Ziemanskye on 7/7/2007 at 09:23

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I honestly don't know about Max 4 or lower, so that might work if you can find a copy, but the actual conversion process happens as an export option from within max, so while you can build in other things, it still has to go through Max to get to a game-usuable state.

The original content is quite good for the most part. Unfortunately it's also very specifically targetted, meaning that while you can build with it is actually visually limited: and sadly there's an expectation of too many polygons to be able to bodge it with Brush-work, and the engine/editor has a nasty tendancy to rip holes in the world if said Brush-work gets too complicated, which means you predominantly have to use boxy rooms with static meshes to disguise it. There's also a really dumb problem with staticmesh scaling, in that while you can visually shrink or expand the meshes, their collision models don't scale with it, which means that for a lot of things you can need new smeshes at the correct size to begin with.

Since we also can't change material properties without overriding entire objects, or by going through Max, we're also left with similar kinds of problems on that front.

The quickest summary of the problem is that we don't have UnrealEngine2 at the base of this anymore: All the neatness and quickness and in-editor goodness of UE2 just isn't there for us, so everything has to go through Max - and if you want to build something special, you need that power.

Pretty much all missions will want for a couple of new textures, or a new StaticMesh of some kind, and working around that with OM content is always going to feel like a poor comparison for a decent set of workable tools and fileformats.

(and of course, the OM content of TDS is less varied than in TMA, which had it's caves and it's submarine, and the ancient city and the mechanists, and the art-deco panelling as wells as the streets and the mansion - while we have some variation, it's mostly the same boxy rooms with specificly made special pieces, which simply because of being more detailed are harder to use elsewhere)

Ziemanskye on 21/7/2007 at 18:10

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It's there, people are using it.

Not many people make it past the tutorial though, since it's not easy to work with and there's not much love for TDS - most of the early adopters were just people who didn't like TDS and wanted to "fix" the game.

They realised it wasn't going to happen (or not without more work than they felt necesary) and moved on, mostly to the DarkMod as far as I know. And since one of them decided to try and split the community with a "fixed" version of the Editor and the game which I still haven't seen any FMs using, well, lack of internal coherency is not a good thing for growing a healthy scene.