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Paul-Jan
Site Admin
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
Posts: 3066
Location: Lage Zwaluwe
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 Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 7:04 pm Post subject: Cartography Shop (.CSM) Importer |
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An importer for Cartography Shop .CSM files is now available from the Download section. Got questions, requests, bug reports, anything? Post it here!
I'll post the readme.txt below:
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Installation
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Simply unzip the DLLs into the Plugin folder of your DeleD installation. The next time DeleD is started, the plugins will be loaded.
Importer Usage
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Invoke the plugin from the DeleD Plugin menu. A file-dialog will appear, allowing you to select a CSM file to import. Next, a window appears that allows you to set the following options:
- Texture path: CSM files refer to external texture files, that are usally stored inside the Cartography Shop texture folder. You will need to tell the importer where to find those textures, usually at a location like 'c:\program files\CShop4\Textures'. The importer will remember this (as well as other settings). If you leave this field blank, the exporter will look for the texture files in the folder where the CSM file is imported from.
- Scale factor: You might want to adjust the scale of the map so that it matches up with the rest of the scene. There is no generic guideline here, Cartography shop by default models at about the same size as DeleD, but your mileage may vary. If you want to make the imported object smaller, simply use fractional numbers (0.5, 0.001, etc).
- Textures: Most often, you will want to import both UV Coordinates and Textures. When selecting this option, the import plugin will try its best to import all textures refered by the CSM file. The Cartography shop texture groups will be converted into categories within the DeleD Material Editor. If you don't want to import the textures, you can choose to import only the UV Coordinates, or have them auto-generated by DeleD.
- Lights: When this option is checked, DeleD will import the light entities from the CSM file as DeleD point lights. However, as the Cartography shop lightmapper uses a very different lighting model from DeleD, you will more often than not want to adjust the properties of the imported lights to suit your needs.
Issues
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- This plugin was only tested with the 3 csm files that come with the Cartography Shop 4 demo, so there are bound to be problems when importing custom maps. If you run into any of them, please send me the csm file (if possible including the textures used) so I can reproduce the problem. I just haven't got enough testing material available at the moment.
- Any textures that couldn't be imported are replaced by a bright white material. If your imported scene is all white, you most probably haven't set the Texture Path correctly.
- I don't have any indepth knowledge about the Cartography shop lighting, and information is scarce. Currently, the importer imports all lights as point lights with a fixed attenuation (a quadratic factor of 0.0000005). If you have any information on how to improve this, please contact me.
- In the CSM files I tested with, the imported objects didn't seem to have a name at all. What the importer does is replace empty object names with the name of the file postfixed with some sequential number. Not really convenient to work with from within DeleD, but there is not much I can do about it, really.
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granada
Team member
Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 1955
Location: England
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| Posted: Sun May 22, 2005 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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You have been busy paul,nice one 
dave
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Paul-Jan
Site Admin
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
Posts: 3066
Location: Lage Zwaluwe
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 7:07 pm Post subject: |
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Thanks Dave! If you know any specific other forums where people might be interested in this importer, please let me know so we can drop a line there. The Leadwerks forums come to mind, but that would probably offend Josh  |
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Jeroen
Site Admin
Joined: 07 Aug 2004
Posts: 5332
Location: The Netherlands
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| Posted: Mon May 23, 2005 7:25 pm Post subject: |
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I've mentioned it in the Cartho forum on the Darkbasic site as I thought it would be interesting for some people that use both Cartho and DeleD. It seems my idea wasn't being appreciated as my post was deleted... Oh well...  |
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Paul-Jan
Site Admin
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
Posts: 3066
Location: Lage Zwaluwe
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| Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2005 1:10 pm Post subject: |
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The plugin has been updated, and now actually does load Cartography Shop 4.1 files. While the test levels provided with Cartography shop are in CSM 4 format, CShop 4.1 happens to write in CSM 5 format. Something I had no idea of, as I developed using the demo version (that doesn't allow saving afaik), so I only had the test levels to work with.
A huge "thank you" goes out to DJTurpin, for reporting this issue and providing files to test and solve them with  |
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