Irrlicht Engine

my ideal format would be something more like ogres, with separated files for materials, scenes, skeletons, animations etc...

not really a format but a structure. There would be a huge mount to consider. seeing as MAX isnt the only thing out there to make 3d with. Making a start by introducing this kind of thing is good though. a 1 shot export for a mesh is only the first step. then u do it for everyhting in the scene into the /mesh directory copy all the rendered textures or textures to /textures etc. thats all i did was get th materials and save the textures and meshes using maxscript. ill try find it.

I really wish irrlicht was more like ogre in the way it separates meshes and materials and has a unified animation system

creating a "chunky" system for something simple is foolish. a lot of the drawback imo with ogre is the "weight" of the whole thing. like using a 1300 cc superbike to ride 1 km to the shop when your bicycle works just fine. what about the guys who wanna just load one mesh? it would need to be a fetaure that is accessible, but not the default. In my view its worth having a system structure that can in essence, "make a map system" from one 3d scene, bt then again u have irredit. Making max export into .irr format has been my route recently and iv found great success.

the key is modularity , adding ur mesh writer system into 1 format for a model will make that irr format writer cooler, but im sure you get what i mean?

binormals and tangents are just like the normals of a vert. Just they point in perpendicular directions to the normal.

FuzzYspo0N:I definitely agree with you about modularity, thats really the only way I wish irrlicht was more like ogre, it is modular to have separate files. but what I mean is that in the same way there is irrmesh and irr there should also be irrmaterial irranimation etc. I would be very interested to see a .irr exporter for max btw


Zeuss: yeah I know what binormals and tangents are. when you mentioned texture seams I thought generating them had something to do with the uvs being different, but I just realized its because there have to be two actual vertices for there to even be a seam, if a vertex only has one uv. so this is probably why irrlicht can't generate them. I think if the code that generates normals took into consideration verts with the same position, there would be no need to have normals in a file.
but I think it is better to have normals in the file for a number of reasons so nvm I will add normals anyway:lol:

I have not read the whole post but what you are trying to do seems alot like Neverwinter Nights ASCII mdl format.