DeleD Community Edition

Spaddlewit · Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2011 6:39 pm Post subject: Test DXS files wanted

Hi!

I'm working on a plugin/.NET DXS loader and since there isn't any documentation on the DXS file format, I was wondering if anyone had some good 'test' DXS files that use a lot of the features to be sure I'm reading all of the necessary attributes and nodes from the XML.

Jeroen · Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2011 7:50 pm Post subject:

Cool! It's always good to hear about other plugin dev's. What is it you're workin' on exactly? Can you tell us a little more about it?
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Spaddlewit · Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2011 10:44 pm Post subject:

Right now it's a C# library that can load a DXS scene into a bunch of objects, manipulating them, then save them back to DXS. The XML reader/writer is abstracted so that you could also load/save a DXS from a memory stream or similar (for plugin use). I've only been working on it for a day and I'm almost finished (at least by the looks of my own DXS files I'm testing with).

Also toying with creating a very basic "DeleD.NET" if you will, rewriting some of the basics into C#.NET and WinForms. I know 'rewrites aren't always good', but I think Delphi is the #1 reason there isn't more open source participation (#2 is awareness). DeleD really is an amazing and underappreciated tool and I would be adding absolute craploads of features to DeleD if it wasn't in Delphi.

What method did you use for picking in DeleD, Jeroen? Reverse projection, or did you draw everything in a slightly different color and glReadPixels() from an offscreen buffer?

Edit: I'm also not sure if I've found a bug in the file format or not... in my test files, it seems that "highestID" for Primitives is one greater than the actual highest ID in the primitives list. Actually, it's the 'highestID' including the ID of the lights. Is that intentional? Then why does <lights> have its own highestID attribute?

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

I'm curious how you're going about a C#.NET plugin for DeleD? I'm under the impression that in order to do reverse P/Invoke (I don't think .NET COM interop would apply here?) you're going to need an interop layer using C++/CLI.

Spaddlewit · Posted: Thu Jul 07, 2011 6:11 pm Post subject:

Yeah, I'd probably use some kind of C++ COM interop layer.

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

I remembered hearing about there being another way to do this, by modifying the IL directly, but who really wants to do that?

Well, I just found someone apparently wrote a nifty little MSBuild task that will allow you to create Dll exports, doing just that and doing it automatically:

http://sites.google.com/site/robertgiesecke/Home/uploads/csharpprojecttemplateforunmanagedexports

Was made aware of it via this gamedev article describing how to write C# plugins for UDK:

http://www.gamedev.net/blog/785/entry-2250398-using-c-managed-dlls-in-udk-or-exposing-managed-dlls-in-an-unmanaged-application/