Progress

I have to say. I am amazed at the progress I have made on my little project over the weekend. Nothing that I can post a screenshot of though because the progress was made entirely in the background.

I got my bearings with XSI, I come from years of tinkering with 3Dsmax so I still prefer it, but I am confortable with the interface now and I am actually very impressed at the level of exposure that XSI offers to the end user, so scripting for it has been rather good. Not that I needed anything too complex but with Max I never even tried dwelling into MaxScript, and XSI offers an advantage here, you can script in two languages "out of the box", VBScript and JScript, and you can add Python and Perl if you can be bothered to install the Addons.

I decided to go for the VBScript (which I am finding a bit convoluted) mostly because of the available documentation on it. And in two days I was able to completely write my own self-installing plug-in that exports all the Data I need from XSI into an XML document that I can parse later on on XNA.

So, basically, counting the time spending googling and thinking about my pipeline I was able to create a crude, but functional, Level Editor for XNA using the XSI Mod Tool.

Right now, it comprises of the amazing ability of exporting type, name, position and rotation of every Model in the Level (Scene). Later on I'll be adding functions to create specific entity types from the list of available entities. And Voilá, I got myself a neat Pipeline.

Now onto working on the XML Serializer to actually use the data I churn.

A little video of how the thing looked a week ago (it didn't change a lot yet)



NOTE: I also managed to add support for the Xbox360 pad, so I can fly around the environment easily (much better than the keyboard).