MapExporter for Gamespace

#1 Eustacia... Did you tag every object in the scene for it's intended purpose? If not, then none of the objects will export, which is probably why you're getting the empty .map file.

BTW, how large is your team? I haven't seen very many gameSpace/trueSpace users around here...

#2 I wonder if he's using your map exporter, or the built-in one? If he's using the built-in one, he probably has the same problems as me - pretty much nothing exports :)

Back when I tried the built-in map exporter, I tried creating a simple cube and exporting. I tried importing to Quark to convert to a DIF and Quark wouldn't even show the cube. I didn't play around with it long enough to see what the problem was: I didn't have that much time to spend on that part and there wasn't much help for the exporter.

-nerseus

#3 @Ted: I followed the enclosed tutorial, I created a small house using the interior primitives provided. I tagged them all as br's. I then textured, with a 128x128 texture and then tried to export. gS just disappeared and an empty .map file was created. I even tried saving it into the directory the texture was located.

Was there something I missed? Were any of the other brushes required? Was there a special layer required?

We have 3 people who purchased gameSpace and the mapExporter and none of us can get this to work.

@Dan: She not he:) I am using the digitalflux mapExporter. One of the other group members tried using the buildin level exporter and couldn't get it to work using the torque settings and quark. He had to export it as quake then edit it before converting to dif. He said it barely worked for a simple house.

This is kind of depressing we spent a lot of money and can't even get a simple house into the game.

#4 Ted could you email me a .scn that you know will export? I'd really appreciate it:)

#5 Eustacia: gS disappearing is a crash ;) Trust me, I see that happen too, both with gS and tS(and other apps, to be fair). I'm not sure why it did that, you might want to try reinstalling if it does that repeatedly.

I'll cook up a quick scene and email it to you...

#6 I'll try reinstalling it tonight when I get home. Does it matter that I purchased and downloaded the exporter from the Primitive Itch website and not the caligari site?

#7 Update:

I reinstalled and that didn't help. I then thought about what you mentioned on lights. I had forgotten gs automatically puts in lights. So I deleted all the lights and it exported!!!

Now I have 2 issues. One I hope is just a configuration issue, the other I'm thinking is some kind of bug.

1) When I export the map the textures always have the path relative to my c: drive. So quark complains that it can't find the textures. I ended up manually editing the .map file and removing the path to get it to work. Any suggestions?

2) The first couple times I exported the .map will looked fine and opened in quark (except for the texture complaints). Then all of a suddent the .maps were being written out with huge numbers for all the coords. And when I tried to pull them into quark I would get a floating point error. If I rebooted I could export that file fine. I'm trying to reproduce the error to find when it starts doing it. But of course when I tried to purposefully do it I couldn't:)

#8 Okay, a bit of strangeness there... Lights in the scene shouldn't stop the export process, since if they're not tagged, mapExporter doesn't care about them.

And for the other issues:
1) mapExporter isn't designed to work with QuARK or Hammer, so the relative pathing you see is for map2dif(though, strictly speaking, you really only need the texture name). There can be an option in the next build to strip out the path from the filenames as well.

2) I haven't run into that myself, except as a bug that I fixed around the time of release. I'll take another look, and hopefully it isn't a random bug...

BTW, what's your system specs/patches?

#9 WinXP Home - SP1 & all current updates
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
768 Meg Ram
Nvideo GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, 128meg driver ver56.72

gameSpace 1.5 sp1
mapExporter build 1001

So I don't need to load the .map into quark to convert it I just need to run it through the map2dif program? I'll give that a try tonight.

#10 You're correct. There's no need to run any maps generated by mapExporter through another editor, unless you have a specific need that it doesn't yet provide.

#11 You had to do some manipulation in Quark for the Level Exporter, but I haven't had to do anything for mapExporter. Of course, the levels I've created are extremely basic since it's a top-down shooter, but still.

#12 I seemed to have some trouble with simple cubes at some points, weird; I'd gotten one to work earlier in the day. I was getting errors indicating bad syntax on line 10 and 114 I think...what I noticed was perhaps it was after I had moved the objects pivot point to it's base like most DTS objects, I went back and didn't move it and it worked...? but this was after I tried to open it in QuArk, since I'm not to sure about gS's UV mapping.

#13 @Rex: I can't vouch for anything QuARK might do if you import a .map from mapExporter into it.

#14 O.k., thanks...

#15 I installed gs1.5 and the mapExporter on my laptop, and all maps i've tried exporting looks like this:

{
"classname" "worldspawn"
"min_pixels" "250"
"geometry_scale" "32"
"light_geometry_scale" "32"
"ambient_color" "0 0 0"
"emergency_ambient_color" "0 0 0"
"mapversion" "220"
{
( 0 0 0 ) ( 0 0 0 ) ( 0 0 0 ) gameSpace15\Textures7005560 [ -1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] [ 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000 0.000000 ] 0 1.000000 1.000000
( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) gameSpace15\Textures7005560 [ 0.000000 -1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] [ 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] 0 1.000000 1.000000
( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) gameSpace15\Textures7005560 [ 0.000000 -1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] [ 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000 0.000000 ] 0 1.000000 1.000000
( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) gameSpace15\Textures7005560 [ 0.000000 -1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] [ -1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] 0 1.000000 1.000000
( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) gameSpace15\Textures7005560 [ 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] [ 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000 0.000000 ] 0 1.000000 1.000000
( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) ( 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ) gameSpace15\Textures7005560 [ 0.000000 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ] [ 0.000000 0.000000 1.000000 0.000000 ] 0 1.000000 1.000000
}
}

Isn't the first 3 sets of parens supposed to describe the location of the vertex for the faces?

Is this a memory issue? I've only 256megs ram on this machine.

(P4 1.00 Ghz, 256meg ram, xp pro hp pavilion n5470)

#16 That's weird, and memory has no affect on the tsx. Can you email me the scene(.scn format) to Ted@DigitalFlux.com? I'll take a look and see if there's anything funky about it. The tsx really just pulls the data straight from the objects within trueSpace/gameSpace, and then translates that to the .map file.

#17 I'll email you one i created later, but all scn's do this on that computer. I even pulled in the one you emailed me and same thing. I tried reinstalling gs and no change. It's very strange.

#18 One note that I discovered about the crashing.
It seems to cause it to crash If you don't have
proper directory paths that exist. (Level Exporter)
Also, if you have create wad file checked and no
path or filename, it will cause it to crash.
Seems the designer of the plugin did not
safeguard against that.

#19 Richard, mapExporter and Level Exporter are two different products.

#20 One note that I discovered about the crashing.
It seems to cause it to crash If you don't have
proper directory paths that exist. (Level Exporter)