Introduction

Blender 3D is a very actively developed piece of software. Every new version introduces new features but also some changes that may cause unexpected problems for the third party plugin developers – like me ;-) This was the case when they started 2.6x branch. There were so many changes to API that Dark Exporter occurred to be incompatible. I’ve realized that the only solution is to rewrite Dark Exporter from scratch. The new version will not be in anyway compatible with the previous one. I know it may be a problem for some of you (including myself) who were building the models fitting the demands of Dark Exporter. This is the cost we have to pay for a rapid evolution of Blender. We also have to be aware that this situation may happen again…

Having that in mind remember that it’s always possible to use Blender for creating custom models for Thief games without Dark Exporter. Dark Exporter is only a helper that simplifies the whole process.

There are two things I can recommend before new Dark Exporter would be released:

• Do everything manually in Blender without Dark Exporter

  • Use Blender 2.59 with Dark Exporter 0.1.7 remembering that a new version will not be backward compatible.

So to make everything clear. DO NOT download Dark Exporter  marked for Blender 2.60. It’s not fully compatible with Blender API. I consider all versions distributed on Sourceforge as historical and I will not update any docs regarding these versions. 

My former site on which I was holding a very detailed description of the plugin is gone and I don’t plan to bring it back online. Apart from that site, a lot of interesting information was available via Wordpress application of Sourceforge, but this service is no longer active either. Unfortunatelly I already know that Wordpress application on Sourceforge was retired. It means it is off and will never be launched again. I don't know why Sourceforge team decided to do so.

It’s not a bad idea to keep the detailed documentation directly in the ZIP of Dark Exporter preferably in the PDF format, because it allows for including screenshots. For the next release however I plan to distribute a new documentation via this webpage and (if I have enough time) as a PDF doc included in the official release ZIP file.