Hi. I'm writing a program that exports to the .map format after which I can load these exported .map files into 3DGS. For the most part everything's gone without a hitch until now. 3DGS recognizes the "worldspawn" classtype, the "light" classtype, even the "start" classtype, but it doesn't recognize the "model" classtype. This is especially bad as this is how it SAVES entities itself, it just can't load them back in again. Is there an alternate classtype that will work for entities? It's rather frustrating because I want to be able to setup, among other things, enemies and where they will be in level.

Thanks for any help you can give.

The importer is using the Quake/Valve/Halflife .map format. It's possible that models are not imported because Quake/Halflife uses entities in a different way than Gamestudio. However I'm not sure - I'll pass that question to our WED developer.

Thanks for your quick reply and for looking into it.

The clincher is that if you save to .map format in 3D Game Studio all of the entities are saved in the file too (you can see them using notepad) but when you load the file back INTO 3D Game Studio, they don't get loaded right and show up with a question mark in the explorer.
I guess people don't use .map's very often so this got overlooked, I just wonder if there is any way around it.
I could always just export to wmp format but I've read in a few places that it changes from version to version, so I'd rather stick with the .map format if possible.

No resolution huh? In that case how frequently does the wmp format change? Would you consider it stable enough to write an exporter for it? It's disapointing that the .map format support is not complete. I'll just have to try to find a way around it. I can't wait until WED gets plugin support. There are so many things I could write to help speed up game dev.

MAP Format serves only for the transfer of the level geometry. Wed loads basically no Entities from the MAP files. Reason for that: The Quake-Map defined multiple different classes for the Entities, but the classes Are not known in the WED.

Only level geometrie and Objects like "info_player_start" and "light" are imported and exports. All other Entities are exported as common Objects.

Since the version 6.7 WED has a Plugin interface

Three things.
Firstly, I'm sorry if I'm being a pain, but I'm still not quite clear on this. If WED exports all entity information when saving to .map format, why wouldn't it import entities using the same format it used to export them?

Secondly, I have searched quite a bit for information on developing WED plugins and my impression is that it hasn't yet been added but is in development. It is mentioned in this post, this one, and this one. I see that these aren't recent posts, but they're the most current references that I can find to a WED plugin. If you know of any information on it, it would be very helpful.
Also you said that it's been implimented since ver 6.7 but the latest version of 3DGS is 6.4. I'm guessing this must be a typo.

Finally, How much does the .wmp format change over time? Is it pretty stable at this point or are there a lot of revisions from version to version?

The WMP format normally won't change. However, a change is planned next year that could affect entity angles stored in the WMP file - so your exporter should evaluate the version number stored in the WMP file. The MAP importer is unlikely to be modified, so if it doesn't work with the current version we probably won't ever be able to re-import entity information from MAP.

Thank you both for all your help and patience. In hindsight I really should have thought of this before.

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Also you said that it's been implimented since ver 6.7 but the latest version of 3DGS is 6.4. I'm guessing this must be a typo.

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Btw, this is no typo. Just open WED and click 'Help' -> 'About WED' .. It gives both the current engine version and the WED version. WED is currently at version V6.751 ..

Cheers

Ah, I see. My apologies Wlad.