I spent 2 days getting things looking sort-of-right in oFusion. But still about 10% of the time it would be wrong. I spent about 30 minutes figuring out why an object wasn’t lit when I lit it. Another 30 minutes on why my texture wouldn’t take. A few other things. In each case it was fixed by restarting my computer – in other words bugs with oFusion.
For all the time I spent trying to get oFusion working, I could have just done all the materials by hand. So I’m dropping oFusion.
My current approach is to tell the artists to make things look how they want, then I will go through, use oFusion only for exporting (the free exporter doesn’t work), and then do the materials by hand. I can manually do the small tweaks needed to get things looking the same between the game and the editor.
For all the time I spent on this I could have written my own exporter 🙁
3 replies on “Dropping oFusion”
Yep. Again: âIf you want something done right, do it yourselfâ?.
Doing a exporter is not that hard. You just need to organize your data and in most of the time just debug the output.
A really nice software to prototype and debug your data is the Sweetscape’s 010 editor (http://www.sweetscape.com/010editor/), and recently I’ve found also the FileCarver (http://fizzysoft.net/filecarver/), I’ve made a trial and it looks very nice.
Anyway, if you gonna keep updating your project (as a MMO, I believe that you might update it) its convenient to write a exporter or use a data type from other sources. A lot of 3D model formats are already created with dozen exporters and libraries/documentation of how to parse it. Once I made a derivation of quake MDL2, bones and a deformation info, The model data (vertex, weight and bones) were exported to one file, the animations to other and the deformation to a third (this was done in Maya). At the time I was very crude in C++ coding, and I took a month and a half to code it. I believe that it can be done in a week or two, including the triangle stripping and other features.
You should try to do that when you get some time.
Rather than write your own exporter, why not just convert your primary shader into a DirectX max shader? This way, your artists can see exactly what the model will look like in max without having to export it or use oFusion. This will still require some manual adjustment to the material files, but with OGRE’s robust material system, very little modification should be necessary.
The ‘lexi exporter’ works well and has become the official ogre max exporter. It’s in CVS under tools/3dsmax export. You could edit that for your needs.
Also on the forums is the ‘ogreMax’ exporter which looks nice. It’s a native max plugin and is opensource, plus exports to the dotscene scene format which you could customise easily.
If you want custom max dialogs for artists go here
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2addons/viewtopic.php?t=4000&highlight=
Some simple dialogs for setting up and exporting xml from max userdata. I learnt off this and made my own in a few hours. Maxscript is easy