It's strange, the chair works fine outdoor.

Nikkkita, it may be the shadows on the chair, have you edited ALL the MODL and MLOD files?

yes Deluxe Designs, I have edited all the files for my second test.

In your advanced mode, put %1 on each line after the command name. That will make windows pass the filename to the program, which is what the program is complaining about when it says {infile}.

<* Wes *>

Make a temporary workspace, reimport each LOD, do a "smooth all" on them and reexport them.

OK, the normals flipping fix I made a while back did not get moved from the exporter to the compiler when I rewrote the code. My bad.

V0.12 has been posted, and it fixes that problem.

<* Wes *>

Grrrrrr I had done that. But nothing happened in the game.
I will remake a new package.

Thanks for the update.

Sorry. If EA had tried to design a more difficult way to construct the game mesh format, I'm not sure they would have succeeded. Unlike TS2 or the body meshes, all of the values (vertices, normals, UVs) used in game have been compressed.

The compression I was doing had a math error in it, and it changed every value of 0 to -128, effectively reversing the normal. Normals are a big component of the lighting calculations, so those on the top of the arms were reversed, making them appear shaded instead of bright.

The outdoor results are apparently the result of the higher lighting levels.

I don't like problems any more than you do. I try to fix the problems promptly, and your work has been a great help for me in finding the issues. It is part of the pain of doing something new, instead of waiting until the bugs have all been found and the tutorials written.

<* Wes *>

All works perfectly now.

Thank you Wes

Well, sooner or later we will get it all right. Thanks for the report.

<* Wes *>

Darn! I just tried that, but I got the same error. Any details I could be missing?

Someone with XP will have to help you. I no longer have any functional XP machines to test with, and was flying by memory. Perhaps the %1 needed to be in quotes. My recollection was that when you set the program up by default, it included the %1.

Thanks Wes.

Yeah, it set everything up by default with the previous version, but this time XP is definitely not doing what it usually does for some reason.

I'll go poke at the registry. I really want to make this work!

Has anyone else besides BabaYaga experienced problems with Windows XP. I just downgraded from Windows 7 to XP because some of my programs were not running correctly in Windows 7. Now when I drag the lod and mod files to the s3modld.exe nothing happens. It worked perfectly in Windows 7. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Well, it does work. The GUI parts will come along, but designing GUIs takes as long as writing the underlying code sometimes. This way, at least the more persistent users get to start doing meshing, and my code gets tested. By the time it is set in an environment where button pushing is all that is required, it has the major deficiencies cured.

Some people mentioned dragging the .mcfg file onto the modldc.exe program file and dropping it there. I haven't tried this, but it might work. You could also experiment with making a shortcut file, or writing a .bat file to invoke the program with.

<* Wes *>

You did download the "Visual Studio 2008 Runtime" after you installed XP? If not, that is the probably cause for them not running.

Yes I did. I forgot at first and thought that this was the reason but it still doesn't work after installing it.

I don't have a clue, but I didn't code anything that probably wouldn't run under Windows 98 or Windows 2000. But my sole remaining XP machine died of old age here, so I can no longer test under XP.

I always used to use the right-click menu and "open" the first time, and the "pick the program from a list" and then "browse" to get a particular extension associated with some program so then all I had to do was double-click to run the program on that file. XP allowed more flexibility to edit the associations with than Vista does.

<* Wes *>

Hey thanks Wes, I just went back and tried that and it worked. I right clicked on the mod file as I had already associated it with the s3modld.exe file and clicked open and the files just all spawned. Thanks will test some more tomorrow. I have to go to work in the morning.

Yup, using "%1" (with quotes) instead of %1 (with no quotes) did the trick. Thanks for your help, Wes.

OK, great. I know I wrote the programs using the "standard" methods that work many versions of windows back, although I doubt Sims 3 itself works on the pre-XP versions. Glad you got it going.

<* Wes *>

Hi Wes, I have updated the S3Object Import/Export Tools to V0.12
I then imported an object mesh into Milkshape and exported the same mesh with no changes to the mesh at all and get this error?

Err: Model has 1 groups: original had 0.



here are the model statistics if that helps?


Any way to correct this? or am i missing something with the new tool?

Thanks Wes.

<Rick>

Rick:

Please post up the original MLOD/MODL for me so I can replicate the problem. It appears the decompiler has made a bad .mcfg file, as that is where the exporter obtains the original group count from. There is probably something unusual about the way that one is built.

<* Wes *>

Here you go wes,
this seems to be happening to all my files so it may be something i missed?
I just tried the Country Stove and it said err: Model has 2 groups: original had 0.

Not sure what i might have missed?

This is aggravating, because it works here perfectly.

The "original had 0" is because the exporter plugin was unable to open the file "S3_00000001_0000000000BB8E4A_01661233_cfg.mcfg" to locate the number of original groups. This appears to have something to do with the path, because if you try to force it to open a different file than what it is expecting, you would get a different error message.

I don't think you are doing something "wrong" but something is not happening the same way there as elsewhere, including here. Let me think of a suitable way to test this.

Just on a lark, what is the full path name to where your file is saved?

EDIT:
OK, there may be an issue with GetPrivateProfileInt() and Vista-64 with UAC enabled. I can code around this anyway, and I will get you to test this before a general release.

EDIT2:
I have a test version sent out on this. While it may well be a problem with the Windows and how it is configured there, if I can code around it, there is no reason not to do so. I shall refrain from saying what I really think about the root cause, because it would be inappropriate language and very unflattering to a certain large software company that habitually produces sloppy work.

Wes i used the test exporter you gave me and it gave me a new error but in the process it let me know what i was doing wrong,
I now know it will no longer allow me to use a unique name on the file during export unless i clone the file and give the clone a unique name before importing it,
now i know i should use the original byte name always unless i clone and give it a new name first, leaving the _cfg.mcfg.