If you own ts6.6 + conversion pack and are considering GS1.1 for it's .X output then read this -
They say GS will output enhanced .X that fixes a bug in TS6.6's .X animation output. What is not very clear since they have a sales person offering non tech. help - my questions regarding why one should get GS1.x if they have TS6.6 was never answered. I managed to find out why TS's BONED animation in .X output does NOT work in DBpro (crashes). Simply put it's a bug in TS6.6 and no one at caligari offered to fix it for whatever reason. (but they did in GS1.2!!!) I was willing to buy GS1.x to fix this, but after downloading their eval version(1.1), their .X format looks suspiciously like TS6.6's version and STILL the .X animations did not work in DBpro.
So here's how I got the boned animations to work. If you look in the
attached message I pulled from gamespace/caligari website... it tell you of the fix.
Therefore you do NOT need GS1.2 if you are interested in Boned .X animations for DBpro. I will say if you are creating other game formats then GS1.2 is very invaluable....
BUG: X file export of skeleton data
Tom/Spidey/All,
Yes, our favorite old topic, the X file/bone export issue, is back!
My project got to the stage on Thursday where I was ready to load skinned meshes and start animation properly. Up to now, all I have loaded in my own code has been static (non-skinned) meshes and scenes.
Each time I loaded the mesh with my own parsing code, and found a Mesh template, I would call D3DXLoadSkinMeshFromXof with the data instance. With every skinned .X file saved from gameSpace, I was getting an exception thrown saying "Access violation". X files saved from MilkShape work just fine, even when the model was exported from gameSpace to MilkShape. Similarly, X files from any other sources were fine. The problem only occurs in files saved from gameSpace.
To cut a long story shorter, gameSpace, when it exports a skinned mesh to a .X file, is incorrectly formatting the XSkinMeshHeader template. The 3 data components are defined by the .X file docs as WORD data types, but gameSpace is writing that template as 3 x DWORD. This causes the exception in the D3DXLoadSkinMeshFromXof function described above. Changing a gameSpace generated .X file to use the correct data type for that template fixes the problem, and the skinned mesh can be loaded without error.
This has cost me 20+ hours of pain in the last 2 days, but frankly I am so relieved to find the cause is not in MY code that I don’t care. Now I can get on with animation!
Atlay
end of message quote
GS
Breaking new Boundaries....
