W3E Viewer

i've implemented an almost-complete .w3e (warcraft 3 terrain format) viewer. see a screenshot here:

http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~btang/ss5.jpg

not sure what it'd be good for, but any help with the noticeable texture seams would be appreciated

*update: 7/23/03*
-new screenshots with the major seams fixed, and how the seams look more like the real war3 ones :P

http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~btang/ss6.jpg

almost the same shot at night:

http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~btang/ss6_night.jpg

***the terrain is not completely like war3's yet (not just talking about trees, creeps, etc.) cliffs are .mdx files. if anyone wants to help me with that (i know nothing about mdx), feel free to email me or leave a post here.

Good job! Looks awesome!
How did you manage to have the different tilesets linked together? Did you use calls to storm.dll or did you use the alpha channel for each tileset?

well i converted the tileset blp's to tga's with alpha and used those. i don't even know what storm.dll is :)

by the way, zepir, your .w3e specifications helped a lot :) thanks a lot...but your detail texture information is wrong. detail textures range from 0 to 17, requiring the lowest 5 bits of the byte you mentioned. in other words

detail texture # = byte & 0x1F

i'm not sure what the upper 3 bits are for, though.

Hey zepir, team up with blt8 to make your Map Editor have a 3D view!

I am a programer, but I is newbie at w3e, what can I do for it?
And, the program is free?
Can I get a copy of source code to learn?

the program/project isn't ready for distrubution in any form (binaries or source). the reason for no binaries is that i don't know anything about .blp files (blizzard image format) and so i extracted and converted them to .tga's instead. easy for me since i already had a .tga loading library ready to use. the reason for no source is that it's still really messy and incomplete in a lot of areas.

Heh heh heh! :)
Nahh!! I'll do the job myself! :-p

But I think I'll try to implement a plug-in system that'll allow other programmers to make little editing tools using my map editor to access to the structures they need. Which basically means that making 3D view of a W3E file would be possible as a plugin.
;-)

I don't want to offense you, but before you talk about the possibilities of plugins you should add the support and populate a documentation on how to program such a plugin, OK!

Don't worry, you wont offense me. What you're saying is interesting and I'll think about it (which doesn't mean I'll do it but I may...).

By the way blt8, how did you handle the shadows?
Did you use the .shd file too?

those are not "shadows" per se. war3 separates shadows and lighting. what you see in the screenshots is lighting only, and is not given in any files. the terrain uses the slope-lighting algorithm.

zep, aside from your detail texture info being wrong, your water height formula is also wrong =P

Are you sure? Because if you look at my map editor, it displays water where water is. So either I wasn't clear enought and/or I made mistakes in the "public" documentation, or you made a mistake when computing the height? :-)
If you really think the formula is wrong, then give us a new one! ;-P

[edit]
*Water level:
By the way, my formula is:
(water_level - 0x2000)/4 - 89.6

I hope you got that 0x2000 was an hexadecimal value (8192.0 in float base 10).
I mixed base 10 and base 16 which can lead to confusion.


*details:
I gave this:
1byte: texture details (of the tile of which the tilepoint is the bottom left corner) (rocks, holes, bones,...)

Which doesn't really say "how" this byte is used. I'm not really sure how it is used but I'm sure it is used for details.

The last shot looks so damn good!
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~btang/ss_sky.jpg