Ed, you are infinitely more active than me here, just compare the difference of posts between you and me :)
Nice you can see your son everyday.
Happy new year!

Jim, any news update for us? :) I thought it been ages since you last told us how it's going, but checking back this thread I realised it wasn't that long ago I read it.. :)

What ever happened to the "chat with Jim"? I have a faint memory that we talked about this recently but I haven't seen it since (or I just missed the chat...)

We haven't had a chat in eons. I hope to do one by the end of the month.

You were just waiting for a request?

A topic worthy of chat. ;)

:D

any news for the new version
 

hi ,

is there any news for the new version ?

Working on a moving coral on the far right of the screen, but hit a snag with the lack of decent Lightwave-DirectX plugins. I need thios to save Lightwave animations, but the only one out there is DStorm, which is a Japanese product with no English translation.

Guess you could try Linguaphone...

hire a little japanese

What did you use to save the fish animations in Aquarium 99L+?

I know it's two frames of animation which I am guessing you exported as 2 separate objects and pasted the vertices into the first file. I'm quite familiar with the fish format in your product. Boredom. ;)

Yes, there's no animation saved at all. It's simply two meshes - one straight and one bent left. The bent right mesh is created from the left mesh as the program loads. But in the 3.0 version everything moves, so I need a way of saving complex animations in DirectX format. This has been a problem for several years, and I was hoping that someone had written a useful plugin by now, but they haven't.

Lightwave Modeler has a morph utility that allows you to distort an object through any number of steps, and this gets saved with the object. It would be great if the DirectX plugin saved this data as a DX object with the animation included. The DX SDK has a great example of a DX animation -- a mesh of a girl with a walk-cycle included. So all the pieces are there, they just need a programmer familiar with both file formats to merge them into a plugin.

I'm sure that everyone who wants to save out of Lightwave into DirectX format writes their own utilities, since no 2 people want the same things in their DirectX file.

I really think this is something that Prolific should be helping you with. I can't believe Prolific hasn't done the math and made introductions and opened up lines of communication between you and Newtek. With stiff competition from 3D Studio Max (Autodesk), Maya, and SoftImage, Lightwave is getting squeezed out as the "hobbyist" 3D modeler and would probably bend over backwards for you as far as writing a utility like you are asking for, in exchange for a little marketing and publicity. The right people simply haven't been contacted.

This has actually been discussed quite a bit in the various Lightwave forums. The consensus seems to be that Newtek is only interested in animation for movies and video, not game development.

what about the freeware program blender?
I have read that you can import lightwave files and also export to directx...

After a few months not being here in the forums I have this question:
Has the release-date of 3.0 something to do with Microsoft DreamScene? (I thought about MCE 2005 Goldfish Aquarium)

@Lightwave-Probblem:
That's why I love 3DS Max (which has other issues of course :-))

Jim does NOT support running the Aquarium as a background. He is appalled at the idea of having a bunch of icons on top of the Aquarium.

And Jim is developing the Aquarium to run at LEAST on DirectX 8, 9, and 10, on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, and possibly Windows 98. He certainly doesn't want to marry himself to only Windows Vista Ultimate with a 512MB video card which is what DreamScene seems to require. Once again Microsoft "develops" something with ridiculous hardware and software requirements that 3rd party apps and Macintosh OS have been doing for 5 years on much leaner systems.


P.S. Goldfish Aquarium is a different artist. :)