Plan for Tom Spilman
by Tom Spilman · 04/02/2005 (12:49 am) · 8 comments
This is my first plan here... i guess it's probably the best place to let people know about the progress with Cartography Shop.
First of all beta 3 of our CartShop4 exporter is available now. It should be the last before the final release.
So with that nearing completion and Josh so kindly sending me the beta version of Cartography Shop 5, I decided to take the weekend to start testing the waters with it. It's really an alpha IMO as *a lot* of stuff is still not working, but already it shows great improvement. Windowed selection is in. Carving is 100% more robust than it was in CS4. New "arch" primitive. All great additions!
Ok... So it's still *really* early, but I started by writing one of the new mesh reader plugins to support Torque DTS meshes. These should look familiar to all Torque users:
(Also notice the arch from the new arch tool)
It seems the normals are screwed up and a few more complex DTS meshes fail to load, but it's a good start. The eventual goal is that you'll just have to add your Torque/mod/data/shapes folder into the CS5 mesh search path and it will automatically populate it's mesh list with all the DTS shapes in your game.
I'll keep people up to date with what's going on here from time to time.
First of all beta 3 of our CartShop4 exporter is available now. It should be the last before the final release.
So with that nearing completion and Josh so kindly sending me the beta version of Cartography Shop 5, I decided to take the weekend to start testing the waters with it. It's really an alpha IMO as *a lot* of stuff is still not working, but already it shows great improvement. Windowed selection is in. Carving is 100% more robust than it was in CS4. New "arch" primitive. All great additions!
Ok... So it's still *really* early, but I started by writing one of the new mesh reader plugins to support Torque DTS meshes. These should look familiar to all Torque users:
(Also notice the arch from the new arch tool)
It seems the normals are screwed up and a few more complex DTS meshes fail to load, but it's a good start. The eventual goal is that you'll just have to add your Torque/mod/data/shapes folder into the CS5 mesh search path and it will automatically populate it's mesh list with all the DTS shapes in your game.
I'll keep people up to date with what's going on here from time to time.
About the author
Tom is a programmer and co-owner of Sickhead Games, LLC.
#2
04/02/2005 (2:54 am)
Any texturing improvements?
#3
04/02/2005 (3:40 am)
Now thats a cool idea.. load the DTS meshes into the dif editor so that you can bake the lighting with the DTS meshes IN the level, then allow them to be placed seperately when loading the DIF.
#4
04/02/2005 (4:44 am)
That rocks... do you know what the ETA is for cartshop 5?
#5
@Phil - This is part of the plan. Also when you place your interior into Torque the DTS instances will appear with it. Erik Madison has done the ground work for this. If you want this feature it will take applying a patch to the engine for now. Once Matt's interior stuff makes it into the engine i will adapt to whatever method he uses.
@Adam - When it's done. =)
04/02/2005 (12:29 pm)
@Erik - Yea there are improvements.... more precise texture rotation, single click fit to face, align to left/top/right/bottom, and more i'm forgetting.@Phil - This is part of the plan. Also when you place your interior into Torque the DTS instances will appear with it. Erik Madison has done the ground work for this. If you want this feature it will take applying a patch to the engine for now. Once Matt's interior stuff makes it into the engine i will adapt to whatever method he uses.
@Adam - When it's done. =)
#7
04/03/2005 (1:17 pm)
@Warpy - I'm gathering up the courage to delve into exporting CartShop lightmaps into the DIF. To start this process i'll be looking to see how TGERad was integrated into map2dif. So technically i could make both work.... we'll see how it goes. 
Torque Owner Ed Johnson