The .skeleton format has had a small change which will require you to re-export your models. Also there’s a bit of info in the full story about my progress on overlay (HUD) rendering and XML support.
I’ve just changed the .skeleton format slightly so that the name of bones is stored in the Bone chunk. This makes .skeleton files exported before this version incompatible, and you will get a ‘version number mismatch’ error if you try to load them. Please re-export your skeletons after building the Milkshape exporter again to resolve this.
I did this because I thought I should bring across the names of bones from the modeller for ease of reference. This occurred to me especially since I’m working on XML converters for .mesh and .skeleton now (I have both converting to XML, but not back again yet).
The idea is that you can convert the binary files to XML to examine the contents or make tweaks, then convert then back to binary .mesh and .skeleton for runtime use (the binary versions are a lot smaller and more efficient to load). You could even write the XML from scratch if you wanted; only really practical for small test models but hey, it’s there if you want it. I hope to get the XML-to-binary converter done soon, it only took me a couple of days to do the reverse thanks to TinyXML.
Overlay (HUD) work is coming along well too, I hope to have a working version using the proper interfaces in a few days (I’ve already rendered some HUDs using hacky internal code to prove the concept). I’ve just about finished establishing the base interfaces (GuiElement and GuiContainer), I’m moving on to specialising these into useful controls (panels, labels etc). It’s actually text rendering that will take most of the time; for now I intend to generate an alphabet texture for a selected font using Freetype and using a quad per letter for text labels etc. I’ll attempt to make it generalised so in the future I can let you can load external images and a config file describing the letter layout to allow the use of artist-created fonts instead of Freetype rendered ones. Lots to do as usual! 😉