Map 3d landscape data

[1ИCΘ6И17Θ]

Hello there !

I have started to work on my Open Source conversion of Battlefront 1, and I'm facing a problem, I am unable to extract the map's landscape, Zero Editor has a mode which exports the map as .TER format, however, no program I have such as Terragen or Blender is able to open it, when I export the file as .obj , It turns insanely big and almost not readable, can someone help me with the extraction of the Citadel's Landscape from the .TER file ? I'm totally out of options here.

[tirpider]

3D Object Converter can open them. I do not believe it will handle any textures or coloring though.

It's a shareware program (one of the few I have bought) but it's pretty handy as a viewer and converter if you work with many obscure formats.

edit: testing it now (it's been a while)... it is slow to load, which is as I remember.
But it does load, and it can export into whatever. Trial may limit your options.

edit: the 4 million plus vertices and resulting 2 million plus triangles might be why it grinds everything to a halt.
I gave up on opening an exported obj of a ter file in 3d Object converter and tried Noesis (it's usually pretty quick). It even choked on it a bit. Noesis wont load SWBF ter files, btw.

[1ИCΘ6И17Θ]

Thx dude ! 
And yeah, I also gave up on the .obj, I'm gonna try your program, how big is the output file out of curiosity ?
No worry though, I plan to retexture everything once I have the landscape data.
Something is bugging me though, Battlefront uses almost the same landscape as Id tech 3 games does, but despite this, upon exporting the file as a .map in blender, the output file is 1gb big !
EDIT, do you have any idea of a file format we could export the .ter in that would be less than 10 mb and could be read by blender ?
Once it is in blender I have an extension that can convert it into .map file.
EDIT
Ow shock, noesis's angy 

 

[tirpider]

The one I tested came out as 127 mb. It was itself a test file for something else, just the only one I could get to without having to find a box in my closet.

I'm no expert, but I believe most games use a similar way of making the ground. The big difference being whatever method they use to store and process it from asset to in-game resource. Typically a proprietary/in-house method that works with whatever tools they've made. The SWBF mungers will take the ter files and make them into an optimized resource for the game. Blender won't have those sort of optimizations in it's exporters, unless someone makes one for it.

Not being an expert, I just said that out of conjecture. I'm probably wrong in a way that I can't imagine. But the end result is that .ter files were not meant to be .map files. There will be some differences. Some big, some small but big enough to break the file.

edit: and that's the catch when migrating file formats. Things get lost. Even between different iterations of the same format (.msh from SWBF2 to SWBF1, for instance,) cloth and collisions get all goofy. I think that even the flags for material renderers and effects changed a bit. More extreme, you go to an obj and everything but the geometry and basic texturing is lost (hard points, bones, weights, ect). Which is cool if you are prepared to do everything but create new shapes to get it working in whatever your destination is. Converting dev assets is tricky business.

I remember someone on Gametoast was working on a program to manipulate ter files outside of ZeroEdit. Don't know what became of it. I'll dig around and see if I can find it. Might be something in it to help you do your thing.

edit:
Bah. Didn't find it or I remembered things wrong. I did find theultimat's tga2ter program, which turns a tga height map into a ter. Not sure how useful that would be.

[1ИCΘ6И17Θ]

The file closest to what could be exploitable is terragen's original .ter, it (like the .map) has the terrain data coordinates stocked into a relatively small raw text file, do you have any idea of which format it could be exported into to as to be close to this ?

[tirpider]

No idea at all.

I focused on msh files and only took a cursory glance at the ter's.

[1ИCΘ6И17Θ]

I did it ! Despite looking a tad weird I successfully exported the .ter to another compact and perfectly readable format !
Thanks a lot man ! 

So, to accomplish this you need 3d converter, open the .ter and export it to a wavefront file, and afterwards you can open it co convert it again with noesis. Hope it helps anyone that wants to port maps, thanks again dude.