Posted by Dr. Willard on August 19, 2000 at 03:27:50:
In reply to: Thought of that since we´ve got Rosetta Stone posted by Tomb Biker on August 18, 2000 at 05:55:27:
: I mean, we have the complete levels with models, etc. in it. So it would be great if there´s a chance to get a better engine modified to load TR levels from all games and display them all the same way. In quake, for example there are some weapons that absolutely don´t match the TR idea. Another possibility would be coding some kind of converter but from all that I know the models of other engines are widely different from the TR models (skinned models).
I don't know of any existing open-sourced commercial game that could do that; those whose world geometries I'm familiar with (Doom, Marathon, Quake) are world geometries too different from TR's for this to be feasible.
The best best for something like that would be the Crystal Space engine (crystal.linuxgames.com). Its world geometry appears to be a superset of TR's, meaning that one could load a TR level into the CS engine. There may be problems with room alternation, but those could be handled easily.
However, models are much easier to place in other engines; one would still need appropriate rendering code, but that should be a straightforward task. However, TR's model format is different from other commonly-used ones, such as Quake's. The Quake series does all its animation by moving vertices; the TR series uses rigid models moved relative to each other in skeletal-animation fashion. I note that Half-Life also includes skeletal animation, but uses it to move vertices in a Quake-style model.
: BTW, have you ever heard of an editor for the Vista engine (Turok, Shadowman)?
Dunno about that.