Turok Level Editor

[djdduty]

Welcome! And hell yeah we are looking forward to this! Thanks for coming to help Stinkee. Even though he is moving really fast with this. The more help the better! And more interesting people is great.

Btw Stinkee really nice work so far damn dude that fast progress. I mean I didn't expect what you have so far un till a few months.

Well I mean, he doesn't really need my help as you can see so far. But I'm just offering to do so since it looks like a lot of fun to work on and he always gets to have all the fun!

[Adon]

Yes join in on Stinkee's fun, plus if you two worked together before then that is great Really though, the more help the better on this project. Its moving along in a lovely manner. If people are able to produce user maps for Turok it will be a first I believe, or am I wrong?

Either way I know some people of this forum and even outside of it will be grateful and it will help ensure eternity in Turok whether they release a new game or not. Good luck breaking the last bits of code that is needed!

[djdduty]

Yes join in on Stinkee's fun, plus if you two worked together before then that is great Really though, the more help the better on this project. Its moving along in a lovely manner. If people are able to produce user maps for Turok it will be a first I believe, or am I wrong?

Either way I know some people of this forum and even outside of it will be grateful and it will help ensure eternity in Turok whether they release a new game or not. Good luck breaking the last bits of code that is needed!

I'll leave the file parsing to Stinkee, he's always been way better at serialization than I have and I would have a lot to catch up on the file formats with his current progress.

I can expect to do interface work, object manipulation, rendering, optimization, that type of stuff. As an example currently there is a lot of optimization stuff that never got put into the renderer and so the viewer seems to be suffering from less than ideal frame rates despite the lack of any real dynamic shaders (if anyone has noticed this). I never got around to finishing the culling code, for example, but that would speed it up by an extremely significant amount. I won't go in to details now but once we get a repository set up specifically for this project I'll probably have a huge amount of tasks on there, having a plan keeps me organized.

I am a pretty busy guy as far as schedule goes, so it might be a few days before I have anything to show, but I'll try to organize a plan with Stinkee later today.

[Stinkee2]

Hello djdduty, I see you've met my Turok friends. I'm glad you've taken a liking to this project. Plenty of fun to go around. Of course now that you're here I have to admit that in earlier posts I referred to the rendering engine as "mine" simply because it was easier than saying "the rendering engine my friend and I built". But in fact it was a joint effort, not just me.

In other news, I have made contact with one of the engine programmers from Acclaim during the Turok 4 days. I'll report back if I find out any new and useful information about the Turok 4 engine (Quagmire engine?) or the game files.

[djdduty]

Hello djdduty, I see you've met my Turok friends. I'm glad you've taken a liking to this project. Plenty of fun to go around. Of course now that you're here I have to admit that in earlier posts I referred to the rendering engine as "mine" simply because it was easier than saying "the rendering engine my friend and I built". But in fact it was a joint effort, not just me.

In other news, I have made contact with one of the engine programmers from Acclaim during the Turok 4 days. I'll report back if I find out any new and useful information about the Turok 4 engine (Quagmire engine?) or the game files.

Just because I'm at work doesn't mean I'm not on skype, you can chat with me there as usual if you have messages directed at me. And don't worry, I understand / don't care about how you refer to the renderer, you've done most of the work anyway.

If you've started documents / graphs on the headers and format of the file types, it'd be awesome if we can start some documentation on de-serializing their file types, and include any useful information from them there? I've seen you layout some things in a couple posts here but maybe we should gather that into a usable reference resource or something that any programmer can use.

[Adon]

So other then just Turok Evolution, you are actually creating an entire engine but making it able to work with Evolution at the same time? Funny name for it to

[djdduty]

So other then just Turok Evolution, you are actually creating an entire engine but making it able to work with Evolution at the same time? Funny name for it to

No, We're not coupling the engine with Turok specifically in any way. Basically a few months back Stinkee and I set out to create a renderer. We had made entire game engines before and we always get caught up in certain features so we set our goals a bit differently, this time we were going to make JUST the Renderer with all the abstraction, flexibility, and modern rendering features like physically based rendering that it would need to be easily plugged in to any project or engine down the road, for any programmers, not just us. So far it's going really well other than me slacking off.

Long story short Stinkee decided to use it in this project because it would save a lot of time, which means we get to develop both of them alongside eachother but the Renderer itself doesn't actually have anything to do with Turok, that's just the code Stinkee wrote on top of it to parse all the game files. We can't really use the Renderer to it's full potential in this project because the basic rendering style of Turok Evolution so you can basically disregard the Renderer, but maybe we'll play around with something in the future.

I don't think we've said the name of the Renderer anywhere. "Quagmire" engine was referring to the original Turok Evolution Engine. Our Renderer is called "Silk", a bit odd but we like it.

[operative lm]

The Quagmire engine was also the name of the engine Acclaim used for some of their sports titles, starting with NFL Quarterback Club '98, I believe.

EDIT: Was it Quagmire that was used for Evolution? I'd always assumed they'd heavily repurposed the Turok engine. Again.

[djdduty]

The Quagmire engine was also the name of the engine Acclaim used for some of their sports titles, starting with NFL Quarterback Club '98, I believe.

EDIT: Was it Quagmire that was used for Evolution? I'd always assumed they'd heavily repurposed the Turok engine. Again.

Stinkee said he did some digging around in the binary and found a reference(s) to Quagmire, so I assume so. He would know more about this since he discovered it.

[Duke64]

This is really good! Well I plan to open the level viewer over this weekend so I can't wait for that. If I see anything unusual I will let you know. Keep up the good work. Good luck, please, and thanks

That's great you guys are working on a full rendering program. So is this going to also help programmers with reverse engineering on other projects and stuff of that manner? Silk is a cool name to btw.