Thanks for the response, this is a breath of fresh air for sure.
"Dave Eberly" <eberly@magic-software.com> wrote in message news:<YeWNb.10008$q4.5904@newsread3.news.atl.earth link.net>...
> The Morrowind web site mentions editors you can get. Have
> you not tried this approach?
I have. There is one official construction set with a severely limited
toolset for modifying the terrain and two user-programmed utilities.
One crashes, the other doesn't give me the level of control I need for
my landscape. I couldn't get in touch with either author and their
source code doesn't seem to be available.
> The requirement for tiling the terrain without the CLOD causing
> cracking at the tile boundaries is that each tile be of the size
> (2^n+1)-by-(2^n+1). In your case, n = 6.
Excellent, that makes sense. Now I just need to find what sides the
row and column are on for each cell/tile. I should be able to do that
by comparing adjacent cell sides to see if they contain the same data.
> Has Bethesda Softworks not provided the format at its website?
> If legal, why would you need to "crack" the format?
Sadly not. They seem to get a kick out of letting people crack their
data file format themselves. They've offered some help/clues in the
past but generally try not to get involved in the hard core modders'
projects. Probably because of potential lawsuits since many of the
large-scale mods are based on things like Lord of the Rings, which I
doubt they have permission to do from the copyright holders. They do
their best to encourage modding, such as hosting a modder's forum and
releasing a fairly robust editor with the game.
The main problem I'm having deciphering the elevation data is hard to
pin down. The heights are rendered incorrectly. Much of what it
renders is correct, although vertical changes in elevation aren't
rendered at all. I tried to carry over the accumulative height past
each row's end instead of resetting it to zero, but that didn't work
either. It's bizarre. I'll post my code in a follow up to this.
Kevin Fishburne
kfishburne@_NOSPAM_pinestate.com