Spark engine exporter for blender?

BeigeAlert

So I've put a good amount of work into some custom models for my map, only to find out that they don't really work correctly because they don't have a working collision mesh, and the collada exporters for Blender don't work correctly for generating the collision mesh. Now if I understand correctly, this plugin ONLY works for 3dsmax version 9... which isn't sold anymore... and if that means I would have to torrent it in order to export models for this game... well that's a load of bullshit, nobody should have to do that.

I would really LOVE it if somebody could port/re-write the spark exporter for Blender. I'm going to skip ahead to the part where nobody has responded and I throw up my hands in frustration and say, alright alright I'LL do it! Now here's my question: would it be possible to get the source code for that plugin so I can adapt it to Blender? Otherwise... I don't think I know enough about the file format to actually get this thing working.

Soul_Rider

The only way you could get the source file for the plug-in would be to send an email to @max, as he is the one who wrote it, although, he might reply if he reads this thread. I am not sure whether it is something they would consider open-sourcing, but there is certainly no harm in asking. Extending support for additional modelling programs will always be a good thing.

SamusDroid

It really needs to be updated for 64 bit. Who would install a 32bit version of 3ds max these days.

Freya45

Yeah, this is a great improvement ive been waiting all year for a bge upgrade.
I would like to see bge updates in the future though.
it never seems to get any love.

BeigeAlert

I'm not talking about bge, I'm talking about an export script for blender to spark.

BeigeAlert

Okay I asked max, and he says that the exporter is just a slightly modified version of ColladaMax... and I can't find the source for that either.

So could somebody please upload a collada file that they know works in spark so I can study it? I just discovered that my Blender-exported collada files suddenly don't want to work anymore. They look fine in blender, even if I import a collada file it just exported, but for whatever reason, when they go through builder, all hell breaks loose and random triangles are stabbing out every which way. It worked fine in 257 so... I wonder if they did something to builder in the last patch...

BeigeAlert

Making a little progress here...

It seems Spark does NOT like it when vert/normal/texcoord float values use exponents in them (ie. 2.345e-8 ) So if you just change these values to 0.0, you don't get the crazy polygons shooting out all over the place.

Still working on figuring out the collision models though. I'm close, thanks to WhiteDevil for providing me with a "proper" DAE export of one of my models so I can compare the two.

EDIT: Oh and also, not sure if this makes a difference or not, but in the geometry section, changing "polylist" to "triangles" and removing the "<vcount>" group all-together (the one with nothing but 3's filling it up) seems to help too, though I was stupid and did both this, AND the steps above and it worked... so I'm unsure if this actually has an effect or not... but it can't hurt right!?