Month: March 2006

Tonight I have been working on MDL Tweaker II again. I have finished the vertex list dialog, that allows you to alter vertices of your object and also provides an option to “normalize” the normal vectors of the vertices. This last option is useful if you want to make objects that do not change color with the direction of the sun, like the autogen trees do. Each time I finish one of the dialogs, the tool is getting closer to loosing the alpha status. The more recent versions also seem to be rather stable already. Before the first beta version … Continue reading Time for a user manual

The CAT headache is solved for now, as I have released a new version. As I already wrote about before, this new version does also support the ASM source files created with FSDS3. Although both GMax and FSDS3 use MakeMDL to export and create the ASM file, there was a little structure difference. I have learned CAT these differences now, so that both formats are supported. But the other problem Nick and I found while debugging a few days ago was more difficult to solve. Actually I could not really solve it, I could only add an option that gives … Continue reading CAT is "fixed"

Version 1.02 of CAT is get closer to release again. This evening I had a good debugging session with Nick on a bug he had since CAT 1.01. I finally was able to reproduce his animation condition problem. Basically the problem means that the local variables used to store the animation state are shared between all copies of the object you place. So now that the animation condition works on the animation trigger (to make sure you get a nice reverse animation when the condition is no longer true), this means that multiple placements of the same object will block … Continue reading CAT headache

Until now CAT was only a tool for users of GMax, but now that FSDS3 is also using MakeMDL it is time to change that. In theory the ASM sources file created by MakeMDL when exporting from FSDS3 should work right away with CAT. But of course the reality is that there are a few minor differences in the structure of the source code. I have now figured out what these differences are and I am patching CAT to understand both “formats” of the ASM file. So expect an updated version of CAT soon, that will also allow FSDS3 user … Continue reading The CAT has grown a bit

I had a very productive weekend, as I was visiting my parents and could therefore not be disturbed by forum questions or people chatting with me. I had brought my laptop, so I made some nice progress on MDL Tweaker II. I finished implementing the code that allows you to add seasonal conditions to your textures (and it should also be able to read that information back from the MDL file the next time you open it). You can find the latest alpha version of MDL Tweaker II on the forum. You will have noticed that I wrote alpha version, … Continue reading Seasons