LWO files, lightwave demo

[Baddcog]

I noticed awhile back that LWO files are a fraction of the size of ase's.

 

Ase's are easy to edit and export for me so I don't mind using them personally but looking at file sizes I'm amazed.

 

My chest2.ase is 454 kb. I found a couple conversion programs and forced it thru to lwo. The file size is about 55 kb. Might end up larger as those files aren't correct, getting the correct textures applied is a pain and the Max export program I found only gets one material into DR.

 

So I was curious to give Lightwave a try if for nothing more than exporting LWO's. But it looks like the company that makes it is working on a new version and there is no demo available.

 

The 3 chest and lids files total about 1.27 MB's alone, That is only a fraction of the models I've made so if I could cut down file sizes by 75% we could probably trim 10 MB's easily.

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Well, I just checked by zipping them up and they compressed to 167 kb, so I guess that's not too bad after all. 255 kb of lwo's only compressed to about 129 kb. So I guess as far as zipped files go they really do compress well.

 

I'd still be interested in checking Lightwave out though if any body has any leads or an old demo around.

[oDDity]

What good is a demo anyway, since you can't actually use it for production.

Either you're going to buy Lightwave, or you're going to download a warez copy to use like everyone else who works on mods, so just go ahead.

[Crispy]

I noticed awhile back that LWO files are a fraction of the size of ase's.

But ASEs probably compress a lot better, so when distributing a compressed archive you won't see much difference.

[New Horizon]

I would suspect they compress about the same since they're really both just text. Only difference being that the lwo files are encrypted.

[Crispy]

LWO files are binary. I looked up (see the 8.0 SDK documentation linked to from that page) the format to make sure. As such, I'd expect them to be more space-efficient but less compressible compared to an equivalent text-based format.

 

Data Types

 

The atomic, or lowest-level, types used in object files are listed below. All of these are written in a byte order variously called big-endian, Motorola, or network order, with the most significant byte written first. The shorthand names (I2, F4, etc.) will be used throughout this document.

 

ID Tag

ID4

An ID tag is a sequence of 4 bytes containing 7-bit ASCII values, usually upper-case printable characters. These tags are used to identify the data that follows. FORM, SURF, POLS, and LWO2 are all examples of ID tags. ID tags can be interpreted as unsigned integers for comparison purposes.

 

Signed Integer

I1, I2, I4

Unsigned Integer

U1, U2, U4

Integers can be signed or unsigned and 1, 2 or 4 bytes in length. Signed integers are two's complement.

 

Float

F4

4-byte IEEE floating-point values.

 

String

S0

Names or other character strings are written as a series of ASCII character values followed by a zero (or null) byte. If the length of the string including the null terminating byte is odd, an extra null is added so that the data that follows will begin on an even byte boundary.

 

The ID tags happen to be 4 ASCII bytes, though they're probably compared as integers in most implementations ("ID tags can be interpreted as unsigned integers for comparison purposes"). Apart from that all the important data is packed integers and IEEE floating-point values, which are binary.

[Baddcog]

That's cool. Ase's do compress really good so I guess I'll just stick to them anyway.