I’ve not been active in the GTA Modding community lately. My interest has changed. I’ve got a full time job as a software developer, so I don’t have much spare time to work on my own projects. Recently something different than GTA has triggered my interest. The Oculus Rift, since the day the kickstarter launched I’ve followed it with much interest because it’s always been a dream of me to be “inside” the game. My girlfriend bought me a developer kit for my birthday <3 and I love it. It’s everything I thought it would be. It still has a couple of flaws but I think it can change the way people see gaming and watch movies. I personally can’t wait for DK2/CV1 to arrive.

What I’ve been doing with the devkit

There are a lot of demos out there that are really showing the power of the Rift, I showed it to all my friends and they all think it’s amazing even the friends that are not into gaming. As a developer I wanted to build something for the Rift myself. I started working on a small project to get the Rift to work in C# using OpenTK. You can find it on my Github account if you want to know how I did it. Using that project as a base I started working on a game, a game that I’ve always wanted to experience as if I was actually there, my favorite game of all time (maybe you can guess it already) The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I’ve played and completed that game hundreds of times on the N64 and Gamecube, but I could never have thought I would once play it in VR. I’ve been working on a project that loads the N64 Zelda rom and makes it playable with the Rift. For now it only loads the map and gives you the ability to walk around. The rendering is still a bit off, but don’t worry about that, I will get it right eventually.

Oh and that’s not it. I want it to be a full VR Experience. I’ve backed two more kickstarter projects that I think are amazing and I can’t wait for them to arrive. The Virtuix Omni will make it possible to walk around in Hyrule and the STEM System will make it possible to swing your sword and kill Ganondorf once and for all.

Thanks for reading, I’ve created a project page with a roadmap for this project. Also I should give a lot of credit to spinout182. His website contains valuable information regarding Zelda64, without his website I wouldn’t have known where to start.

The end of IV has come, last week GTA V finally arrived. Research on the formats used in V has already begun and a lot of people are already working on small tools. Because I’ve not been very active in the modding scene I would like to contribute in a different way to the modding community…

I am going to Open Source my IV modding tools, starting with Shadow-Mapper (code is pretty bad so be warned). The code can be read, run, improved and learned from by everyone. A lot of the V file formats will probably be familiar to the files used in IV. So some code might still be useful. Next to that I will also improve some of the current projects or try to implement GTA V support into them. The source can be found on my GitHub account. I am still trying to get the code to build again so keep this in mind.

If there is any particular project of mine you would like to see on GitHub just let me know and I will upload it.

I released a new version of the exporter. It contains a few minor bug fixes and I hope everything works like it should this time. But I am not sure because sketchup is doing crazy stuff!

Head over to the download page and give it a try. Please let me know if it works!

First of all I would like to whish you all a happy new year!

I’ve released the sketchup exporter for IV. Head over to the project page to try it out. It’s able to export ODR, OBD, IDE and WPL files. I’ve also provided a little tutorial and test scene to guide you through the export process. If something is still not clear, please let me know. It’s far from perfect, so if you find any bugs or have suggestions to improve the exporter let me know in the comments.

Enjoy and again all the best whishes for 2013!

(3DS Max users should not read this as the word sketchup makes them cry most of the time)

A little while ago I wanted to export some of my sketchup models to IV. I found it to much of a hassle to do the Sketchup -> 3DS Max conversion every time I wanted to export or update something so I decided to quickly write an exporter to improve my workflow. If anyone is interested in it I’ll make it suitable for release and release it.

Current features:
– Export WDR (Really basic)
– Export WBD/WBN
– Export WPL
– Export IDE (WIP)

I know there are a few sketchup modders out there so if you’re interested in this let me know.

Note: Sketchup Pro is not required because it’s a ruby plugin.