Object-Designers!! We need YOUR help!

[Lo]

Maybe you allready know, that we (the ODF, http://www.odf-online.org) are still working on our free Descent Clone \"Flight Back\". Currently, we can render the most important stuff of D3 Levels with Irrlicht (See appended Image). We would like to start with the gameplay soon. Hence, we need to put objects (which we do not want to copy from Descent3) into the level first. When we talk about objects, we think about Spaceships, Bots, Powerups etc.

Since we are no object designers, we do not know:

- Which object formats are popular amongst designers
- Which editors the most designers can handle
- Which formats are most suitable
etc.

From our side, there are only 3 limitations:

- The format must be loadable with Irrlicht, which implies that it must be one of the following (if another format is viewed as better than all of these we may attempt to write a loader for it, though that would take some time and is not garunteed):

* Irrlicht scenes (.irr, r/w)
* Irrlicht static meshes (.irrmesh, r/w)
* 3D Studio meshes (.3ds, r)
* B3D files (.b3d, r)
* Alias Wavefront Maya (.obj, r/w)
* Lightwave Objects (.lwo, r)
* COLLADA 1.4 (.xml, .dae, r/w)
* Microsoft DirectX (.x, r) (binary & text)
* Milkshape (.ms3d, r)
* OGRE meshes (.mesh, r)
* My3DTools 3 (.my3D, r)
* Pulsar LMTools (.lmts, r)
* Quake 3 levels (.bsp, r)
* Quake 2 models (.md2, r)
* Quake 3 models (.md3, r)
* DeleD (.dmf, r)
* FSRad oct (.oct, r)
* Cartography shop 4 (.csm, r)
* STL 3D files (.stl, r/w)

[Token from: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/feature ... tedformats]

- The associated editor should, be usable without paying money. Additionally, platform independence is required.

- The format should, it possible, have features, that such a pyro needs (I am thinking about gunpoints, e.g. - Basically we need to have some way of naming a subobject with a specific name (i.e. $gnpt0) so its position/rotation may be retrieved later).


Who could propose an object format and an editor for it? Furthermore, who would be ready to make a model for our first pyro?


Thank you for your answers in advance
by the ODF development team



(Ascent., rendered with Irrlicht. Here, the objects shall be placed )

[Sirius]

While not a big-time modeller myself (have done some now really outdated stuff for D2) most 3D game work tends to have something to do with 3DS Max and by extension .3ds format. If Blender can export sufficiently functional models to that format (I'm sure it can export stuff, it's mostly the more sophisticated texturing features such as normal/etc maps and animation-related functions such as rigging that I couldn't be certain is properly converted), I would suggest going with that.

If there are gaps in the conversion/importing process, though, you probably could create a few of your own tools to cover them. Most game development efforts seem to wind up doing a bit of that anyway.