Ogre3D Radiant Released

[ProtoZoo]

The toolkit converts the GtkRadiant level editor into an Ogre3D compatible 3d authoring tool. Modules for Ogre3D material, meshes, entities, physics (designed for Newton Game Dynamics but can be used for different engines) and map compiler tools are helping the designer to create realistic 3d worlds.

The current version is only an alpha release. Not all features are implemented. The model & entity modules and the map compiler are not fully included in this package. The .map format, the material & archive modules are 100% working.

Please read the documentation for more information.

You can get the package in the download section at http://www.duskengine.de/.

Best regards!

[jacmoe]

I took the liberty of hot-linking this image:



Wow! This is great!

[Frenetic]

Looks exciting! In the little time I have spent with GtkRadiant I found it to be a very nice world-creating tool. I've never been a huge fan of making levels using elaborate modelers like Maya, etc.

It's a pity the BSPSceneManager seems kind of deprecated (or at least, it seems like a very lonely SceneManager these days ) ... maybe I should give it some attention sometime.

Thanks for posting this, ProtoZoo! Keep us posted on the progress.

[ProtoZoo]

I think it's very hard for a "I'm not a CG guru" programmer to get good results in modeling levels with Maya/Blender.

I had a problem with the BSPSceneManager the last few days. I'd like to expand the functionality of the old Quake3 bsp system ... like dynamic lighting etc. But now I decided to do a new scene format, which will be very similar to the dotScene format. I think that the compiler and the SceneManager will be done in a few days. Probably the compiler will support dotScene output, too.

I'm working on the model import at the moment. Due to some strange compiler settings of the GtkRadiant projects and the STLport I'm unable to call the mesh serializer functionality inside my modules. I have to do a generic import of the .mesh file.

I'm working on MSVS 2005 Professional on a 64bit system and I get a very huge list of errors when including the Ogre files. That's because of the STLport and some 64bit issues (funny-stuff: The project is Win32 and not x64). I'm going to create a library that acts as a shell for Ogre that returns the vertex data of the mesh file. Hope that works.

@jacmoe: Thanks for linking the image! I forgot to provide some screenshots here!

[Quall]

cool, hope it is not a project you plan on dropping anytime soon. I used to use gtk back in the day all the time. Its licensing made me stop using it though.

[ProtoZoo]

The project is very important for later stuff I'm working on, it has a very tight schedule. The GtkRadiant part has it's deadline at the end of the week.

Why did you stop working with GtkRadiant? it's GLP now, with all it's tools like q3map2 etc.!

[Quall]

Isn't one of the agreements in the GPL is that all your work remains open source? THat is what I don't like about it.

[Frenetic]

Isn't one of the agreements in the GPL is that all your work remains open source? THat is what I don't like about it.

No.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.htm ... sOutputGPL

Content you create using GNU software (for example, 3D models made with the GPL'ed program Blender) is copyrighted just the same as if you made that thing with a pencil and paper.

The only exception is if the GPL software puts part of its source or binary into the result (then the result is technically a derivative of the GPL software, and thus you must license that content as GPL as well to comply with the license of the software you are using).

Ogre is LGPL meaning you can connect it to your own software without requiring your software to be GPL, provided you don't intermingle Ogre with your work. It also still requires that changes be licensed under the LGPL as well.

PS. IANAL, just my interpretation, etc, etc.

[ProtoZoo]

The model module is finished and working fine on both, binary .mesh and .mesh.xml files. The model is temporary fliped to the GtkRadiant coordinate system.



I try to get the dynamic lighting features of the Doom3 game pack running on the Ogre modules now.

[sinbad]

Nice work. We've no particular interest in updating BspSceneManager since the underlying .bsp format is not very friendly to current hardware, but if you exported to a better format (e.g. highly batched and portal based) then this would be a good thing indeed.

[ProtoZoo]

@sinbad: What about worldminion - would that be an approach?

[sinbad]

WorldMinion was about turning a polygon soup into a cell/portal graph really, and I've since stopped developing it and released it under the GPL for all interested parties.

Cell/portal graph structures are really simple anyway, it doesn't take much to come up with one. The tough bit in WM was deriving one from completely unstructured data.

[ProtoZoo]

@sinbad: While working on the entity system I realised that I have to make some major changes in the executable. I talked to some of the 'official' GtkRadiant developers today. The final release of the 'Toolkit' will be a special Ogre3D-GtkRadiant-Inofficial-Tweaked-Modified-Setup. That means that this GtkRadiant version/build is ONLY for Ogre3D and comes with an installer.

About WM: I'm really unsure what kind of output or scene managment system to choose. The toolkit was meant for creating 'huge' levels/worlds - the scene managment should be designed to handle large number of polys.

[jacmoe]

BlasterN has created a SceneManager/converter/importer for bsp's.

<edit>
Here:
http://www.ogre3d.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=19737
And here:
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/maptoogremesh/
</edit>

[ProtoZoo]

@jacmoe: Thanks a lot ... I think that this will be helpful stuff!

[Macada]

This is an extremely cool project. QERadiant was my favorite level editor for Quake2 (and one of the few that didn't crash every 30 mins).

Thanks ProtoZoo.

[ProtoZoo]

The map compiler is mostly done. Today I finished the geometry generation and some basic CSG operations. I hope to finish the compiler the next days. The screenshot shows a raw triangle soup (no CSG operation and optimizing done) imported in blender3D.



Hope you like it!

[spooky_paul]

looks great!

cant wait to get my dirty hands on it!

[ProtoZoo]

I've uploaded the setup file to my new domain. You can get the editor at http://www.big-black-block.com (the old one is still working). Hope that it's useful! There have been some problems ... please read the news on my site for more information.

[Ajare]

This could potentially be very useful! Could you just clarify what can be exported from it? I take it that, without the map compiler, it cannot do CSG on the brushes, but can it export polygon data to any format directly readable by Ogre (ie mesh/dotscene)? I am not so much interested in it for creating full maps, as using it as a modelling program to create .mesh files.

Anyway, excellent work!

[DaCracker]

It looks very cool! awsome work!

[ProtoZoo]

This could potentially be very useful! Could you just clarify what can be exported from it? I take it that, without the map compiler, it cannot do CSG on the brushes, but can it export polygon data to any format directly readable by Ogre (ie mesh/dotscene)? I am not so much interested in it for creating full maps, as using it as a modelling program to create .mesh files.

Anyway, excellent work!

The map file exported contains all data that you generated in the editor. That means every single entity is listed in the text file - like the old Quake3 or newer Doom3/Quake4 map files. The geometry is stored in brushes and patches ... the brushes are mostly 6 sided blocks. Which are then - in the compiler - converted to friendly polys. I've uploaded a sample compiler today which does exactly that. But the compiler doesn't do CSG. The meshes/maps created with the compiler will hold some useless data where the brushes are intersecting. Additional clipping would be very important to use the polys efficiently.

I'm going to setup a FAQ on my site where most of the features - also the map file format - will be explained.

Hope that helps.

[Ajare]

I seem to remember there was a (java?) map-to-mesh converter quite some time ago, but I have no idea what happened to it.

[Mayan Obsidian]

Wow! I was just looking into use radiant as a level editor for my next project, and here you went and did it for me! Based off of looks and usefulness it looks really great!

Perhaps we should write a map -> .scene format as well so that we can export that data to an octree generator instead of bsp.

Regardless, I appreciate your hard work and will be using your code in the future.

[ProtoZoo]

Wow! I was just looking into use radiant as a level editor for my next project, and here you went and did it for me! Based off of looks and usefulness it looks really great!

Perhaps we should write a map -> .scene format as well so that we can export that data to an octree generator instead of bsp.

Regardless, I appreciate your hard work and will be using your code in the future.

Thanks a lot!

I think that you got me wrong in some points. The bsp data is just for clipping useless faces. If you take a look at the compiler source, the parameters are 'octree'-ready. There is no common Q3 bsp like data that is exported. The compiler generates a modified dotScene format to integrate some of the extra features like physics etc.

Take the source of the compiler ... create a tool of your needs! I'd be very happy to see what you did with it! Perhaps I could put your compiler approach online for others, too!