Worklog for OJay
TxTerrain editor
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| So there we are. Got a great Terrainsystem for free, even opensoure. But how to create (respectively compile) these awesome terrains? By hard-coding their settings and painting the heightmap with a thirdparty tool...aweful, if you ask me. And so my anwser is: The TxTerrainEditor :) My goal is to create a tool, which makes it possible to create, manipulate, compile and even make your terrain ready-to-use ingame. So all functionality which is hardcodet at the moment needs to be editable within the editor. Features completed so far: - Loading and saving compiled and uncompiled Terrains into a ready-to-use format, using zlib and XML (see below) - Heightmap import - Configuration of Texturelayers - flyling around in the editor :-) further feature wishlist: - Heightmap manipulation within the editor - realtime Preview of texture layers - Changing Lighting - Realtime terrain manipulation within the 3D view of the editor (rather than through the heightmap) - Compile geometry independent from colormap for faster previewing Especially the last three points on my list, will require to get in deeper touch with the system itself, which basically means, that they probably won't be included in the first release, if i don't get a bit help by pete itself. :) So what does 'ready-to-use' mean? If you look into the provided examples you will see, that there are dozens and dozens of single files, which get created during the process of compilation. Especially the colormaps can get pretty huge and numerous. So to get everything together nicely all of those files will be packed into one single file, the *.ter file. Ter-files are simple zip archives, which can be opened with any packer cappable of the ZIP file format. To be able to reopen terrain into the editor, more information has to be stored into the package. i decided to use a simple xml file for this purpose because its easy to use, human-readable and therefore editable with a normal texteditor. A typical XML file will look like this: http://user.blue-cable.de/ojay/tropics.xml Some facts: - Licensing: Freeware, openSource (will be released, when finished) - GUI: heavily modified BlitzUI (faster, uses system-colors, improved look and feel, will be included in source package) - Project status: 30% Contributors wanted! Since i'm making this project for free and will release the source under public domain, i'm hoping to get some help from the community in some aspects. if you feel comfortable or have already coded something with perlin noise, heightmap generation, zlib and/or realtime image manipulation, please feel free to contact me by mail (ojay [at] eqil [dot] de). Any help appreciated! Last but not least, a small screenshot of what i came up so far:  |