So I downloaded three 3d wrappers for gm, GMI, Ultimate3d and Extreme3d to look through what functions and commands they poses.

I've sort of hit a snag in developing The Crawl as models are beginning to slow down the frame rates and level sizes are limited. Hopefully using one of the engines would allow me to do more.

Now they all seem to boast some pretty sweet effects and abilities, however only Ultimate3d seems to have the ability to allow the coder to make their own models. A feature which is nice since its personal model type can be password locked.

Unfortunatly the other two wrappers do not have any commands for creating a vertex based polygon object some code.

And even more unfortunate is that none of the three can load gm created models and neither do they have the abilitly to create colored and alpha'd polygons based on vertexs…so I'm kind at a loss on what to do.

Of course with a better 3d engine wrapped to gm I can push for a more detailed game in general but lose out on the unique look that the fake shading provided. And being able to have the wrapper make and save models is critical to for the whole system to work.

The editor simply creates a grid of values indicating tile types and the main engine currently translates and builds maps based on this.

One thing that I wish Ultimate had was the ability to look into zip or pak files like the other two provide, but this isn't that big a deal.

Hopefully over the weekend I'll be able to come up with something, or maybe even finds some work arounds. What would be espicially nice would be able to load the GM made models into one of these wrappers, but since they don't seem to support that(which is kind of silly, but not) I'll have to search for some kind of converter that will maintain vertex colors and alphas.