Just a quick update to mention a cool new feature. MV3D can now automatically download assets via web or ftp. I had to do some hacking to get Ogre to load up material definitions that were downloaded. See, when you initialize Ogre, it reads in all the material definitions (which tell it what texture to use, how shiny the material is and other stuff), but if you want it to read another material file you added after init, you have to manually tell it to do so. And to do that requires setting up a “DataStream” type object which was not easy to do in Python. I figured it out though using ctypes and now everything is happy.
Even cooler is the fact that I’ll be able to use the DataStream stuff (in theory) to make an image compositor for terrain editing. Later, it’ll be used to put face textures together from components or add tatoos to characters. 
That’s all for now.
Definitely made some good advances in the last week. There should be a lot more coming up in the next few weeks. I’ll have a lot more time on my hands as the place I work for sent everyone home on Friday and we won’t be coming back unless they get more funding. Good for MV3D, bad for me– unless I can get paid to work on MV3D somehow. Hah!
In any case, the client runs on Linux now. There is a lot of instability (Linux and Windows) having to do with the UI, but I have the IGE up and running more or less. Less in that if you open some dialogs more than once, it crashes. I spent the day working on that one, but have now asked the Python-Ogre guys for help.
Another big leap was that I finally was able to export a skinned & animated model into Ogre with textures and everything! So far, I hadn’t been able to do this. I tried Octopus, LEXIExporter, oFusion, Ogre Exporter, and so on. The winner is oFusion. Thank you oFusion! Unfortunately, oFusion didn’t seem to work with some of the previously made models we have– I was able to get it working with a model I got off a webpage (and then poorly rigged and animated myself ).
I took the 10-12 hour detour into model exporting-land because on Linux, the Robot’s skin is borked. I was able to edit the binary mesh file and replace the texture with another one (thankfully, there was one with the same number of letters in it). However, now, the Robot is made of stone. So, we really really need some 3D models. Anyone know anyone who can do low poly 3d human models and will help out an Open Source project? Me either..
I imported all of the non-animated MV3D models I could find. Here’s one:
Off to test some CEGUI stuff in Windows.
