This idea is what i have come to from investigating the possibility of exporters for other modelling programs. 3DS Max and Lightwave are very expensive programs (ok they are available illegaly but, hey, we like legality here ). Looking at GMax last night i found that they will not distribute exporter code for less than a $400 a year developer license. Since it's based on 3DS Max technology i suppose it's not so unexpected, but a shame. Blender is another option although some feel it is not a readily usable piece of software - any votes on a Blender plug-in?

Otherwise research is going into file-formats to see if (after current bugs are dealt with) whether a convert tab can be put on to FLModelTool to work this magic. I'm not very experienced at programming though so the quality of the result will have to be judged in testing....

+++ out of cheese error - redo from start +++

Xtreme Team Studios

How about making a stand-alone program?

The question I want to know is: Does anyone have any information on the .cmp
file format itself? I wouldn't mind making such a program. Could anyone email this, to my email address at [email protected]?

You can edit the cmp file greatly with UTF_edit and HardCmp. And gmax works very well, so why have a different 3D modeler for FL ship modding?

Can I ask, Mephistopheles?

Are you stupid?

He is planning on a standalone converter program, not a modelling package.

You know, putting in a 3d format file in the one end, and have a cmp out the other and vica versa.

No, he's not. The point he was making was that we already have two decent, affordable moddeling programs, and that they are very adept at the low-poly models that Freelancer supports. Try thinking next time.

@Mike
The source code for the cmp importer/exporter is in downloads somewhere I think, and I'm pretty sure an outline of the file format comes included with it.

Ok everyone just chill down.

Cant you just make a stand alone program and then integrate it into a tab for other programs????

then everyone would be happy.

Heres a good idea... How about we all get to the point of this topic, such as, THE ANSWER TO HIS QUESTION? Why do we need to ramble on about how this is better and what exactly is he asking?

I mean, he asked a very simple question... One that requires a only a very simple answer. I don't see anywhere in his question about him asking about another's opinion on something totaly not relevant to his question, so my question would be: Why waste time posting something that really is a waste of everyones time and clearly not the answer that should have been posted... in this case, "What it takes to write a standalone program..."?

Edited by - BWeiser on 3/13/2005 4:40:59 AM

Oh I just noticed the answer to his question, or atleast an indirect answer, but still, it's all cluttered up in a bunch of pointless posts... my bad. :/

Edited by - BWeiser on 3/13/2005 4:42:29 AM