thanks for replying

well i know python a little bit but not much, i will probably be looking at other peoples stuff and taking it apart to understand it more


and about installation, i was reading the documentation on the main pages and it said something about building cs
does that mean i have to manualy put everything together or is there an installer for it?

edit: after reading some of the other stuff i dont think i know enough about computers to do this :/

If you're concerned about the compilation part of CS I would recommend using CelStart, it's a pre-built scripting environment for CEL where you can script complete games in python, with a few examples, you lose very little of the power as the behavior drives CEL programs regardless of language.

Got dev-libs/boost?

I believe you need those libs for CS's smart pointers/etc to function in C++.

I also don't see it being a pre-req in the ebuild or in the docs, so maybe I'm wrong

boost is not required, CS uses it's own implementation of smart pointers.

Ok, I've ran into my first problem:

I've downloaded crystal space but now how do I install it, and do i have to know any programing languages to use cs?

To use crystalspace: yes!

To use celstart: yes, but occasionally no, blend2crystal will output simple python scripts for you if you stay within the confines of what it wants, but it's usually best to know a language (C++ or Python.

If you had searched, you can see there are export scripts for CS and CAL3D, although the CS script is rather dated, it should work for genmeshes and other things, this however may soon be dated by CrystalMaya which has a realtime preview http://wiki.peragro.org/index.php/CrystalMaya

Please search the forums in future for more information before posting.

well, i believe both these effects are shader effects and a fullscreen render2texture, the psudeo stable will support them, but you'll find it hard to get documentation on it. Luckily shader systems and render2texture are rather generalised, so using generic information about the effects it should be possible to transpose this to the CS API.

For characters, that should be covered by the cal3d expoter (as CS utilises the cal3d library for skeletal animation) it should recognise all Max bone types, but i can't promise anything.

As for levels, the 3d studio max script from planeshift (which is in the CS cvs repo)  is capable of doing that (mostly geometry and texturing) but lacks some more advanced CS features.

there is a script in CS/scripts/maya

or keep an eye on this: http://wiki.peragro.org/index.php/CrystalMaya

OGRE can handle the standard ARB, CG and FX shaders, you don't need to learn a completely different shader system.

As jorrit said, CS supports those shader formats just uses an XML format for shader management allowing fallbacks and snippets and templates and conditional attributes to shaders, it makes using shaders more manageable, you can fallback to different shaders for different cards, you can modularise your shader for common features (like CS does with fog, and projected textures) so really, i don't see using JUST cg or ARG as a huge plus. The format isn't that complicated, especially if you do not need to use those extended features.

Ther is a good tutorial in the CS manual about creating external applications with MSVC.

The tutorial is here paganwarrior:

http://crystalspace3d.org/docs/online/manual/cs_4.20.2.php#4.20.2

As for bentino, to have a release folder you MUST build CS in RELEASE mode (which as i said is changed via the configuration manager in the menu (Build -> Configuration Manager), this does not need to be done if you don't plan to build your application in release mode (which would link against a Release CS).

The configuration manager in MSVC can be changed between release and debug which build the corresponding release and debut folders.

He mean I can adjust the mipmap quality via the graphics card driver.

you shouldn't have to, the config has all the options you need to enable different texture filtering methods.

Theres a script to convert Maya Files to Crystalspace, but it's heavily outdated and slow, it might still work though.

Luckily there is an even better way to do things in the works for maya users.

http://wiki.peragro.org/index.php/CrystalMaya

Watch that wiki page for updates.

This usually indicates that you have not setup the platform SDK correctly. please follow these instructions to the word.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/usingpsdk/default.aspx

[I must compile "CS\mk\visualc7\wkstypical.sln" before?]

Also, the lack of Zlib indicates that you havn't installed cswin32libs

I must compile "CS\mk\visualc7\wkstypical.sln" before?

Compiling Crystal Space
To compile Crystal Space, you'll have to perform the following steps. If anything doesn't work, see the Win32 FAQ, MSVC7 FAQ.

Load `CS\mk\visualc7\wkstypical.sln' (On the other hand, if you want to try out the experimental new renderer, open the workspace `wksnewrenderer.sln' in the same directory, and select either the Release_NR or Debug_NR build mode.)

From the file menu select Build->Build Solution. Note that you must build the project using the Release or Debug build modes. Do not use the special-purpose Release_NR, Debug_NR, or ExtensiveMemDebug build modes (which are reserved for specific developmental activities on Crystal Space itself). Note that you must use Release_NR or Debug_NR if you selected `wksnewrenderer.sln'.

After a while the compilation should finish. The signal for a successful build will be come in the form of the something similar to the following:
  Build: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped

---------------------------------------------------

It's require zlib.lib what folder I must extract?
my CS folder here C:\CS
 

Crystalspace is distributed as source code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Code meaning you will need a compiler in order to use it.
There are several free compilers available depending on your platform, for example on windows:

Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualC/default.aspx

MinGW/MSYS  http://www.mingw.org/

By following the documentations, you should be able to build the CS SDK and demo excecutables.