Irrlicht Engine

so there will be support for .x models in 0.5 cool, but what's their story?? according to what i have read they are supposed to be an ascii file format, but i found one on the web and opened it up in notepad and it was incomprehensible garbage, like a binary would be. yet it opens up just fine in microsoft's mesh viewer they bundle with the directx 9.0 SDK, so it IS somehow a valid mesh....

point is, does anybody know more about this format? I need to use a model format that has joints i can attache child meshes to. i was using MD3's, but i need completely different animations than they support and more attachment points than the standard tags.(also very few actually WORK) i would use milkshape files but as im sure others have seen on the forums, they have some pretty serious issues on their own. also i could use MD2's of my own design with cutom animation, but i'm sure you have all seen the vertex "swimming" that they do up close.....

dx8 format has it all

bones, weights, animation, interpolation, time scaling, etc..

It's a huge point...The Panda directx exporter beta is supposed to export bones and stuff from Max, so that's a huge point. That and charcater fx, 3d canvas, soon blender, ts6.6+conversion pack... It's a good thing.

.X files can be ascii or compiled binary.

Kinda like a LUA script.

sounds sweet yeh i can export em directly from milkshape too, which is great for me its my fave modeller package. anybody know places on the web with free .x models? i could use some more to maybe save me time makin props and little stuff or even as basis for other characters, dunno.

also if niko is checkin this will 0.5 support both the ascii and compiled .x models? and will it do mutltiple animations in a model?

that would rock

-Ted

from what he says, the .x file loading is really, really fast-- which is a big plus if you're working with (semi-)older machines, like me.

x models is imho a great solution. In fact, engines like unreal tournament 2003, support bones and weights, (look how smoothly the alien tails do swing at iddle animations, that's impossible without bones and weights...and much more stuff...besides, makes artist's life way easier...I know why I say this ) or jedi knight, a lot of others.

You still surely can load a tiny md2, or a big one, if wish so, but having the alternative of loading bones with weights is...plainly fantastic... Artists -cough- use to love that...

Also, from the coder side, in the future, having access to a certain joint/bone, at any moment, and to a partial animation, is really powerful: It will be seen when months pass by and some projects evolve to reach that point, imho...

Imho, an engine that supports md2 and directx with bones and weights, already has 2 of the best ways imho to load an animated character model (softskinned . boned-weighted). And Niko probably is heading stuff that direction, I suspect...

Anyway, I suspect also, adding weights is a huge task in programming...I don't know a word of coding, but I'd probably get impressed if he gets a way to deal with that... It has "destroyed" many coders before...