Plan for Ben Versaw

Porting Madness Well it has been a few days now since Martin and I first came up with the crazy idea to port to Torque. Progress has been going okay considering the amount of content we have to port over. Content goes through a long path to get to Torque, but fortunately the process usually doesn't take that long.

Due to strengths in Torque that Conitec's 3DGameStudio doesn't have. Martin and I have teamed up to port his game from 3DGS to TGE. Here is the progress so far.

Porting Madness
Well it has been a few days now since Martin and I first came up with the crazy idea to port to Torque. Progress has been going okay considering the amount of content we have to port over. Content goes through a long path to get to Torque, but fortunately the process usually doesn't take that long.

For Levels
1) Levels are being cut up into objects that they are made up of: models and level blocks mostly, and then take their own route.

For Level Blocks
1) Groups of blocks forming objects such as platforms are copied into a different .wmp level
2) The level is loaded in Conitec's Med and saved as a MDL
3) The model is loaded in Milkshape, where it is re-textured (once the texture is extracted from the .wad file in WED), re-scaled smaller, and exported to a .dif

For Models
1) The model is loaded in Milkshape, the texture is extracted from the MDL file and reapplied sometimes this involves resizing the texture to a valid size, scaled down, and exported to a .dif

Problems I have had:
1) DIF files exported from Milkshape were way too large,. they looked like giants compared to the terrain. I introduced re-scaling to 0.3 or so before exporting to fix this.
2) Collision wasn't working probably at first. This was due to my own inexperience with TGE, I had exported my models in a slight slant from Milkshape. This gave them inaccurate bounding boxes. Later on I discovered that renaming a mesh "Collision" in Milkshape would let you use it as a collision mesh.


Current Issues:
3) I can't get a terrain from 3DGS into TGE. Conitec's Med doesn't allow me to export a heightmap or any usable format to get it into a TGE terrain. I could export it as a .dif but there has to be a better way.
4) Style conflicts. The image on the top is from the 3DGS version of the game, the bottom is the current TGE port.



The "crispness" of the old look is gone. I think some of this might have to do with the lighting and other problems. I'm not sure how to fix this. Also there are a few more problems visible in the above shot.


I don't know why there is something hovering there. There are flat planes with a transparent skin on them, the skin is completely empty expect for the grass image. While we are talking about the grass I just noticed I have either have it too tall or the player and the NPC (the cat) too short, maybe even both. So time to take out the mower and growth pills!