First Big Step

This may not seem like big news to some, but after months of trying (admittedly, only a few hours of effort a few separate times) we have succeeded in converting straight from Maya to DTS. It turns out (and this may seem obvious to the initiated) that when you're not logged into GarageGames to do your searches, there's a lot less material returned than when you *are* logged in. When you *are* logged in, you get all sorts of nifty things like the newest versions of Maya2DTS that work on Maya 8. As opposed to the version made to work on 6 that I was trying to force through. ("Error: The operation completed successfully" is my new favourite error message). Anyway, we had had it sorta working by converting to flx (or was it fbx?) and using Milkshape, but that's never as good as straight to the extension you need out of the program you're using.

In my defense, I've never programmed games before, and when I got into this project the concept of an engine was (and it seems laughable now) new to me. Nor had I ever used Maya, and so following simple tutorials/instructions took me a lot longer than might be expected. Nor did I know what various options in various checkboxes were, so trial and error were, by and large, my bywords. This doesn't work as well as you might think.

We also discovered that patterns show up if they are (gasp) an exponent of 2, such as 256x256 or 512x512. I never tried 256x512, but I suppose that might work. (Before we were only getting grey versions of the objects in the gameworld).

Also, Torque ShowTool is awesome.