New tool ideas

Anyone have any new tool ideas..usefull tools that actually need to be made. I'm looking for a new project, maybe even someone to help me work on it. (I code in C++ and use MSVC++6 for my IDE) Anyways, this should be a serious thread with new tool ideas and programmers that may want to develop these tools.

I got an idea but it would be a ton of work. A program that could take in a raw mdx and let you add or edit particle emmiters, materials, sound events, collision shapes, etc. it would be cool if it could display all this stuff. I would be willing to help, it would be nice to learn some opengl or somethin. this would be useful to lots of people making models and interesting to other people that might want to browse through models outside of worldedit. I wouldnt suggest this but niether I nor anyone else can seem to think of anything that is REALLY needed.

citizensnips is trying to add this to his maxscript but i dont see it getting as easy or as flexible as this would be. if you wanna do this we should tell him before we start.

Well, I'd have to see some specs on the mdx format, along with help from someone that pretty much know it. I'll be willing to work on it if I can get some solid support.

If you haven't already, check this thread: http://www.wc3campaigns.com/forums/s...=&threadid=686

Ideas for programs: We need a new file converter (in my opinion). The one Yobguls made is way too buggy.

That post doesn't help too much, but i found this page [http://mirex.mypage.sk/FILES/w3_mdx.txt] to be of good use. Anyways, what kind of files did YobGul's convertor covert exactly?

Well, I just noticed that WC# Viewer is put, so the file copnvertor isn't really something that would be worth doing. I'm leaning more towards the mdx project, but I'm still looking for more suggestions.

Yes, but the main function of Yobguls Converter was MDL to MDX (and vice versa). The BLP thingy was not used by many people as there was the Image Extractor. But the WC3 Viewer has no MDX->MDL (and vice versa) conversation feature. That would be nice (maybe you can team up with them to include that into the WC3 Viewer to make sure that there are not so many tools).

I'll probally start working on that tonight...oh, do you know C++ scfreak?

I started learning C++ a few weeks ago. Up to now I managed to learn the most basic things.
I started programming in Object Pascal (Delphi 6) about two years ago.
I'd like to program MPQ stuff, but I was not able (yet) to use sfmpq.dll in a Pascal program.
Generally loading a DLL in Object Pascal is very easy. I can use the API function LoadLibrary, but I can also define a function and say "external 'sfmpq.dll'". This means that it searches for the Entrypoint of a function with the same name in the DLL. Internally it uses the API function LoadLibrary, but for the user it is easier. The problem is that if any type of the paramerters is wrong, it doesn't work. This was maybe my problem. I asked you in the other thread to send me the source of TechMPQ. I'll try to either learn so much C++ to understand it (this is anyway a goal of me) or to translate the C++ source to Object Pascal.