I thought the DXTV dll only loaded compressed textures as regular bitmaps without actual hardware compression. Thats what someone told me anyway.
To be honest the best graphics renderer is still only as good as it's art pipeline. Without which you might as well stick with what you have got.
Ogre has a great script based material system that someone actually made max plugins for with full support for multipass materials, LOD materials, and techniques for hardware compatibility. Not only that but it renders wysiwyg in your max viewports, shaders, 3 types of realtime shadows and all.
It also exports LOD, tangent vectors and builds edge lists for the shadows too. Really nice when artists have control of dynamic lights and shadow casting and recieving from within their level building tools.
It will take a long time before Max3D gets anywhere near as good support, months if not years.
This is the kind of thing your up against when competing with commercial game engines that often do have these tools built over time. Indies typicaly get the short end of the straw. but it is getting better :)
To be honest the best graphics renderer is still only as good as it's art pipeline. Without which you might as well stick with what you have got.
Ogre has a great script based material system that someone actually made max plugins for with full support for multipass materials, LOD materials, and techniques for hardware compatibility. Not only that but it renders wysiwyg in your max viewports, shaders, 3 types of realtime shadows and all.
It also exports LOD, tangent vectors and builds edge lists for the shadows too. Really nice when artists have control of dynamic lights and shadow casting and recieving from within their level building tools.
It will take a long time before Max3D gets anywhere near as good support, months if not years.
This is the kind of thing your up against when competing with commercial game engines that often do have these tools built over time. Indies typicaly get the short end of the straw. but it is getting better :)