TA3D is awesome

[Bidigam]

I just thought I should drop by and say how much I think the work you guys are doing is awesome! it is.

However most of what you need done gravitates around programing, and there is nothing I can really do to help.

But when my race ( synthetic sentience) is ready, or maybe even before I will be using your engine to do pics and advertising materials. I will make sure people can see I was using your engine.

Anyways, don't give up. You are heading the right way. I dont want to bash spring, but I think where spring turned wrong, you remained right.

You are the ones making a free TA2 really. And it will spread like wildfire when we will put together 3rd part materials ( without copyright) together with your engine.

Work towards simplicity, towards performance, and towards solidity.
Make a solid engine that is modable and you will see it florish.

[zuzuf]

Thank you very much, I am glad to hear that

And it will spread like wildfire when we will put together 3rd part materials ( without copyright) together with your engine.

even if there is still lots of work on the programming side, there is also lots of work to do on materials (we also want to create HD materials to replace TA ones, so we'll have a set of free materials, a kind of free TA in HD making the game totally free).

We're also creating some tools to use TA3D's engine features like 3DM models possibilities. These tools are mainly for modders and need improvements and still lacks lots of features. Our 3DMEditor tool aims to be a complete unit maker (with model surface edition and animation). You can help us using those tools and telling us what needs improvements, etc ...

[Bidigam]

We should look to the best open source modeling software and see what would be the best format. I suppose that would be blender. Or maybe there are other more appropriate free modeler suits that I do not know.

I don't use blender but that would perhaps be a good excuse to learn how to use it?

But that should be a future concern, right now the engine must be your focus.

I suppose you will have easy access to stuff like TA:Excess, Talon, and also Synthetic sentience. I can see it very easy as a free game with three races.
Just make a macro to delete the Cavedog copyright from the files

Anyways, lots can be done with a working engine. Focus on that.

[zuzuf]

currently the engine works really well, there are still some remaining bugs to fix, but we need help to find/fix them ... that's why we're trying to make our community grow, so we've recently worked on 3DMEditor (I rewrote the whole GUI and added a small editor to write GLSL code for 3DM models). What's slowing down the process is that TA3D lacks a free set of resources so many sites flag TA3D as non-free (or even commercial) whereas it's not really the case : we already use Evolva models and a few home made things to replace TA resources, but it still lacks lots of things to have a complete resource set.

There are lots of 3D models editors and 3D formats ... so we decided to support what modders need. Currently 3DMEditor reads ASC,3DO,3DS,3DM and OBJ files and support texture import for most cases. If you need support for blender format, we can add that . Anyway if you need a good 3D modeler, I recommend wings3d which is really simple and runs on windows, Linux and MacOS, it also supports lots of 3D formats.

Also assembling a complete free set of resources from various mods is piece of work, we simply don't have the man power to do that but if someone wants to help, this could be interesting .

Just make a macro to delete the Cavedog copyright from the files

I am afraid it doesn't solve the problem