I know the topic of a new model format comes up a lot but I was wondering about something. An engine I was planning to use before I found Spring Apocalyx, has model loaders for MD2, MD3, MDL, Cal3D, and MS3D (Most include animation support, some even skeletal).
Now given Apocalyx is pretty modular and I'm 99% sure it's GPL I could possibly integrate those model loaders into Spring. Presumably the models would then end up in some kind of generic model + animations data structure so I was wondering, generally speaking, what additional information or steps would Spring need to to use these models for units, terrain or features?
Obviously it's hard to say without seeing the Apocalyx code, and I'm not that familiar with the Spring code either, but I'm still interested in knowing what kind of issues I might need to deal with.
The only issues I know for sure would be dealing with Spring-specific data like teamcolor, model height and radius. Automatic calculation of these would be difficult for models with long pointy bits. I was thinking though that the unit FBI might be able to specify these like it does for footprint. The other missing link would be knowing the units 'base' piece though I guess you could set that via FBI as well.
example unitname.lua:
Code: Select all
-- Set the radius offset from actual model center
centerX = 0.0,
centerY = -5.0,
centerZ = 0.0,
-- unit radius
radius = 6.0,
-- unit parent piece name
basePiece = 'body',
-- scale model pieces
scale = 0.5,