Why is only a single material allowed on a .x file? I have an old, but awesome, 3D construction program called 3D World Studio by Leadwerks, which I want to use for creating buildings from. When I export to .x format, it generates one texture as dds and the remainder of the used textures are saved off as jpg. Now, the .x file has no problems identifying each individual material and describing where they are used on the model. But FPS Creator only cares about the .dds file and just ignores the .x file details and applies it on all mesh faces.



Why can't FPS Creator honor the .x file and apply the textures as specified in the file?

It isn't supported as it would bog down the engine.

It shouldn't impact performance significantly. I've written engines that support multi-material meshes and most every engine out there supports multi-material meshes without issues. This is a serious missing feature if you ask me. I don't really think there is much of a difference, if any, between having a building constructed of multiple segments that each have their own texture and a single mesh with multiple textures. Any differences are simply in the way the engine chooses to handle them under then hood.

We will be looking to add something to the forthcoming object importer which will take multi-material models and convert them to single mesh single texture entities. From a performance standpoint one draw call is much better than more than one draw call, and by combining the textures onto a single plate we will be able to do that.

Lee, yes one draw call is better than multiple draw calls, but if you have a multi segment building with different materials then you are doing separate draw calls anyway. And the engine could combine meshes into a single draw call under the hood as well. For example, if you had a building consisting of 10 segments and half were one texture and the other half were something else then you can combine 5 mesh segments into a single mesh with a single material and the other 5 mesh segments into a single mesh with the other material. That's something all done under the hood and we never have to worry about it.



Now, if you have an importer that combines it all into a single mesh and single material then that's great as well, but I think you'll run into problems with really large meshes with lots of materials. You're limited by the texture size and I think you will hit limits as to how much you can cram into a single texture.

The age old battle of performance vs quality Maybe a tick-box in the importer which resolves the multi-material into a group of meshes, each with their original material texture. Slower, but you keep the quality. Something to raise when we release the first version of the Importer.

I look forward to seeing what the importer can do.

I used to come across this issue when using Google Sketchup, which admittedly isn't brilliant software at all, but its a good beginner modelling tools, stuff like blender always seemed way over my head. haha



Anyway I was never any good at UV mapping, so the texture thing was an issue for me, it would be good to see some compatibility for this in the future

@tomjscott



Im in the same boat and also am comfortable with 3D World studio but multi texturing isn't impossible...I did manage to blag it



Check out my link below and see how I did



[href]http://fpscrforum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_vi

Lee are you really using a 9600 GT?

Interesting trick, synchromesh. I thought that you had to have a dds file as the texture or it wouldn't work. At least that's what the docs say. Also, I'm not quite sure how you managed to craft the model with all the hidden textures, but I might give it a try. I would think it could get quite complicated for something more involved than that brick house. Anyway, I'm sure willing to give it a try for a few things I may need for my level.

@BarZaTTacKS : Yep - keeps me honest to low-end users

@Lee That would drive me crazy, I run FPSC:Reloaded on my 6970 crossfire config at home and its awesome.. on my laptop with Intel HD 3000, horrible. I don't know how you do it but props to you!



Do you have a system that pulls the data from systems t

No, but when we put Reloaded on Steam we should be able to get those metrics