newbie question - Creating Levels in 3dsmax

[Dragonfly]

From what i understand Ogre3d is purely a graphic engine, to create levels i either have to get an external level builder (something that resembles UnrealEd with viewports) or use the 3dsmax plugin i have seen on the ogre site.

am i right in saying i place all the actors, sprites, special effects and lights etc into the level and then export the whole thing and allow Ogre to render ti all ?

Is the level and everything included in it binded together with code so that the characters interact with each other or is that done in the level edit stage.

sorry for sounding newbish, i'm an Artist not a Coder.

thank you

[haffax]

You can build levels with other tools too, for instance with Blender, which exports to the community supported format dotscene.

But this only exports the static things, like lights, effects, all things graphical. Not the interaction between those actors and no behaviour. You *can* add your own custom information for interaction and behaviour definition to dotscene. It is defined to be extensible and many projects do this already. But you are on your own with that and you have to do the coding for this yourself too. This is not inside Ogre's domain.

[sinbad]

You should look at oFusion.

[Dragonfly]

Just found it at the same time you posted, thanks sinbad

http://ofusion.inocentric.com/oFusion.html

the only thing that i am confused about in the game making process is that once you have your level made out of separate objects or whatever do you code the logic and behaviors in Ogre or is that coded somewhere else. Right now i can make a level in 3dsmax, with all the characters.

[Arkos]

Hey Dragonfly,

Now that you can make a scene in max you should probably look into exporting with ofusion into the dotScene format and importing that into your ogre app via the dotSceneOctreeManager.

In terms of logic and behaviours of objects, all of that would be defined in code in your ogre app.

You definately need a programmer to do all of this, as it is not trivial.

My team is exporting physics material data from maya into our dotscene format which will define certain physics behaviours for the models in the game. This is an example of altering the exporter to make the dotScene format conform to your needs.

[Dragonfly]

In terms of logic and behaviours of objects, all of that would be defined in code in your ogre app.

what about special effects and particles, is that for the coder to sort out ?

Yes it's all new to me but i've been using max from the start so i'm good at constructing levels and objects, texturing. I have a coder in my team that is looking logic etc.

thank you for your intrest.

[Arkos]

to be honest, I am a noob to ogre so I am just learning a lot of the mechanics as well.

To my understanding you are able to place particle emmiters in maya(assuming 3dmax also) and export them into the dotScene format. Then within a script (not code per se) you can specify the behaviors/looks of the particles being emmitted.

The whole idea behind scripting is to make certain resources within the game changeable without having to recompile the program. For instance the coder would write a few lines of code to load the particle system in the actual code (not script) of the game and compile it. When the game runs it looks to a script file to determine the paticles behavior. This script file can then be tweaked rather easily by an artist without having to change the program's code. This allows you to change something, run the game, see how it looks, change something, run the game, see how it looks, etc... The scripting language is pretty intuitive and anyone should be able to pick it up rather quickly. You just alter the scripts in wordpad or something.

Ogre already has a particle system. I would recommend taking a look at Demo_ParticleFX in the sample projects that come with ogre. Hope this helps.

[Dragonfly]

yeah i saw the demo it's nice. I'll think i'll stick to the arty stuff and let the coder do the rest