.HKB File Format for the 3D assets?

from Elemental Forums

Poking through the files, as near as I can tell the 3D assets are in something called .hkb format.  What is this, I don't recognize it?  Is this proprietary for the engine?

 

It was my understanding that this would be hightly moddable and a bit more open.  Is it a matter of providing an exporter? If so, is there any hope of you providing one for anything other than Max?

 

Thank you for any information you're willing to share on this.

3,013 views 6 replies
Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting xenofchaos, reply 1
Indeed. Max is fail.
End of xenofchaos's quote

Well, I did just notice this in the final stages of the Beta Schedule:

 

Beta 5B: Third-party Maya/3D Studio importing beta

End of quote

 

So it looks like We might get an exporter for Maya and Max. :/   So much for Stardock not encouraging piracy ;)

 

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

In the files there's a text section near the start that mentions Havok, so it's not just a standard .3DS or something.  Definetly an importer/exporter thing.

A Blender importer/exporter would be especially nice though.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting scottrycroft, reply 3
In the files there's a text section near the start that mentions Havok, so it's not just a standard .3DS or something.  Definetly an importer/exporter thing.

A Blender importer/exporter would be especially nice though.
End of scottrycroft's quote

Not that I even use Blender, (I was hoping for some Valve-esque XSI love), but it could function as a  Pipeline hub that is legally available to everyone, regardless of whatever software they have access to. 

Still, Im sure thats a pipe dream.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

There is also google sketch-up which, as I understand, is free and particuarly good for building modeling. In all seriousness Max sucks badly, and I dunno about maya. I think being able to use several different modeling programs would be beneficial. Unfortunately, I don't currently know much about model import pipelines, so I don't know the drawback to just using .obj files, which, as I understand, are pretty standardized.

 

If worst comes to worse, I guess you could always import to Max/Maya, let them break the crap you just did and cry.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting xenofchaos, reply 5
There is also google sketch-up which, as I understand, is free and particuarly good for building modeling. In all seriousness Max sucks badly, and I dunno about maya. I think being able to use several different modeling programs would be beneficial. Unfortunately, I don't currently know much about model import pipelines, so I don't know the drawback to just using .obj files, which, as I understand, are pretty standardized.

 
.
End of xenofchaos's quote

 

Well, Sketch Up doesnt sound very realistic by any standard, if only that it's not an animation package.  I'd love to own Max or Maya, but virtually the only people online who actually *own* Max  (not to be confused with the number of people who *use* it) are students that are required to purchase it (and receive a significant discount), and companies who buy it for their employee's use.

 

I'm sure Boogie can show up here and list any number of technical reasons this or that way, but I'm sure it's also largely just a matter of practicality. Like Brad has said a number of times, the early portion of development is mostly devoted to building the *tools* they then use to build the *game.*  And since they use Max and Maya in the studio, they have to build tools to export from those to  make the game. We'll probably get some version of those same tools, which have the benefit of being vetted and refined in a production environment, so they know pretty much how well they work.

 

From there it's just a matter of practicality, on whether or not it's worth taking any time away from developing all the other projects on the impossibly large list of things they want to do for the game , simply to cater to the lingering few people online who prefer to *own* their software legally.  Sucks, but that's losing math every time.

 

Still, with as much as Brad was talking about how this was going to be an ambitious community mod-driven game, I had sort of hoped they might be able to suprise me.  When Valve  *really, really wanted* the community to mod their engine, they worked with Softimage to release a full fledged  Lite version of XSI for free for the community to work with.  Worked out pretty well for them. ;)

 

Speaking of which, i wonder if there would be any hope to write an exporter for the XSI Mod tool :

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?id=13571257&siteID=123112

 

I suppose I'm jumping to conclusions here.  Maybe they will surprise me yet.