Gmax, Editing Tool for 3D Games

Michael 'Buccaneer' Koch writes: "Earlier this week, Discreet, the makers of 3D Studio Max, released a new tool for making content for games like levels and models. Its name is gmax and can be downloaded freely. Developers can build support for their games by writing plugins for gmax and paying a fee to Discreet. It really sounds like a good idea for the mod-community."

Re:WooHoo

[Error27]

I don't know why oog would make it on your list.

Oog the caveman is not a troll and has many valuable things to say.

gmax is heavy, too heavy

[MGKoch]

Honestely, I was rather disappointed when I tried out gmax. I had high expectations but was shocked when I saw that the interface of gmax is very similar to 3D Studio Max's - too many menus, too heavy, hard handling. I know many level editors for Quake (WorldCraft, Q3Radiant, GtkRadiant, Tread, Qoole, QuArK, etc.) and find Q3Radiant is the best. It's small, has intuitive controls and doesn't have such a strange colour settings as gmax (which has only one pre-defined colour setting).

Of course, you have to take into consideration that you can do also models with gmax (you have to download a special package to make content for Quake 3) but still the application is not suitable for the works I normally do - basic and straight-forward mapping.

Not really useful, unless games support it

[Pvt_Waldo]

Can edit quake 3 maps. Can't do much else. Kind of "chicken and egg" - won't use it until it support Half-Life maps/models/etc.

Open Source Applications

[TeachingMachines]

I can't tell if this was posted or not, but I've downloaded and checked it out. It seems like a great way to build communities around a project while giving experience and allowing interaction with up and coming programmers. In other words, it sounds a lot like open source development in general. The folks at Autodesk seem a bit hyper about the registration process, but it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Windows Only

[Tony]

It's MS-Windows only. Didn't see any multi-platform support mentioned-- and it had minimum requirements of IE5.5 for the web browser.

Considering that Blender [www.nan.nl] is free, *and* multiplatform, and lighter-weight, I'm not sure what advantage Gmax would give me.

But, then again, I'm a platform-bigot. So maybe that's coloring my opinion.

And what would that "fee" bee?

[Junks Jerzey]

The fee developers have to pay is very substantial. It's not just a few thousand dollars. It's well into the five figures. Who is going to support this?