What are soft that can I use to create scene/mesh/animation?

[Zoubrowska]

Hi Folks,

I've been working on a new project for school and after days of neck-deep research and test I am still struggling to understand what are the format that can be use in irrlicht and to which extant.

I'm creating a bomberman clone from scratch with Irr, so I started the tutorials and used Blender to create my map. I've tried the .dae .obj .blend and a bunch of other format - Only with the .x format was I able to load my map correctly with its texture, but unfortunately additional work that I may have done with Blender on the .x, such as collision, ennemy path finding etc did not appear to work once loaded in with Irrlicht. That I came to understand that it may not be possible since irrlicht is NOT a game engine (thx the FAQ ^^), but please correct me if i'm wrong.

So here is my question, what software should I use to create my models, like my characters, bombs, destructible walls etc, and in which format? In order to then animate them, and have the whole thing working when I load it with irrlicht ?

[CuteAlien]

Hard question - as the answer is - it depends. First you have to be aware of the difference between scene formats and mesh formats.

Typical mesh-formats are .obj and .x and .b3d. Those usually have a single 3d mesh (the geometry parts - aka triangles). And depending on the format they can have additional materials (sometimes inside the same file, sometimes like with .obj you get an additional material file). And some formats have animations (.X and .b3d). One of the best to use in my experience is b3d. If you work with blender take a look at the b3d exporter from SuperTuxKart: https://sourceforge.net/p/supertuxkart/ ... lender_25/

If you want to put many models together - you will need to work with some scene format. Those are often very game-specific and so many people write their own game-editors with their own game formats. There are also a few general formats, but no guarantee those will work for your game. The .dae format (usually called Collada) is one of those, but doesn't support that much stuff you need for games so you usually have to extend it when using that one. I think some quake formats also have scene information, but I never worked with those so I can't help too much there. Irrlicht has the .irr format which you can create with irrEdit. Again I didn't work much with it - but I think it is somewhat flexible and might allow passing on meta-information. So maybe take a look at IrrEdit.
Maybe someone else can help out and tell about experience with quake editors?

My own solution... I always create my own scene-formats. Writing a simple editor is usually easy and one of the tasks I somwhat enjoy anyway (not that complicated, you quickly see stuff and if you learn using an engine it's a nice task to start with). And my formats are usually xml-based (sometimes using irrXML sometimes using TinyXML for reading/writing). And it has the advantage that I can put exactly the stuff I need for a game in the editor.

There is one more solution some people use - they extend a tool like Blender. So they also create an own format - but code plugins to have their game-editor directly inside Blender.

[Zoubrowska]

Thanks for your answer, it's very helpful!

I'm gonna look what I can do with IrrEdit but I feel like I'm gonna end up having to write my own scene-format, thanks for the clarifications.