Sounds good. Will the demo editor come with it's own hardware requirements or will it scale to whatever Freebuild can use?

Cool. One more thing- are constructor DIFs still compatible?

I like my brush modeling but ok.

Oh noes, KermCave is going to need a makeover! I hope that there are some decent conversion tools out there.

Since it's on T3D, that already seems to be an accomplishment. But can you show us any pictures yet, or do we have to wait?

If I remember correctly they said in a news update that they'd like to rip out the DIF support in a future update because they said they were unoptimized in some way.

I've recently been combining DIF buildings with DTS details, much like Valve has done for years. Would this not be an acceptable application of the format?

Sorin,
Interiors/DIFs can only be created in a custom CSG editor like Constructor, Hammer, or Quark and must be built out of closed, convex, volumes which is extremely limiting for most modern game development.

There currently isn't a good way to move your Interior/DIF geometry from one of the CSG editors into a more general 3D modeling application like 3D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, Houdini, Blender, Gamespace, Milkshape, etc. There are a few applications/plugins that attempt to help with this conversion (usually converting from a .map format) but most, if not all of them will lose your texturing info along the way and will also leave you with a mesh that you have to spend a lot of time optimizing (like removing hidden surfaces).

The Interiors->Collada export allows you to take an optimized version of the Interior (which is what gets generated during the Constructor and/or map2dif exporting process) and output that with all of the correct texturing info into a Collada file that you can import into pretty much all 3D modeling applications.

This will allow you to use that mesh as a general polysoup shape and to take full advantage of curves, higher polycounts, and non-convex, non-volumetric shapes.

When combined with the Portal and Zone level objects that will ship with Beta 3, this means that you can effectively move completely away from CSG geometry. For now those Portal and Zone objects will have to be hand placed by the artist in the World Editor to match the set up that was in the Interior file. At some point it may be possible to automate that part.

Oooh, that's awesome! And is Collada easier to work with than Constructor? If so, I might attempt something I've always wanted to do and build the rest of my apartment to turn KermCave into KermApt.