First up those of you not following my Patreon posts; the reason I have been generally quiet the last couple of weeks was due to the passing of a friend. As I’m sure you can understand I wasn’t exactly in the mood to work on mods and keep everyone updated. In fact due to this, 1.47 Beta was the first time I did no beta testing at all since becoming a tester. 😱

But let’s divert this before I go off on a tangent, the intention of this post is to bring to light some changes in 1.47 that will affect modders.

Some of you may have already tried to import 1.47 models into Blender and found that you can’t. The reason for this is that the information within the automat files has changed structure, as a result PIX doesn’t know what to do with it.

The good news is that in 1.47 the game can read both new and old format mat files. So from a modding perspective we’re okay, for now. Hopefully a ConverterPIX update will be released shortly to the public, but in the meantime you can still import 1.46/older models and work with them.

50Keda has stated in a beta channel that he will be updating ConvertionTools so that Blender can export in the new format. Now here’s the important bit, while 1.47 will work with both styles, my personal belief is that this will be a temporary solution and that in 1.48/1.49 support for old mat files will be stopped and all mods will require to use the new style.

I highly advise that when the CT are updated that you start using it to export mods from day one. While this will mean the mods will only work with 1.47 and above, it also means that if they do kill off the functionality of the old mat files modders will already be prepared and won’t have to deal with mass mod updates.

At the end of the day, what you do with your mods is up to you. But I will be converting my to 1.47 new standard ASAP. Better to update slowly through-out 1.47 than have a mad rush if/when old mats stop working right?