Reverse-Engineering Model Files (geometry and collision)

[Sparky]

This is my first real attempt at reverse-engineering model files so that I can make a conversion script that will let you convert .obj models to Eschaton tags for both geometry and collision data (mod2 and coll).

Resource files that I'm using:
http://www.halodemomods.com/wiki/File:Model_testing.zip

Feel free to use those resources yourself and do what I'm doing on your own side, also. I'll probably just be using HexEdit and Smultron and making a .php script for this. I'm not so keen on Obj-C yet.

Here's what the little metal pyramid looks like in Halo Demo:

[nil]

Looks cool. Go learn Python or Ruby or something.. They are suitable programming languages for tasks like this and aren't biased for the web, and are way better. Afterwards, it'd be trivial to create a Cocoa app that would run your Python or Ruby script, or do the same on the web. (Obviously this is more suitable for desktop utility however).

[Sparky]

This can be done with PHP though, right? Since I'm also planning to include database storage with multi-modding sessions and user saved files and the INCY Online.

The INCY Online would be PHP/MySQL. This and other Zeus-related scripts would be PHP in order to simplify things. Anyway, for more discussions of this, see the newer post on "a new plan for Zeus". This is also related to the Programming forum.

Which would you recommend more, Python or Ruby? And this is possible with PHP, eh?

I'm using MAMP to develop and test PHP apps locally before uploading them to HDM's Zeus directory. It's working well and I prefer it to the Web Sharing alternative.

[nil]

I do not like the web. My interest in "Zeus" is steadily reaching nil, while I think the idea of this thread is somewhat good.

Why use PHP when you can use something better like Python or Ruby? Only reason I can think of is popularity and it's not a good one. Even for web development, Ruby and Python have web based frameworks for those. Off the top of my head, Ruby has Rails (which is a complex framework, so maybe I suggest looking for more lightweight alternative actually), Python has jango -- and there should be some means of connecting to a database like SQL.

As far as what I'd recommend for Ruby vs Python, my answer is whichever one you seem to like more or whichever one has a library/framework that you want to use.

[Modzy]

I can see if I can dig up the source to an rb app I wrote that dumped coll verts into .obj. the difficult part about working with collision is collision spheres in objects that have physics.