Current state of GAE?

[ZaggyDad]

I agree, Titi. The .blend format is actually just a memory dump from Blender, from what I've heard, so it isn't exactly a real format at all. What should be done is that someone that's good at Blender Python should make a direct G3D exporter, and perhaps later GAE could have a 3d skeleton format made for it, which would help make animation for Glest. I suppose that would require that the model format have weight textures, or something...but that might not be a disadvantage at all.

[John.d.h]

Agreed.  Blend files have tons of information in them that isn't pertinent at all to Glest, and I don't see how the program would figure out what information to use and what to leave out.  That's why we have g3d.  Besides, exporting only takes like 10 seconds at most.

someone that's good at Blender Python should make a direct G3D exporter

Like this one, you mean? http://titusgames.de/blender/g3d_xml_exporter_v1.1.zip

[charlieg]

.blend is an internal format for blender! Its not something only made for models. Even complete games can be in it! So .blend is really no option.
We should really stay with g3d for now, there is no big benefit I can see for now.

I don't think anybody is advocating supporting all of the Blender features, just those relevant to Glest.

The .blend file format

One of the biggest questions that gets asked is what is the .blend file format. The answer to this question is in the Architecture document*, and the answer is basically that the .blend format evolves and is basically a dump of the data structures in blender with some information on the "version" of the .blend that tells blender how to deal with things. While there is not a heck of a lot of detail in the documentation on this your best bet is to look at: blender/source/blender/makesdna/intern/makesdna.c It is heavily commented and should have all you need to deal with changes to it. Ton has written some additional notes on it here:

http://www.blender.org/development/architecture/notes-on-sdna/

* http://www.blender.org/development/architecture/

[ZaggyDad]

Agreed.  Blend files have tons of information in them that isn't pertinent at all to Glest, and I don't see how the program would figure out what information to use and what to leave out.  That's why we have g3d.  Besides, exporting only takes like 10 seconds at most.

Like this one, you mean? http://titusgames.de/blender/g3d_xml_exporter_v1.1.zip

I know about that, and no, that's not quite ideal. What would be ideal is a DIRECT exporter. Like the one that never got made, but included a direct importer for G3Ds.

I don't think anybody is advocating supporting all of the Blender features, just those relevant to Glest.

The .blend file format

One of the biggest questions that gets asked is what is the .blend file format. The answer to this question is in the Architecture document*, and the answer is basically that the .blend format evolves and is basically a dump of the data structures in blender with some information on the "version" of the .blend that tells blender how to deal with things. While there is not a heck of a lot of detail in the documentation on this your best bet is to look at: blender/source/blender/makesdna/intern/makesdna.c It is heavily commented and should have all you need to deal with changes to it. Ton has written some additional notes on it here:

http://www.blender.org/development/architecture/notes-on-sdna/

* http://www.blender.org/development/architecture/

I don't think anyone would like having blends as a format in Glest, because, as John said, it would have to skip all kinds of data, and way too much, which may just slow down load times to like more than two times as long. It would also mess up the XML, since it would have to have the name of the animation from the blend, and it would undoubtedly have to be case sensitive...way too much work. And on top of that, the texture loading would get a huge amount more complicated, since it would have to support both of the ways of putting a texture onto a model, and the one in materials, if it had multiple ones, or something other than a image, it would probably just crash it.

[-Archmage-]

Quote from: John.d.h on November 15, 2009, 18:44:58
Agreed.  Blend files have tons of information in them that isn't pertinent at all to Glest, and I don't see how the program would figure out what information to use and what to leave out.  That's why we have g3d.  Besides, exporting only takes like 10 seconds at most.

Like this one, you mean? http://titusgames.de/blender/g3d_xml_exporter_v1.1.zip

I know about that, and no, that's not quite ideal. What would be ideal is a DIRECT exporter. Like the one that never got made, but included a direct importer for G3Ds.

What are talking about Zaggy?
That is direct, all you have to do is: File --> Export --> G3D XML Exporter 1.1 and it'll export directly to G3D, I don't know why it still says XML in there though, because it doesn't export an XML.

[hailstone]

This is getting off topic. Perhaps it should be locked.

To sum up the topic: There is a feature freeze on the 0.2.12 branch to finish networking, pathfinder, and fix any bugs (such as in saving a game). For 0.3 we will work on features such as GUI, Lua, more networking, lots of refactoring, although the details can be worked out later.

We need testers submitting bugs/crashes to http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/glestae/ otherwise we will think it is stable. If you need help getting 0.2.12a started, post in https://forum.megaglest.org/index.php?topic=4508.75

[ZaggyDad]

What are talking about Zaggy?
That is direct, all you have to do is: File --> Export --> G3D XML Exporter 1.1 and it'll export directly to G3D, I don't know why it still says XML in there though, because it doesn't export an XML.

Oh? I had no idea. Wow. In that case, I may start modding Glest more avidly. (Yay!)

Oh. I looked into it, and it should be named that, because, if it doesn't have Glexemel, I'm pretty sure, it'll just output a xml file.

[-Archmage-]

Oh. Well, if you're enthusiastic about modding again, come help!