How to get EQ zones into 3DSMax

[Kaiyodo]

Ah yes, I see it now! I was in a bit of a rush to join our after-work Battlefield 1942 session as I was typing and didn't have much of a chance to check

K.

[Q-Dog]

Hey Kaiyodo, I run 3dsmax4 and your script wouldn't create a rollout for me, so I edited it to the following so it creates a popup window. This should be helpful for anyone that is having the same problem.

Quick Side note: Your awesome, thanks for creating this.

Original Code:

Utility ZoneImporter "ZoneImporter"
(
	-- Import a ZoneConverter generated logfile of an Everquest zone into Max
	-- along with it's materials

	Button ImportZoneButton "Import"

	on ImportZoneButton pressed do
	(
		ImportEQZone()
	)
)

Modified Code:

rollout ZoneImporter "ZoneImporter" width:162 height:70
(
	-- Import a ZoneConverter generated logfile of an Everquest zone into Max
	-- along with it's materials

	button ImportZoneButton "Import" pos:[20,30] width:63 height:21
	
	on ImportZoneButton pressed do
	(
		ImportEQZone()
	)
)
createDialog ZoneImporter width:100 height:100
registerViewWindow ZoneImporter

Here is the file:

[Norvak]

I used the tools to try to get character models into 3dsmax. I've been wanting to try to animate them in the zonefiles I've managed to export. Problem is that they're all crushed and jacked up. It's like when you define a skeleton in Character studio and attach it to a mesh, then remove the skeleton and the mesh collapses.

Am I missing something here?

[Kaiyodo]

You're not missing anything, the character models just don't work. In fact anything that's skinned doesn't work, I don't know how to interpret the skinning info in the file so I can't output it correctly :(

K.

[Norvak]

Thanks anyway.

I'll get a full model into 3dsmax and see if I can use something like Texporter to translate its skinning info into a texture file. Might give some clue. Best to see if we can get some look at the UVs. If not, at least we'll have a useless texture template or a method to add skins to EQ.

[Norvak]

Well crap.

No luck on that. Loaded it up in 3dsmax and the skinning info translated by Textporter was all garbled. Oh well. Worth a shot. Not really a big loss at this time.

There's another matter I want to talk with you about, Kaiyodo.

What language is the converter written in? I'm trying to get the structure of the WDL files so I can see if I can add support for them to the 3D engine I'm working with.

I'm working with The Nebula Device, the engine being used for Project Nomad and was released Open Source. I think It'd be cool to code our own client to go with the server.

[Kaiyodo]

The zoneconverter that I released was originally written in C++ by someone over at Hackersquest, I modified it to extract the texture coordinates. The better version which is compatible with Luclin and Pop zones was written in VB by Mitselplik, i had nothing to do with that one

K.

[Norvak]

Cool. I'll go over there and get the source so I can get WLD support into the engine I'm working with. I tried using Morfit, which was the engine the WLD format was written for, but low and behold, it didn't work. :P WLD is SUPPOSED to be an ASCII format that the engine translates into a BSP tree, but for some odd reason, the ones with EQ are in some terse binary format.

Methinks VI either made a proprietary format and just decided to call it WLD or used some other format and just changed the extension.

We'll see how it goes.

Thanks for the tipoff.

[Kaiyodo]

I can pretty much guarentee that VI made up a proprietry format that just happened to be called WLD. I don't think I've ever seen a 3d game that used a known format for it's levels unless they wanted to be easily editable. Most 3d formats store either too much or too little data to be of any use for games.

K.

[Bluezone]

Just curious, what would it take to get a zone into GTKRadiant? Used for Quake 3 engine games :P .

[septimus]

An act of god.

Radiant and other Quake engine editors (Hammer etc) all use BSP brush based geometry. EQ zones use single continuous mesh geometry (like a big inside-out 3D model made in 3DSMAX).

There's some debate as to whether the zones were created in a brush engine (which I myself am against) but what's for certain is that the finished zone geometry shows no signs of being made like that, so it'd not be possible to turn them back into editable brush geometry.

[Bluezone]

Thanks, been wondering.