Hi All,
Just got directed to your list today. Hope I'm posting this right as that
is a first for me too. Sorry if I goofed too.
I'm one of a bunch of content makers, I recently had a conversation with
Stuart, and felt it worth exploring this a bit further with you all to see
if it has much of a future as an idea. Basically we have been working with
other sims for quite a few years, and I think between us we have tried
pretty much everything by now. We work from Lightwave, and can't
realistically afford to change from that. But then again neither would we
really want to as it works the best for us and what we do. It's simple,
uncluttered, concise, agile and robust.
Pleased to see that the new OSG supports a format or two we can in theory
work with. I ran some tests today and while the format of .lwo is obviously
being noticed in the bowels of the thing, it does not show the model as a
visual result. So that is a problem that maybe needs some further
investigation.
One problem we can't do much about is that both AC3D and Blender have issues
beyond our control on the platform we use. AC3D can't run on Windows build
6001 SP1 and above as far as we can tell, and this will be set to get a lot
worse with the advent of 7000 and up later this year. At any rate it has an
"app crash" as soon as it starts to run. Fixes are inconsistent to that's
not a solid proposition by then. Blender has other issue related to what it
wants in the way of python versions and what is actually available for x64
quad based machines.
Having discovered all this we now need to find out about lightwave use in
flightgear directly. It's going to be work either way, and since it seems
able to use the stuff directly I can't see any point having 3rd party stuff
with issues in the way, especially since they also bloat the files by a
factor of 3 in many cases. 500K .lwo file becomes 1,500K .ac file and loses
all it's image maps into a not very good looking bargain.
Today, and without seeing the model turn up visually, I debugged a plane in
.lwo format (chosen at random) via the error messages in the dos box and
tweaked out the problems one at a time until it stopped grumbling! I'm
guessing I made it happy eventually because it finally spent time and went
through it all including reading the textures and finally without comment or
complaint in the last few attempts, but it just did not want to show the
model, only an empty space where it should have been!
I did mention on the forum that I felt pretty sure that if the LWS scene
file were to be read as well as the parts then positional information for
the parts of a whole plane, with rotation points would be there for the
asking with a view to making an XML file or the start of one. But that is
icing on the cake to some extent.
I mention this because there is no other way of getting a whole plane from
lightwave. Although I am not sure if collada might prove ok in that respect
and the latest version of lightwave has that as an export possibility, but
we've never had cause to try it to date.
Lastly, I see form other posts in this context that there is great mention
of MSFS, but can I please say that we were not from there, we have been
making lately for sims very much closer in style to FG than that. They are
minority sims though it must be said, but we feel their time may also be up
shortly. Hence us looking over FG for the last 6 months or so to see if we
could make it work. It's looking awfully close to being possible based on
what we found out about FG so far.
We'd like to make stuff but we don't yet seem to have a fully working route
of choice. We just don't seem able to give it away. Which is a little
unusual!
--
Cheers,
Ian
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