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Old February 19th, 2006, 11:05 AM   #22
Deadly
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SteveW,

It uses a proprietary format...but can be directly exported/imported from/into 3dMax. Unfortunately, the overall X3 environment is extreemly complex, with lots of tables and files containing run-time information.

One of the X3 community is a really strong coder/developer, and has created some very powerful tools, as well as a fairly sophisticated set of MAXScripts to allow the importing and exporting of graphic objects. It is especially useful, since the X3 shaders and DDS textures are preserved.

I often use an existing mesh as a template, although there are a few "original" ships in the bunch. However, since the poly-count does matter, I generally have to rebuild or recreate elements of any mesh I try and use as a base. I find that a poly count of around 10k for smaller ships, and 30k-40k for larger "capital" class ships seems about right. This is not as bad as it seems, since it is possible to get away with a much lower poly count by using DDS textures in the X3 render engine to create "virtual" detail.

The model of the Roger Young is a good example. While it is based on a model created by Gerard Dolan & Marc-Laurent "Magma" Magnier, I literally had to create a new "simpler" mesh object for each element of the ship, since the original ship had a very high poly count. While it doesn't look all that hot in a 3dMax render (especially when compared with the original!), it does look quite nice in-game.

So, as you can see from the RY example, the downside of simplifying a mesh and using DDS textures to simulate detail is that without the additional mesh elements to provide real "physical" detail...the renders outside of the game (e.g.3dMax) don't always look that good

I t looks like I will be doing a serious stress test of the X3 engine when I put the initial BSG Base Star into the game...as it will probably have around 60k poly's
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