The last half-week I’ve been working with artists to try to get their levels working right.
Right now this is turning into a big risk for the project. I paid $1200 for an add-on called oFusion so the artists could theoretically see how things look in the game within the modeling program. But support is too slow and the bugs are killing me.
I had a real dilemma yesterday with how to export materials.
I could:
1. Create materials by hand in text files, which is good because they are source controlled and I can easily change common properties. But then, due to bugs, the artists could not see what they are doing in the game. And also as sort of a hack I would have to name materials in the modeler exactly the same as in the text file. This means I have to do everything myself because that takes too much rigor for the artists to handle.
2. Specify in oFusion which material file I am using. This was a feature I requested, but was buggy to the point of being unusable, and caused problems in step 3.
3. Create everything using oFusion’s preferred system, which is basically to program the material in a GUI through MAX. This means every material takes about 5 minutes for me or 30 minutes for an artist to setup because you really are programming the material. Materials cannot be source controlled and changing any common property means every material in the game needs to be recreated. Worse, because step 2 could not be turned off once activated, I had to delete and recreate the object entirely.
I ultimately went with step 3, because this was the only thing that worked at all.
I’ve been waiting for support to get back to me on various bugs for half a week now and so far no response. This is such a critical time I can’t just drop oFusion or I would and ask for a refund and hire someone to program a decent exporter. Maybe the author is ignoring me. I’m trying really hard to keep a neutral tone in my bug reports but maybe some of my frustration is showing through.
End loss: $1200, plus about 200 hours of my own time, 100 hours of artists time.