DeleD Community Edition

John · Posted: Thu May 19, 2011 3:32 pm Post subject: dxs file format specification?

I've been looking at the DXS format with the intent of making a parser for it (no particular reason yet, I'm trying to relearn my c++ skills). I've been looking for a format specification for DXS on the website but can't find one. The format is pretty easy to understand but I could get the work done faster if there was a specification for it. Is there any such document?

Jeroen · Posted: Thu May 19, 2011 3:53 pm Post subject:

Nope, I'm afraid not. Reason is like you said, the format is self-explanatory (or at least, it should be). But if you need to know something, just yell. Smile

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John · Posted: Wed May 25, 2011 9:40 pm Post subject:

Well I have put together a program so far that reads the geometry (I'm not doing animations yet though).

Only thing is that each vertex can have more than one UV in DXS which I will try to work around. I'm not quite sure how to load that into a vertex array or VBO.

I'm going to *try* to make an OpenGL screen saver that will show off the DXS models in a set directory. No promises though since I made a C in linear algebra. :/

Starnick · DeleD PRO user Joined: 28 Jul 2007 Posts: 611

Jeroen · Posted: Thu May 26, 2011 10:23 am Post subject:

John · Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 5:06 pm Post subject:

Thanks for having faith Jeroen. Smile

After spending a few days parsing and one week figuring out the basics of OpenGL, here is a screen shot from my model loader for DXS...

http://i295.photobucket.com/albums/mm151/coffeeaddict21/deledplusopengl.png

Some limitations so far...
1. Mesh has to be triangulated to load.
2. No textures yet.
3. No smoothing groups yet (breaking apart the primitives is the current work around).

The performance is kind of miserable. Probably because my algorithm for calculating vertex normals is a bit sloppy since I don't really know what I'm doing. That and I'm using vertex arrays which load into RAM rather than video card memory like VBOs do.

I'm going to continue working on it. Send me a message if you want to look at the code.

Jeroen · Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2011 8:23 pm Post subject:

Excellent start there, John, I knew you could do it. Smile

Now it's all about continuing your work and improve on it. All you need is enough time to commit to it, and the sky is the limit.

Keep us posted about your progress!
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John · Posted: Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:38 pm Post subject:

I'm at little confused about the XML for spotlights:

CableGuy · Member Joined: 11 Jan 2011 Posts: 14

My guess is that the cone has 3 areas: The inner cone has an angle of 30 degrees and inside this area object are completely illuminated. Then you have the area from 30 degrees to 40 in which the light has a constant attenuation with a factor of "1" (from the falloff attribute) and objects outside of the outer cone are not affected by this light.
Translating it to OpenGL, my guess would be that the exponent would be the intensity parameter and the attenuation factors are taken from the falloff attribute ant the attenuation tag.

Hope this makes sense and is not completely wrong as this is my first post in this board, so Hi.

John · Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 3:18 pm Post subject:

^Yeah. I'm going to be experimenting with that for a while.

I have decided to stop using the depreciated traditional fixed function OpenGL graphics pipeline and do a rewrite using shaders. The OpenGL Super Bible 5th Edition does a pretty good job of explaining it. The big reason I switched is that the lighting that the old pipeline uses just sucks. If things work out I should have something put together in a few days.

Jeroen · Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 7:31 pm Post subject:

John, have you considered using OpenTK? Don't know if it does the job for you, but it sure looks like a mighty fine library to me.
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John · Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2011 6:37 pm Post subject:

^Maybe I will move to that once I finish learning the OpenGL end. I don't want to split my attention between the two interfaces. A chimpanzee could code in GLUT so that is what I am using for now.

A little progress, to show I haven't given up...so far I have a fully lit hand made cube (w/ real time calculated vertex normals) using a vertex light directional shader. I've got it set up to load the geometry from a vector object (with the vertex data interleaved) straight into a VBO so there won't be much of a leap from a cube to a full size model. Blending two texture layers with vertex colors is next. Then I move on to per pixel lighting...and then I'll start testing full size models. As usual, the project is becoming much more intricate then I anticipated, but I am enjoying it. Smile