FWIW, Animator is the more maddening of the two utilities. A few reasons (off the top of my head):

No Undo. No IK for posing. Its difficult to see what you've selected due to the somewhat low contrast color scheme of the wireframe and the vertices. You can't drag a bone if you're looking straight down an axis at it beacuse one of the rotation handles will be in its way. You'd be better off having explicit move, scale and rotate icons for manipulating points, bones, etc.

I think (at the least) you'd do well to write a Blender importer so one could rig the model there and then pose it in Animator...although I'd much rather do the poses in Blender as well.

Yeah, totally. Specificity requires a lot of effort, and most people don't give enough of a crap and just move along. And then when one points out something specific, suddenly they have to waste a bunch of time defending it to the developer(s) and assorted users. I'd rather put my head into a circular saw. (Not talking about dim3 specifically at all) But as a footnote, Apple has this service where you can bring your app in and a user interface expert (read: god) tells you how to fix your app. That would really rock for dim3 I think. So, if you ever have an opportunity to go to Cupertino or WWDC... (Might be far out, who knows)

that might be a good idea, when you first learn dim3 it would be a big help, but once you get used to it it doesn't matter anymore...

haha, i've like memorized the 5 differnd spam blockers :P.

oh btw: the new homing misslees are great, you shuld see the civile war soilders with homing missles :P, they all die in like 5 seons :D, and when theres one left, he shoots it the it turns around and kills him XD.

Yeesh. I think someone here is being overly critical. John, how about you allow users to decide what they think of Dim3 before you share your personal experience. Also, make a game before you knock another person's efforts.

On another point of view, Unity is no different than Dim3. At this point in time there are no "sellable" games made exclusively by its users. Sure, that will change in the future for both parties.

yep, it sure will :).

Thanks, Viking Dan. Undo is a biggy I need to get to. The "explicit move, scale, rotate", is that something Blender does? If it has an interface that people are familiar with, then it might be worth it for me to see what I can pull from it.

I don't think Blender is too familiar of an interface to the general Mac community but it does work well after you let yourself realize "different is okay." Maybe Viking Dan can elaborate.

Brian,
What I mean to say is there should be 3 toolbar buttons for the different operations. And only one should be in effect at a time. this would alleviate the problem with trying to move a bone when looking straight down one of the main axises (axes?).

While we're at it, another helpful way to do bones in Blender is with envelopes. Each bone affects all vertices within a certain radius of itself (in a capsule shape.) Where multiple bones encompass a vertice, the weight is automagically split between then. This is easier to deal with then the system you (and meshwork) use which is setting all the weights manually.

Another annoyance is the use of integer coordinates for models.

</rant>

yes, but there would have to be an option, i myself (my opinion) find it easier currently and it would be very hard for me to do it otherwise.
i can see how some people would like that better.

Most modelers (including Blender) have specific icons to set move, scale or rotate mode. Or Cinema 4D/Cheetah 3D also has those widgets on the end of the axis arrows. See link below:
http://macteens.com/images/uploads/scaleFunction.jpg

It makes things much easier than remembering undocumented hotkeys.

<marathon post>
A real manual needs to be written, not merely a properties list for all possible script calls, and not some "I made this with dim3, here's how I did it, there's your manual." Brian, you *really* need to pull yourself out of the code for a bit, find a technical writer, and hash through this thing. I know that's money, but... you have plenty of excited users, perhaps a little fundraising would be in order. (It worked for Frederico Knabben when he tried to work up his FCKEditor (http://www.fckeditor.net) for Safari--users actually BOUGHT HIM AN iBOOK, they beleived in the product so much!)

Or perhaps someone else who's actually produced something impressive (haven't seen it yet, but the product really is rather young) could do that. By "impressive," I mean large-scale, varieties of scripting calls, many different indoor/outdoor environments and how to work portals in those types of maps, etc. In any case, we need SOMEONE who can communicate in complete sentences and in a structured fashion.

Of course, it's likely a matter of available time--there may be plenty of dim3 users out there who would rather spend time making their game work than pouring any kind of effort in REALLY helping other users by going "Chapter 1: The dim3 Environment," etc. (I can hear it now: "Well, why don't YOU write it?" Hey, I don't even have time to PLAY a game, let alone producing one. I'm waiting for some of you guys to do that. I've given up trying to figure the thing out. Not enough time.)

Another big help: find someone to design your control/button icons in Editor and Animator. They really are quite System 6-ish, and I think that's probably the biggest issue with people who think dim3 is "substandard"--it really does look a little hokey. I don't think it actually *is* substandard, but frankly, it doesn't look as professional as, say, Unity must (I confess not to having worked with the product, but all pro-level apps have a pro-level look). I really think such a small thing as upping the *esthetics* of the interface (not simply its functionality) would go a LONG way to making the package more palatable.

I give an example: there's a button that looks like spider-webbing in a corner. My first reaction was, "What on earth is that?" Absent any documentation, the button image really isn't clearly indicative of its true function. This is where some of these (here I go with some "needless flaming," get your fire extinguishers ready) self-impressed artists in the dim3 community could put themselves to some good use: design some good looking buttons!

But, then again, everyone knows how to use dim3, because it's so easy. We don't need to make it look *better*. Come on, boys, I'm sure Mr. Barnes is not going to be upset if you work up some nice button graphics, zip 'em off to him, and say, "Would you use this to shut up all the Unity zealots?"

Plus, the documentation. Did I mention the documentation? I could've sworn I mentioned the documentation...
</marathon post>

Since 2.0, there's actual real docs. Not complete, for sure, but much better than the earlier reference material. I'm also starting to put together a really good tutorial section that will help a lot.

All of dim3's editors should have tooltips now, and the docs should cover each and every button.

You are right, though, there's a lot of work that needs to be put into the docs, and I pull off the time whenever I can.

I'm not insulting Dim3, here, I have a lot of respect for all the work Brian has done, and that he has done it without charging, I continue to follow Dim3 with interest as every version comes out.

That said, I don't think it's fair the way everyone jumped on John Wallice for comparing Dim3 to Unity, the original iDG post says: "As of 2.0, dim3 has become the easiest and most rapid development environment for producing high-end 3D games on Mac OS X" Viking Dan and John were just pointing out that that's quite a bold statement considering the amazing work being done by otee on Unity. I've tried Dim3, I've bought Torque, I've bought Unity. It took over a year but I'm now quite familiar with Torque, can change the engine to make it do what I like etc. I spent a few weeks playing around with dim3, but did find it limiting.
However, as soon as I bought Unity, I ate it up. I can export an entire level (terrain, buildings, etc) straight out of cinema4D, slap on physics, slap on scripts (and have scripts that handle objects based on names, i.e. I can do all my item placement in c4d and just name the objects 'health box'

Also, as far as the graphics, let's pick a game 6 years old, say... 6 years and a month: http://www.tuttoconsole.com/playstation/giochi/immagini/medal/medal.htm
An excellent game, and unfortunately better than most of the things I've seen coming dim3. Yes I know alot of that is art... but in Unity in about 2 seconds with a default terrain, default water, default skybox, default lensflare, and default poly-collision, I can be walking around a very beautiful personal island.

My point is not to argue a worthless 'my dad's bigger than your dad' type argument, my point is that if you are going to say 'dim3 is the best xyz on Mac OS X' you should expect fans of other engines will call you on it.

Right. I have the utmost respect and admiration for Brian and dim3, but he's a one man show, and he just can't compete with Unity on ease of use, unless he takes a break from the engine and focuses on making the tools more professional (both the UI and feature set.)

Unity's brilliance is partly in that it doesn't try to be a game engine and a high end 3d modeller. But if that's what Brian wants to do, he's got a long road ahead of him.

If you look at the big game engines, UT or Quake or Doom, each has it's own map making tools. The reason? Scaling. You can't scale if you don't design your own map formats with that in mind. Modern 3D modelers are not designed for this. Each of these formats is full of things that allow you to optimize the game world.

If might be a long road, it's the only road if you want to scale to large levels on lower end machines. There's just no two ways around it.

There's a reason the engine is designed the way it is; anything that leveled against it will also be leveled against engines like UT, which has clearly won the licensing war, and not without good reasons.

That said, for models, it's all imported from modelers. But, you run it through animator. Why? Because there are things (again) you can't do in modelers, like attack particles, effects, sounds to bones and animations.

Being able to import from a modeler gives you ease of use but you sacrafice scalability and power. It's a call you have to make.

Also, note that Map Editor HAS an OBJ importer (works good for landscapes and buildings), and it has a gray-scale to landscape creator. And all map collision is polygonal based.

I stand by my statement, though, because in dim3 you can do this:

1) launch map editor
2) hit file >> auto-generate
3) hit run

... and you have a fully functional one-level game. It doesn't get any easier to work than that. :)

Brian, as I've mentioned previously, Animator is hideously difficult to work with. I understand it adds engine-specific functionality, but its a hideous pain to use. The only app that is more painful to animate in is Meshwork.

I think letting it import animations from other packages would be a better bet(Blender or C4D, for ecample) for you.

Actually, I've already implemented a couple suggestions from you. Next version will have undo, better color mesh scheme (easier to view, pick out, and select bones), a switch to choose between rotating and stretching bones, better handle dragging, and some other additions that I can't remember right now.

So, thanks, by the way. That's the kind of feedback that I neeed. In the future, hopefully I'll be able to import animations, but that's a low priority compared with the other big things I want to do, but it is certainly on my list of requests.

those pictures you showed, i just wanted to say, could easily be recreated in dim3 --i'm not saying REALLY EASY, but if you tried, threres nothing there that you can't/its hard to make in dim3...
just because you don't see pictures like that, doesn't mean that you couldn't.

i dont get it

wow gold

this site is stupid!