Document scenery tooling

[guyou]

Many parts of the scenery/missions files are quite self explanatory. But I do not find the documentation presenting the tooling available to help designing details of the levels:

• 3D files editor,
• texture editor,
• coordinate computations,
• ...

A dedicated documentation could help design leveling.

[guyou]

Rationale: I'm really happy to discover this project is still active. Few years ago, I tried to add a La Reunion island game level in original sar. Any help to restart this project would be appreciated.

[hsanjuan]

Perhaps @jmbau can help.

I think he kept the 3d editor program around. But otherwise, we are limited to copy-pasting, text-file editing and reverse engineering.

[jmbau]

As Hector said, unfortunately for now we don't have good editing tools. I have the source codes of the "scnedit-0.0.2" scenery editor and the "vertex-0.1.16" 3D model assembler on my hard drive, but I don't have enough programming knowledge to compile them (they don't compile because they are more than 13 years old, and libraries have changed since all this time). If you can work on it, I can send them to you. I uploaded a Corsica scenery (see corsica_scenery in branches, not finished yet, but usable) a few month ago. It took me a lot of time and effort because of lack of editing tools, thus I had to write my own ones... It's a melting pot of VERY poorly programmed tools:

• a .asc (ArcInfo ASCII Grid) to 8-bit grey .tga height field converter (C language)
• a *.tga height field image editor (C language)
• a tiler, which cuts a big height field and a big texture image into little ones, and generate .3d objects and .scn scenery files (shell language)
• a documentation which describes all available sar2 commands: useful to hand write missions, scenery and object files (javascript / html language)

I don't have uploaded them, because as I said, my programming knowledge -and free time- are very limited, and if these tools worked for me, I am not sure that they will work for somebody else... But if you want to try them, it will be a pleasure for me to send them to you.

Note: I know your work on La Reunion island, I downloaded it from your website a very long time ago (I'm French too).

[hsanjuan]

@jmbau can you send me the scnedit and vertex sources?