What about the indices here? Do they start at 0 and what if nothing is attached?



I also have a question about smoothing. Do vertices which are at the same position get welded for gouraud shading? What about the UV-borders? How do you determine the normals? I think the smoothing flag is too inflexible and not enough. Smoothing groups or something like that would be needed. This whole smoothing thing really is a big weakness of Gamestudio.

I've added the answers to the description.

- Vertices don't get welded by themselves. It's up to the level designer to weld them. Gouraud shading is only active for blocks with Smooth flag, and only from version 7.74 on that's currently in beta. When you think the Smooth flag is not enough, just share with us your idea of how else smoothing should work.

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Let´s say you have a shape like this (top view and every character is a polygon) and want hard edges at the tips but smooth shading on the sides. That´s not possible with the smooth flag. (This is just one example. I could list more issues.)

With smoothing groups it would be possible. Put the left side into smoothing group 1 and the right side into smoothing group 2. At the borders of the smoothing groups there will be hard edges. That´s how smoothing groups work in 3dsmax.

Actually smoothing groups aren´t that nice to work with though. I prefer how it works in Maya where you can set smoothing information directly on the edges. But there is no edge struct in the WMB format so probably it would be simplest to include normals with the vertices. Then the exporter could handle smoothing correctly. The smooth flag would be obsolete then.

yes, please ignore the smooth flag in WMB and add normals to the vertex struct instead. this would solve the problem.

WED can still use the smooth flag (but better implement something more sophisticated) and the map compiler is responsible for calculating the mesh and its normals.

jcl, what do you think about adding the normal to the vertex struct?

I'm having problems to display the lightmap. This is the result so far, probably it's the materials list, I'm not including one, or maybe it's the UV coordinates. Any idea will be appreciated.

Best Regards.

what application do you write your exporter for? just curious...

i didn't really start to work with the wmb7 format yet but maybe at least mat_shaded or mat_flat have to be added to the material list and then used correctly by your geometry?

Thanks, I think mat_flat would work, I'll check with this.

Right now I'm focused in Cartography Shop 4.1 (old but I bought a license when started with Dark Basic Pro), after finishing it I'll look for a free editor, I already have a program to load and convert to a MDL the Gile[s] output (DirectX exporter), so my first option is integrating both.

The problem was negative UV data, I need to normalize it. Now I'm trying to include terrains, but they are not described in the objects section (maybe type=3?).

So far I have this sample, I tested it with the 18 Lite-C workshop code and runs fine.

Regards

Terrains are normal entities, type=7.