Aug. 29, 2016 @ 17:46
It’s been a while… Some up-dates.

Wow, is it really four years since my last post? A lot’s happened since then, far too much to go into detail, but anyway some updates.

I get a lot of email about updating my tools, especially 3DS Max plug-ins and Jed’s Half Life Model viewer. As I don’t do modding any more I haven’t had much motivation but I got the itch to do some coding again so have slowly started updating things for my own amusement.

I’ve tested the VTF Shell Extensions on Windows 8.1 and 10 and they work fine. I’ve updated the installer to work properly with these operating systems so you shouldn’t have any problems. As always, make sure you have the correct Micrsoft Runtimes installed (VC++ 2008 SP1) as well. I could have baked them into the installer but that would have made it a 10MB download.

As for the 3DS Max plug-ins, so far the I’ve got the SMD import and exporter to work on 3DS Max 2015 (and should work on 2016 too as their compatible) and I’ve in the process of porting the VTA export and VTF plug-ins. As soon as I’ve done that I’ll look at getting them to work in 3DS Max 2017.

I’m going to be following a general policy that I’ll probably only support the two most recently versions of 3DS Max as long as it doesn’t require me to maintain and entire new build chain. It seems that every other version of Max requires a newer version of Visual Studio and a code re-build. I don’t have the time and effort to maintain that sort of set-up as I did before so as newer versions come out, I’ll retire support for later ones. I’ll still leave the plug-ins for older versions of Max available – I just won’t back port any new features or bug fixes.

As for JHLMV and anything else, most of those need to be re-written from scratch as the original code was written way back in the days of Windows 98 and it’s just broken. Who knows when that will get an update.

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