scarce resources applied to replacing .XNA, which, in case you didn't know, would allow multiple threads to submit draw calls to the GPU and thereby break the existing performance bottleneck.

Replacing just XNA wouldn't solve anything. But replacing XNA with a 3d engine that supports directx 12 or vulcan api, and use GPU that is supports these APIs. As only dx12 and vulcan are really multi-threaded API-s. Older directx versions had some multi thread support, which looked good ON PAPER but in practice there was no, or small improvement, it was like placing spoiler on a bike...
Also draw call problem wouldn't be so big, if the modelers would know which is "draw call", and make their models to minimize the induced draw calls.

Water can look as water already in XNA if, a new water shader/material would be created, but currently only the original MSTS materials are represented in OR, no more.

[SP 0-6-0]

Vulcan will be supported by OpenGL and will be availabe in the MonoGame Framework.

What if any advantage would .X3D have???

I personally feel what is needed is a simple overhaul of the .S file format and a major upgrade to say Gmax Gamepack Exporter for .S shape files.

There is used to be a book from Discreet on designing Gmax Gamepacks. I doubt one could find that book these days.

ORTS having support for multiple shape file formats can only lead to trouble. Unless something like what RW or TS15 uses with the .Bin and .Ban files and say .Obj. Even that is a scarey thought though.

Maybe .Obj or B3D would be good for the routes and the non animated and animated scenery components.

What really need to do is standardize on one format going forward and not look back. God willing a expanded .S shape file format will be the one chosen.

If .S is the standard chosen then a new exporter or converter program like Conv3d.exe and makeace.exe will need to be generated strickly to handle the extended abilities of a improved .S file format for use in ORTS.

There are a couple of GUI interfaces availabe for Conv3d.exe and I will add them here in a bit.

Robert

[Goku]

I have plans to write my own obj -> s converter with mini - editor as part of my TSRE environment.

[disc]

Goku, on 13 October 2015 - 10:44 AM, said:

I have plans to write my own obj -> s converter with mini - editor as part of my TSRE environment.

That's nice for static objects, but the biggest problem is with converting high poly rolling stock to s., which are usually have animations too.