DeleD Community Edition

[Dr. Zoop]

Good to see you guys are still working diligently! I just upgraded to your newest version of DeleD for my modeling needs!

Keep up the good work,
-Dr. Zoop

[Jeroen]

Nice to see you back, Dr Zoop!

[Paul-Jan]

Yeah, it has indeed been a while! Awaiting your input on the latest DeleD version

(And yes, your request for copy-paste between different DMF files is still on our list )

[Dr. Zoop]

It doesn't look like you made the .X exporter save decimals... still integers.

Gotta play the game of resizing everything I load all over again! Haha.

-Dr. Zoop

[Paul-Jan]

Yep, the .X exporter still export integers... because DeleD internally still uses integers, so it doesn't have much choice, really

However, it's kinda funny you should mention this (after all this time ), since Jeroen and me are in the middle of the 1.4 rewrite, and part of that is changing vertex coordinates to floats. So it won't be too long now

[Sindwiller]

[Dr. Zoop]

[Paul-Jan]

Sindwiller: It's all about accuracy. There are People like Dr. Zoop that want to import _small_ files, work with them, and export them again, without being bothered with scaling up and down in that workflow. Currently, DeleD simply doesn't deal with sub-integer scale numbers, effectively rounding all your model coordinates.

Getting this to work correctly in DeleD is a bit tricky here and there, because working with floats introduces rounding errors and error-based equality testing (oh wait, you are a programmer, you know all this ). Take for example welding vertices: in the old situation, we could assume the vertex positions are exactly the same. Not any longer, they will now be 'about' the same, were the size of 'about' (epsilon) is dependent on the scale of the model. Loads of fun, that

Dr. Zoop: Yes, DMF files are plain text files, and they will be a bit bigger (but people concerned with data-size won't care, as they won't be using the plain-text DMF's anyway) indeed.

[Dr. Zoop]

What I find strange is I can resize and move things however I want in DeleD, and if I have snapping off, it'll appears to stick wherever I click. That makes me think you're using floats somewhere. However, you say you're not, which is kinda baffling.

Anyway, the real reason why I almost HAVE to have decimals is this: I am using DeleD for DirectX games. In my previous game, I found out the hard way that DeleD only uses integers. I started getting jagged edges all over my models! I got around this by making my models bigger, and then just scaling them down within the game itself.

Now I am working on a new 3D game, but I wanted to avoid having the game scale down the models itself. Technically, the game should not have to fiddle around with the models. That just takes unnecessary computation time--and when you're trying to push as many frames as you can a second... having it multiply by one extra scaling matrix is an issue.

To avoid all of this, I starting making an average object be 1024x1024x1024. This way, I could generally use the editor however I wanted and if it rounded, it was not a big deal. The difference would be unnoticeable. However, by having such huge models, that meant my in-game camera could be up to 50,000 units away from the point you were looking at. At such huge values, DirectX starts becoming cranky. It starts making mistakes in the Z-buffer and objects that are behind sometimes appear in front. Obviously, that's no good. However, this bug never appears in DirectX when you are using smaller values.

So, I'm back to square one: Now I must rescale everything I import. Thus eating a little bit of FPS. Eventually when it comes to tweaking time, I'll figure out a way around this. But for now, this'll have to do!

-Dr. Zoop

[Jeroen]

[Dr. Zoop]

May I ask when 1.4 will be coming out? By the end of the month, I'm supposed to have this 3D game COMPLETE.

Ha, this is going to be fun craming in. Whee!
-Dr. Zoop

[Jeroen]