Installation

Although on Sourceforge the latest available version of Dark Exporter is 0.1.8 for Blender 2.60, please DO NOT use this version, because it turned out to be incompatible with new Blender API. (See more in the Introduction)

The currently recommended configuration is Blender 2.59 and Dark Exporter 0.1.7. I consider all currently available versions as historical and they will not be updated anymore.

Here is the list of all available downloads:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/darkexporter/files/

Select Blender 2.59 and then dark_exporter_017.zip.

You also need to download and install Blender 2.59. You can download it from here:

http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.59/

In the next steps I assume you already installed Blender 2.59 in your system and you downloaded Dark Exporter 0.1.7 to any folder.

• 1. Unzip all the Dark Exporter files into the Python scripts folder of Blender. This location depends on your installation. In my case it’s the following path: C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.59\scripts\addons

  2. Open Blender and make sure the console is active. If not, than go to the top menu and select Help\Toggle System Console:

• 1. In the top menu click File\User Preferences. User Preferences Window  will display the button stripe in the upper part of the window. Select Add-Ons. In the left side option menu click Import-Export. If you’ve copied Dark Exporter files to a proper location you should find here the new plugin called Import-Export: Dark Exporter. Now you should activate it by clicking the checkmark in the upper right hand corner of the Dark Exporter plugin section:

• 1. If your Blender console is on (and it should be always on), you should notice the following log:                          

• 1. The above log message is about registering the plugin. It tries to read the dark_exporter_conf.txt which stores some default values. If it doesn’t exist it will create it automatically in the above given path. As far as I know this process may require (depending on your system configuration) a write permission to that folder.

  2. Open dark_exporter_conf.txt for edit and adjust the paths to thief dir, n3ds2e.exe and bsp.exe accordingly. Remember to enter double slashes instead of one. The location of dark_exporter_conf.txt should be in your users folder. In my case it's the following path: C:\Users\(my_username)\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.59\config\scripts\dark_exporter_conf.txt. 

1. Now you can select your model in the 3D window and go to File\Export\Dark Engine Exporter (bin)…You should see many options on the left side toolbox. There are three that you should read the paths you’ve just customized in the config file.

That should be all for start. Try to export the default Blender cube and look at the console. It should display some interesting log about the consecutive steps of converting your model into 3DS format, then E format and finally into BIN format of Dark Engine.

The export process always starts with reading the config file dark_exporter_conf.txt. Thanks to that file the plugin knows where to look for the n3ds2e.exe and bsp.exe files. If any of the paths are wrong the Blender console will display the error message like this:

So first you have to make sure you know where n3ds2e.exe and bsp.exe are and enter their locations into the dark_exporter_conf.txt.

If both files can be located by Dark Exporter you should see the following output in the console:

This is a typical positive log of the export process. As you can see it starts with finding n3ds2e.exe and bsp.exe executables. Then it exports the model to 3DS format. In the next step n3ds2e.exe is being launched to convert 3DS file into intermediate E format. Dark Exporter starts the analysis of the model for double-sided planes, specular shaders, transparency and self-illumination. The results of this step are  used later to edit some of the lines in E file. Before any changes are made, Dark Exporter makes a copy of the original E file and renames its extention to E_ORG. Now the E file is being altered accordingly to the analysis. In the last step bsp.exe is invoked to convert E file into the final BIN format. The very last operation is an automatic copy of the BIN file to the OBJ folder of your Thief 1/2 directory.