Native engine fbx support (or at least a converter function)

It would be nice, if the engine native supports fbx (and other known formats) or at lease offers a function to convert these formats to mdl7.

why can't you just import them as fbx then save as mdl?

in a script?

I meant native engine support ent_create("cool_model.fbx", nullvector, NULL);
or (at least)
ent_convert("cool_model.fbx", "cool_model.mdl");
ent_create("cool_model.mdl", nullvector, NULL);


(most model packages are 3ds, fbx, collada, ...)
3DGS supports them (by importing in MED), but it takes hours and hours of manuel converting (import->save as..) to convert such packages.

The methods are part of MED (and available for conitec) so it just would be nice to have access with lite-c?!

Yes, mercuryus had right, only ent_create("my_model.x", nullvector, NULL); as native format can be imported directly, why not another format like *.obj etc?

i dont think that would be possible with fbx, there are like a million versions of fbx.

Why not start with the versions supported by MED?
(would make a valuable advertisment for GS: "native support for collada, 3DS, fbx, x, obj")

Just as a thought:

I can imagine, that the fbx file format is relativly unoptimized for games because it allows a variety of features you'll never need in - even a modern - 3D-Game. So there is a lot of overhead in this file format for the 3DGS-Engine which will slow down loading (probably to a very high extend). Therefore it's useless to load FBX while runtime.

So even if the loading time would be just 50% higher as they are for the optimized MDL file format, don't you think, that this time is worth to save at runtime and just convert the model?

BTW: An Instruction like this: ent_create("test.fbx","test.mdl"); does not make sense at all. At least at runtime it would just screw up your loading-times.

greetings,
Tech

PS: I've never tried out the fbx mdl converted, but if it works correctly, as already said, is there really a heavy need to support the giant fbx file format as native format?

PS2: Just have a look at other engines.. e.g. CryTek..

Batch processing which allows to use a file list and constructed filenames for MED should do I think.

just as a small annotation: X is supported nativly by DirectX, and therefore was not very difficult to implement. Additionaly it's intended for games therefore it shouldn't be too slow..

@Firoball: If one file is converted correctly , a batch process shouldn't be very hard.. Is the converter open-source? If so i could give it a small try at the weekend.

.x is a very crappy format and shouldn't be used for anything.

http://assimp.sourceforge.net
this library could be interesting. should be useable from lite-c.

I'm currently working through some DX tutorials. I found it cool that there is a ready to use file format (I mean .x). So why shouldn't we use it? Where is the disadvantage?

It's not one format, it's at least ten. More or less...

I had extreme problems with exporting and importing .x as every tool did sth else wrong.
Ended up writing a MDL5 importer (for another engine) because I found absolutely now way to get .mdl to .x without having export/import errors.

-> .x sucks.