FGD ML wrote: > 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. Welcome! > > 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. > I have zero experience with Lightwave, but if it's similar to the other "big" modeling packages, including Blender, then I would assume that its native file format is not suitable to be used directly in a game or real-time simulation. The set of possible modeling operations is just too rich for OSG to support, and the file format is designed for editing, not fast loading and display. What art path are you using now with the simulations that apparently aren't MSFS? It would be most useful to inquire in the Lightwave community what people do for export to games. OSG supports DirectX .x files, Flight format, Collada, even plain .obj for geometry and textures; those all seem like better candidates for loading into Flightgear than .lwo.
An important concern is exporting animations that are stored in your Lightwave models. It's true that Flightgear does all model animations via XML files that are separate from the model files, but that's an artifact of the tools that Flightgear modelers have used to date. While it is convenient to have a human-readable format for animations, OSG does support animations directly in its scene graph and can construct them from loaded files. If you can export the pivots and sequences of your animations into one of the above file formats, then the remaining work is connecting Flightgear runtime properties with the controlling animation variables in the model. There would be some XML for you to write (I think), and we would need to support hooking into an OSG animation directly. > 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. I don't know what to say about AC3D, but Blender has such a large community that I doubt you need to be suffering in isolation this way. Surely this is a known problem with a workaround? > > 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. There will be some bloat as you go from the modeler format to a real-time format. 300% is not outrageous. ... > > 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! > As I said above, can you tell us about your present art path, and maybe what simulations you're targeting today? Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R)AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today-http://p.sf.net/sfu/adobe-com _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
