http://www.blendernation.com/2009/07/16/breaking-ton-roosendaal-to-receive-honorary-doctorate-today/

Congratulations to him and he really deserves it !

By the way ventilator, I just have to say YOU ROCK! Thanks for the awesome exporter.

a good tutorial side with free videos:

CG-Cookie - Blender Tutorials


I love Blender,.... i love it....

Hey Ventilator!

Is it possible to write a plugIn for the a7 engine to use .blend files?
...it would be great, if we could use a full model, with bone, bona-animation, and maybe a rig-setup..?

Shure, it is possible, but who would / could do that...?
My knowlege about writing plugIns are..... let me say ..... not good enouth

greetings
Marcel

the a7 engine doesn't provide full access to stuff like the assigned textures or bones or animations for a mesh so if you wanted to do a custom mesh loader you would have to write a full .mdl file into a memory buffer and load it with ent_create().

directly using the .blend format would be an extreme amount of work. it wouldn't be worth it. it makes much more sense to use blender's python api to write an exporter.

it would be possible to do it like unity though. start a headless blender from the command line in the background which loads the .blend file, executes the exporter script and then load the generated .mdl. this would already work with the current exporter with some small changes.

http://durian.blender.org/news/durian-pre-sale-campaign-started/

if you like blender this is a great way to support it.

What?

But this requires to restrict the use of blend files to certain features, right?

How would it improve the workflow?
Let's guess:
- we load in A7 our game
- the engine starts the headless blender
- the headless blender exports each model tha is created in the engine
= increasing of load time. - not so good!


- we load in A7 our game
- we reload a model or level by a certain command within the game and -
- the engine starts the headless blender
- the headless blender exports each model or level
- that we can see in its newest shape
= hm...

Does this mean, we could run the game and blender simultaneously, updating the blendfiles in a level to test it in realtime, and then switching to blender to re adjust the placing or a shadow or a shape, and then switching back to the game, and so working on it without to restart the engine again and again?

yes, kind of like that.

or you could trigger a reexport if the .blend file time/date changed.

it could be a bit slow though depending on the complexity of the scene. i don't know if it really would improve workflow. depends on the project i guess.

This combined with a dialog whther it should be updated yet, sounds like a good idea.