Hello all - long time AC player here; I've always been curious as to the inner workings of AC, and I'm looking to build a few utilities as a learning experience. I'd like to build a AC Terrain viewer, similar to what Akilla has done on his page: http://www.akilla.net/ac2d/

I found David Simpson's Dereth Cartography page: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~dsimpson/
He posted some small utilities for extracting terrain information, but they predate ToD release, and I know the cell.dat format changed at that time. I also know there are some conversion utilities which re-format the new cell.dat to the old one (so that older applications like AC Explorer can work with the new cell.dat)

My question is, is this a good place to start - figure out what information David's utilities is providing me, and going from there? Or are there other, newer ways to extract the data? And has anyone shown a good way to organize the landblock data for import into a viewing program?

Thanks

 

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The format of cell itself has changed since ToD was introduced, so the functions there for retrieving a 'file' from it will no longer work without modification.

Decal FileService contains functions which allow you to extract individual cell files from client_cell.dat. Probably the easiest way to access them would be to create a plugin which dumps the information you want using FileService.

The format of each 'file' (aka landblock) in cell has also changed a little, but not that much. Using the site you referenced it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out what you're looking at in terms of landblock data.

As for AC2D, though, you should probably be aware that the author has been working on it for years. Something that merely displays the landscape, though, would not be an insurmountable task.

Beware, though: this is certainly a programming/reverse engineering project. If you are expecting to just compile someone else's code, click save, and import into some other program you will be greatly disappointed.

 

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Hi VI, thanks for replying... I haven't used Decal in ages, so I wasn't sure what it was capable of these days. It did seem reasonable that it would have some soft of functionality to facilitate what I'm trying to do, so I'll check that out.

And yeah I'm aware it won't be a trivial task - in fact that's one reason I'm doing this, to expand my skill set.. I'm a professional software developer, but I've never done anything with OpenGl or graphics, and this seemed like a fun project to work on.

If you have any other useful information on how to tackle a project like this please PM or reply.

Thanks again -

 

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http://sourceforge.net/projects/acdev/

Has some utilities (and source code) for reading AC's DAT files.

 

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Thanks Digero, I will check those out!

 

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