I bought XSI Foundation last december, I think is the best option for game development, it is the cheapest ($500) of the big guys, and it is feature rich.

I did some &#106avascripting in it, and found that to be fairly easy (it also allows you to write vbscript and python scripts).<br><br>However, the SDK API is COM based, which although great for supporting multiple scripting languages, it complicates writting plugins in C/C++, specially if you like using MinGW instead of Visual C++ like me.<br><br>All in all its a matter of getting used to it, the trueSpace API is way too easy to use, so I guess I got spolied by it [smile] I do need to get my Map exporter ported to XSI.

Quote:Original post by Teknofreek
Touche'. You're right, I really haven't tried to use it in years. And you're right, half of what I didn't like about it was it's paradigms. The modeling in it actually looked pretty decent, but everything else seemed a bit odd to me. But I was a bit harsh, wasn't I. Perhaps we can just agree to disagree :)

Definitely, there's nothing wrong with everyone finding different things odd to work with... just thought the original poster could use getting some more up-to-date info in response to their question ^^

Quote:Yeah, their modeling stuff does look good. As I mentioned before, the only thing I question is how easy it will be to fit that program into a full production pipeline. It does sound like they're trying to make it as easy as possible to export to other programs. However, there are still lots of times when you want to do things like tweak a model that's already skinned. If they can get the integration with other apps to a point where things like that are easy, then they might be on to something.

Not sure if you mean Modo or Lightwave now... how Modo does it, i dunno. With Lw tweaking is rather trivial -- if you work on animation and decide the model needs some touch-ups you hit the 'Modeler' button, the module opens and loads currently selected object. You can adjust maps, geometry and whatever, and as you do it the animation module detects the changes and updates view automatically (since the modules are linked through network with central hub, it's possible to even have different persons to work both on the model updates and the animation/level building in the same time... if props used in level get updated at some point, they're automatically reloaded so the level designers always get to see most recent version of how it's all going to look in game)