3DSMax & TGE or TSE what does work

#1 Hi Bruno,

I am going to divate a bit on how I answer your question and break it up into the three art areas: DIFs, DTSs and Extras. I hope that this will end up answering your questions and more.

DIFs

There are a few 3rd party tools to generate Half Life .MAP compatabile files from 3DS Max such as Game Level Builder though none of these are fail safe or 100% perfect to the level they need to be.

It takes a pretty big shift in how you build and model to get things working exactly the way that they need to work but if push comes to shove you could use Max to do this though its not entirely recommended. You will also need Quark to handle all the texturing as this data is not normally exported in the MAP exporters currently available for 3DS Max.

For TGE you can use Map2Dif that comes with your download. For TSE you need to recompile, or find someone who has this done already, Map2Dif for TSE. You cannot use DIFs from TGE in TSE.

DTSs

Although some will disagree with me its pretty easy to say that you can do pretty much everything under the sun and get it out into the DTS format from 3DS Max. I could compile a list but if you put some thought to it and read the docs you will understand what you can and cannot work with. Overall IMHO its a powerful yet simple system to work with provided that the students take some time to read the documentation properly and understand 3DS Max.

There are exporters available for Max versions 3 thru 7 and yes they do handle 2 sided textures properly. The same exporter can be used for TGE or TSE, the primary difference is that in TSE you need to edit some files to setup your material shaders correctly for the model.

Extras

No sorry you cannot export particle data out, though it would be trivial to make an effect in Max and replicate it in Torque since the basic Max particle system and Torques particle system are remarkably similar in how they operate. One could create a really simple maxscript in no time to read this data and dump it out to a file if they were so inclined.

Shaders can be generated in 3DS Max 7 and dumped out though the .FX files will need some massaging of their shader semantics to work in TSE.


Logan

#2 Hi Logan,

Thanks for your time.

Difs :
It's better to teach people Quark anyway, since they will need it to assign textures to the interiors.
Could you pass me a link to Game Level Builder ( or is it just a Max feature ? ).

Had you tried recompiling Map2dif for TSE ? Is there any problems or is it straightforward ?

DTS :

I'm not really a Max guy ( specially cause I have a Mac ), so all I tried doing was following the standard docs and running into errors ( the 2-sided thing for instance). So I really don't know what can be done and what can't in this case, or how to solve problems regarding it.
Anyway, I won't be doing that right now. Could I page you for help later on ?

Extras :
Good to know about the particles.

About the .FX files, what are those exactly ? Are them CG files ? Is there a TSE exporter for those ?

TIA

Bruno

#3 www.rustycode.com/matt/map2dif_tse.exe

#4 Thanks Matt.