Feature Request

Hello!

First off I would like to thank the creator for this wonderful piece of software, it is by far one of the best level design tools available, not to mention 3D World Studio is no longer maintained nor does it work well on Windows 7 or work at all on Windows 8.

However amazing Map Scape is I was disappointed to see you can only export to .dbo or .x files unlike 3D World Studio which has a wide range of export and import options.

I have a couple questions and requests.

Is Map Scape still in active development? If so could we please get support for exporting .collada? It is a feature rich file format and open source!

I want to thank you again for your time here and your time developing this awesome software.

I'm really looking forward to hearing back on this. I've done a lot of research finding map making software, out of the countless applications I've tried they either end up being too complicated, out of date, or under developed. MapScape is a priceless gem. My only quam is the lack of supported file formats.

I only suggest .collada as an all-in-one solution to allow exporting world geometry, entity data, lighting, etc. All from a single file format.

Please at the very least have a look!
https://collada.org/
https://github.com/khronosGroup/OpenCOLLADA/

I would definitely agree with KKlouzal here. Why not make Map Scape open source since it's already free? That way many can add more support and better enhance the tool. You can also ask for donations for adding more features.

Anyway, this is a great tool. Thanks for making it free!

Open source would definitely grab more attention to MapScape especially if it were on GitHub but I understand not wanting to make the source code public. On a side note, I definitely would not mind donating for the ability to export to .collada especially if you took advantage of Collada's ability to save entity data.

Hi, Just checked Mapscape and was able to create a nice map in a few seconds! Unfortunately, I'm not using Dark Basic but another framework so I can't have the models with the lightmaps.

Collada would be really complex to implement. But I know that .OBJ support 2 textures coordinates. .OBJ would be able to support the map export with all the features (lightmap). .OBJ is much simpler than Collada to implement.

You can check the format description here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file

Do you think there could be a possibility of at least this format?
[EDIT] I downloaded DARK GDK and just found out that it can natively export in .X but no other format. Since I don't know if you have access to the low details of the model (vertices, faces, edge, normals, etc). Not sure you will be able to export in .OBJ or any other format.
[EDIT2] Ok. Found a way to load the .DBO file with Ultimate Unwrap, it preserved the 2 uv channels, but the images maps are not assigned anymore. Channel 1 was for the diffuse and channel 2 for the Lightmap. Re-assigned the maps in 3DS max to see and I got the lightmap working!

So there is a way out using Ultimate Unwrap. I've tried also with Fragmotion, but the second channel (lightmap) is not preserved correctly.
EDIT: Got in contact with Ultimate Unwrap and they fixed the issue. To have the lightmap, just select each map in the material slots in UU3D and set the map to "composite" to have the lightmap visible and export it.