vvmtool

Inter Quake Model & VVM Exporter

This is the exporter for our extended model format (VVM). It's based off IQM and to some extent is backwards compatible (this was done so that editors capable of displaying IQM files would just work, however it depends on how the loader is written.

It can export both standard IQM files and our extended format for use in FTEQW.

These days, you can find an updated version of this tool inside the FTE SRC, that has become much more than a model exporter and become less portable as a result.

For those reasons, we are preserving our version of the original, extended tool here.

It will be updated if we make changes to our format, those will also be pushed upstream to FTE's tool.

Features

Features that the original IQM exporter did not offer:

• Support for external configuration files for IQM generation (ala studiomdl)
• Pre-processor for rotating single or all input files
• Pre-processor for translating/repositioning single or all input files
• Pre-processor for renaming bones inside a single or all input files
• Pre-processor for material prefixes inside a single or all input files

Some features that our extended specification (VVM) has to offer:

• Support for hitmeshes for faster, content-aware collision detection
• Automatic hitmesh generation
• Submodels that allow showing/hiding specific groups of the model via the game-logic
• Support for frame triggered events that can be read by the game-logic (model-events)
• Level-of-detail range flag for references/sub-models
• User-defined surface and contentflags per reference/sub-model

NOTE: Using any of the VVM features is not supported in any engine other than FTEQW

History

In 2016 when we had our first prototype of The Wastes, we started out using DPM for toolchain related reasons and quickly migrated to IQM. However we needed a better system for handling reproducible output files. The original tool only handled compilation via plain command-line parameters which was not good enough.

The input command file (.qc) syntax is obviously inspired by qdata and other tools such as studiomdl. So if you're familar with those tools you know exactly what to expect.

We then went on and designed extensions that we needed to make the game work, for example a generic model-events system that'd call events in the game-logic when a certain keyframe in the model is displayed.

More complicated things were hitmeshes, for more accurate hit detection of body parts as well as submodels that made the action of shooting body-parts off possible.

We developed this together with David of FTEQW, since this had to be developed in conjunction with the FTEQW builtins that'd later be exposed to the game-logic.

However, the initial extensions to the IQM format in FTE were designed by us; and this is the exporter that was used to make our game.

Building

Make sure you have a C++ compiler installed and issue:

make

Usage

Please read the vvm.txt file included in this repository for more information.

Notes

Extra resources, such as the pre-release files we shared on inside3d.com:

• vvm docs
• vvm example model sources
• July 2017: old sources dated
• July 2017: old win32 binary

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2010-2016 Lee Salzman

Copyright (c) 2016-2017 Vera Visions

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.