[wip] LOD C++ Library (lltool) and tes4ll-v5 : IV

» Sun May 19, 2013 3:07 am

lltool: Landscape and Heightmap Editing Tool and Library

https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki under construction.

Overview

The https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool provides several basic methods and algorithms for heightmap manipulation and terrain triangulation. Steering of the mesh process is done via a batch script with a small and dedicated scripting language. The terrain triangulation is done in two steps: in a first step vertices are placed, either based on vertex placing methods, or via (a combination) of density algorithms. In second step the vertices are triangulated and the resulting mesh can be further manipulated. lltool provides multi-level LODs, break lines and polygon holes.

Features:

https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/DiamondSquare (NEW)
Region selection
Color map creation (NEW)
(Multiple) map handling and administration (NEW)
Heightmap manipulation
Vertex placements
https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/ContourLine
https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/Panorama
Monte-Carlo based vertex placement
Quad and level based iterators, also for multi-level LODs (NEW)
Mesh and triangle manipulation, like split at lines
https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/SplitAtPolygonBorder (Polygons are user-defined shapes embedded into the created mesh. They can be used to stencil out shapes.)

Algorithms, i.e. densities based on:

https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/AlgLayer
Distance
https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/AlgFirstOrder
https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/AlgSecondOrder
https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/AlgPeakFinder(=mountains)
https://github.com/Gruftikus/lltool/wiki/AlgEquation (NEW)

lltool is independent from any game or game engine. It will therefore not provide any game-dependent result, therefore also not for Oblivion/Skyrim/Fallout3/NV. But the game-independent design allows to include the code in new tools. One of the tool will be tes4ll-v5.

» Sat May 18, 2013 11:18 pm

Some more words for the motivation: As you probably know, I released tes4ll some 2 years ago, and at that time it emerged just from a private project. In the first version tes4ll was not able to read directly from the esp-files. Therefore it required nasty user work like running TESAnnwyn by hand and type in the cell position in the tes4ll command. Later, tes4ll was able to run TESAnnwyn as an external program automatically, and recently I merged tes4ll with TES4qLOD. Because there was no architecture done from the software point of view, and the other improvements messed up my source code further, I decided to rewrite all the code more or less from scratch. The result is now the lltool which will provide all classes and algorithms for map handling, generic im- and export, mesh creation, and the (future) tes4ll-v5 will include all this, and provide in addition the esp/esm importer, and the nif-exporter (so all the game-specific) stuff.

So in short: lltool contains all generic stuff, and tes4ll is the Oblivion (and maybe also Skyrim/Fallout) extension. This makes it open to use lltool also for other games.

Some words to the time scale: I don't want to repeat my mistakes. Therefore I will finish my work with the lltool, and do everything as thoroughly as possible, and also write the documentation (some of which is already done on the Github wiki). Most of the parts of lltool (which is open source) is usable already now.