OpenZone : Export your scene from 3DSMax/Gmax to OpenZone

[KhaN]

Export your scene from 3DSMax to OpenZone


Author : Shaminator

Requirement :
- OpenZone
- 3D Modeling Basic Knowledge

Comment
Despite being a killer application, Openzone is a pain to work with if you dont model your own objects/meshes, because OpenZone dont come with a library of premade models (or at least a small one, thanks to WindCatcher).
- Structure your work : try to think what will happen when you'll export, don't put the exterior and interior of a house in a same object, divide them.
- You don't have to bother with collision detection. It's all done magically. That also means all zones are like PoA in the end, just a big ground mesh flying in the middle of nothing.
- Polygons : hard to tell which are the limits, we didn't do much testing in game. To get some reference, post-luclin trees are like 1100 faces (press "7" key to activate faces counter in 3dsmax).
Don't forget there's fog in EQ... So if your zone is large enough and things not too close from each other, poly count shouldn't be a big problem.
That makes me think : did they make zones for the netcode or because of the graphics engine ? both? I guess we can try to do it a little bigger than Verant did.
- Textures : we need more testing to get a precise idea of the limits. What we know, tho, is that textures are all loaded when zoning, keep that in mind and don't go texture frenzy. Ok we discovered how to put 4096*4096 textures in game, but that doesn't mean every little rock around should have its own.
We need to test if it's possible to have few (2 or 3 max) very big textures for the ground, like a satelite map, it could result in very detailed ground, with perfectly integrated paths, small (flat Sad ) flowers, etc, and of course NO TILING!
- Place everything in 3dsmax. 3DS files are supposed to remember the absolute location of the objects, so you should be able to import things seperatly in openzone and they should still be at their spot.

2. Export your zone to OZ
- Make sure everything is in "editable poly" state : NURBS, patches and all won't work.
- Export the whole scene or just the selection. (file > export).
Choose a location (not really important)
- Have all your textures converted to size of 2 texture (You can only use size of 16, 32, 64, 128, 512, 1024, 2048, ...) and put them in the Openzone\library\textures folder.
- Start Openzone, file > import 3DS, select your mesh and wait.
1. Sunny day scenario : all your zone appears in openzone, everything is properly textured, you can skip the rest and export to s3d.
2. It crashes : make sure you use the latest version of openzone. Your 3DS file maybe contains some stuff not understood by openzone, verifiy that all your objects are simple editable poly and al faces/polys are textured.
3. Some objects appear in white : no panic, some of your textures aren't properly named or in the wrong folder or in the wrong format or size.
4. Some items are transparent (wireframe) : no panic, i had the same problem with the textures produced with some programs, openzone seems to have problems (on my comp at least) with bmp's.
5. Some items aren't where you placed them in max, or/and in a bad orientation or/and with a wrong scale. Panic my friend, because this is major pain. Had the same problem, still quite not resolved. You can use 'attach' instead of 'group' in max with all the problematic objects, but this has screwed my uv mapping and crashes when exporting to s3d.

OK time to export now, it's easy, file > export to S3D and if no crash happens it will create all the files you need in the zones folder.
Note you can't rename the zone files afterwoods, so choose right and contact your server admin before (he can't use them if he has to rename them).

Don't hesitate to post your experience here, how you worked around bugs and things like that, what we need right now is knowledge.