Quote: "Nice, but I dont want to pay"
lol. And I don't want to work for free
I think that 12.95€ is very cheap anyway.
Quote: "How about a list of all new features"
Ok, although BSP Factory has been officially announced yesterday for many game development communities (OGRE, NeoEngine, IrrLicht, TGC), I released version 1.0 about one year ago. To make a brief resume of the features it has (and the new ones that have been added with the updates, it can do the following:
1) You can import a .bsp in Quake1 or Half-Life format (i choosed these formats because there are free compiling tools to generate them, unlike Quake3, whose BSP compiler costs a lot of money if you want to use it commercially).
2) You can specify texture flags, which are simply symbols put at the beginning of the texture filename. The symbols are the following:
- | - Fullbright texture. It won't receive shadows when the level is lightmapped.
- ! - Alpha map. This texture will have alpha mapping.
- { - Masked texture. Black areas of the texture won't be drawn.
- $ - Sphere map. Doesn't need any comments
- # - Cube map. The same as above.
- % - Specular lighting. This texture will show specular highlight when a light is projected to it.
3) BSP Factory comes with a built-in lightmapper. That's because some of the new texture flags require different lighting parameters than what Half-Life lightmapper has, and because Quake1 lightmaps have REALLY poor quality. Add coloured lights to a .bsp in Quake1 format, lightmap it in BSP Factory, an it will look way better.
4) Since this new version, you can write scripts to export to any 3d format you want to. By default BSP Facotr ycomes with a Blitz3D .b3d exporter and a DirectX .x exporter. The .b3d exporter supports all the texture flags that BSP Factory does, so it maps will look exactly the same. In .x, you loose texture properties, but after thinking about it, it would be easy to read the texture name of each limb, and based on its texture flags (remember that they are just characters at the beginning of the filename), set its visual properties.
Anyway, I wrote a .dbm (DarkBASIC Pro Mesh) exporter and a loader, and made the screenshot in DBPro using it. This exporter simply exports all the geometry that shares one texture as one mesh memblock in the file, then the next mesh, etc. So, basically the file is a sequence of TEXTURE NAME / MESH MEMBLOCK blocks that you can easilly load. So you create an object from the mesh memblock, and texture it using different visual settings depending on the flags of the texture.
I'll try to finish the .dpm exporter today, and will upload a DBPro demo and the exporter, ok?
== Jedive ==
AthlonXP 1600+, 512MB, GeForce4200, WinXP/DX9, Fedora Core 1
