Descentforum.DE

[The Lion]

Yo everyone. I've just finished work on a C library for editing Descent 3
demo files, with bindings to the Lua scripting language. Its source code
is provided right here, as an attachment to this post. You will need a C
compiler (and linker of course) to build the base library. To compile and
link the Lua module you will also need to have Lua installed, including
its header files.

If you're running Windows and have the old egcs-1.1.2 compiler (used
for D3 SDK to compile mods and levels), you can probably use it to build
the library as well, although you'll need to do it manually. The INSTALL
file included in the distribution contains further information on this.

The library exposes every single byte in the demo files, but there's still
work that could be done on identifying and interpreting the various types
of data they contain. I hope that releasing this library will encourage the
other coders in our community to help me tame those demo files and
create tools that make it easy for the others to perform various kinds of
operations on them (e.g. reduce or increase the framerate, interpolate
object movement and rotation, fix crashes, etc.).

Some excerpts from the readme:

[Munk]

coool ^^

[vision]Maybe someday it is possible to stream live matches to observers by demo files :)[/vision]

[D.Cent]

Nice work!

With the "fixdemo"-example all my D3-demos are working now!!

[Foil]

Very cool, Lion.

I don't have any Lua tools installed at the moment, so I haven't seen this yet. Hopefully I can get a chance to play around with it at some point.

[The Lion]

You don't need to have Lua installed if you just want the C library.
This is in fact the default; if you don't explicitly give Make the
"LUA=1" option, it will not build the Lua module.

Except for that Makefile option, all Lua-specific stuff is contained in
the "lua" subdirectory under the main source tree. The Lua binding
code was added after the C library was finished, and they are well
separated.

[The Lion]

I've used egcs-1.1.2 on wine to compile some windows versions
of the example utilities found under the examples directory, as
suggested by Moon. They are stand-alone binaries that AFAIK
don't have any dependencies other than standard windows DLLs,
and can be found in the "bin-win32" directory that I added to the
new archive attached to this post, labeled "0.1a" and in ZIP
format this time, but otherwise identical to 0.1.

If you want to redistribute these without having to worry about
the legal stuff, simply distribute that ZIP file.