Olaf do you think i can take over development of 3ds2vxl front end now? are there any special tricks i need to know about settings in order for it to not report errors whenever i try to do something. the code is at your sourceforge page i know.
does anyone know if 3d accelerators have zbuffers higher than 24bit. Directx says it doesn't support higher and i'm not happy with the precision so far. i seen lots of horrible z-buffer errors in Serious Sam and X-Plane.
Flyby or Alon, is there anywhere in materials settings of 3dsmax where you can enter the index of refraction? and can you enter it for each of the 3 color components? this is needed for Fresnel effects i believe. i been researching it on the internet but the info is terrible. so far i have fresnel effect in my code but nothing is using it because i don't know what 3ds chunk contains the info. it seems every surface is supposed to have fresnel effect on it. it should especially be simulated on smooth surfaces whether metallic or not i think.
one of the a-wings on the Sci Fi 3d site really shows off my program nicely. but only the upcoming version of 3ds2vxl. this is because there is a divide by zero error in my previous version. apparently what i thought were the variables for bump map strength were set to zero in this 3ds file, meaning no bump maps. this can't be right, and now it's making me wonder whether there are many other things in the 3ds documents which are wrong. anyway the colormaps and bump-maps appear to be working perfectly on this model. alot of people think my program can't do those things because i stated there were still bugs related to texturing but as you can see on this model, in some cases there should be no problems. Warning this model is over 100,000 triangles. i wonder how many triangles the models in Doom3 will have. does anyone know if 3d accelerators could handle models this complex. right now Quake3 models are only 1000 triangles each but don't use the transform processors of the 3d accelerators i believe.
flyby what's the estimated time for your normals info now. i'm trying to make my release coincide with yours.
are there windows functions to load jpg and gif files for me? it's getting kind of annoying converting everything to TGA or BMP.