blender2crystal

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1

Hi,

I have been trying to learn crystal space, but I have some problems.
The tutorials aren’t detailed enough, and there aren’t enough of them. Do I have to read the whole documentation?
The CELstart introduction page recommended to just download blender2crystal and look at the tutorials.
Thanks in advance

2

I had a quick go with B2C and managed to get 2 simple scenes joined by a portal that could be seen through and walked through. Not bad for an hour of messing about.

There were a few tutorials that helped, but nothing like what you find in the Blender community. I’m hoping there will be some good stuff on the Apricot DVD. The CS element of that project seems to have been eclipsed by Blender, but there are supposed to be tutorials in the release, and improvements to B2C and CS in the project so I’m hoping some of the tutorials will be in these areas.

I’m thinking of playing about more with CS and CEL, but decided to wait for the improvements brought in with the Apricot project. There is supposed to be an improvement in the integration between the two platforms, if I’ve correctly understood what I read.

3

How do you install crystal space?

4

Hmmm… It was a little while ago, but I seem to remember it wasn’t too straightforward. You need Crystal Space itself, CEL (Crystal Entity Layer, the game engine part for logic), B2CS (Blender to Crystal Space) for exporting scenes and stuff, CELStart for running games made with CEL. B2CS exports games in the CEL format.

I’d recommend reading all the installation information you can find on the CS and B2CS sites. It took me a while to get it working, but seemed pretty powerful when up and running. It is not a simple matter of making models and “ping” you have a great game. This is why I’m waiting for the conclusion of the Apricot project and the DVD I’ve pre-ordered :).

Having read more info recently, the methods of polygon culling and polygon occlusion should make for large scenes, though I’m not sure about the stage of integration of GLSL…

Edit: Just done a little research. CS supports Cg (C for graphics) and ARB shader languages. From what I can tell, ARB is a machine-level GPU language (scary stuff :eek:), and Cg is a high level shader language. Cg seems to be pretty good as it’s used in “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars”. Cg is a shader language developed by NVIDIA that compiles to either OpenGL or DirectX shader programs… sounds interesting :confused:.