[Golan]

Hello everybody,
I´m searching for informations about the Westwood 3D (aka w3d) file format, does anyone know if the structure of the format is documented somewhere? I.E. how the geometry is saved, how textures & shaders are assigned, basically everything one needs for an exporter/converter. Information on the different generations (Renegade W3d, Generals W3D, SUM W3D) would be welcome too.

[Indigo]

Tough luck dude, if you were here like 3 years ago, people with more technical insights of your question would have help you in no time.

[Ambershee]

There's no public documentation on the W3D fileformat, especially the current version, which makes it nigh on impossible to write an exporter / importer for. People have tried without success to do so in the past - this is why you won't find any exporters other than the CnC SDK or the Renegade Gamepack.

[Golan]

First, thanks for your replies.
Second, (this is especially @Ambershee) are you shure that W3D is undocumented? There´s a selfmade W3D-esporter for 3DS by ACK (IIRC), is this just a butchered version of the RenX exporter?

[Ambershee]

As far as I'm aware, it's just a butchered version of the RenX exporter. GMax and 3dsMax 4/5 do of course have a lot in common. I've seen a lot of discussion in the past about the W3D format, but I've never seen anything come of it. I may be wrong, but anything out there is going to be hard to find, and if there is something out there, then it shouldn't be, as it'd be in use by someone.

[jonwil]

go to http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/rentools/ and download w3dview.
It is a w3d viewer I wrote that can view renegade and some SAGE w3d files.

It cant handle the newest SAGE w3d files (i.e. BFME2 with shaders and stuff).
Also, it doesnt actually parse and display all things a w3d file can do but it does most of it (textures, geometry, animation etc).
It does contain the data structures for the chunks that it doesnt actually parse (like particle emitters for example)

Most importantly, the whole source code for it is released under the GNU General Public Licence.

It is written in pure C and OpenGL as it was done for a University course as a project and those were the requirements

[jonwil]

go to http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/rentools/ and download w3dview.
It is a w3d viewer I wrote that can view renegade and some SAGE w3d files.

It cant handle the newest SAGE w3d files (i.e. BFME2 with shaders and stuff).
Also, it doesnt actually parse and display all things a w3d file can do but it does most of it (textures, geometry, animation etc).
It does contain the data structures for the chunks that it doesnt actually parse (like particle emitters for example)

Most importantly, the whole source code for it is released under the GNU General Public Licence.

It is written in pure C and OpenGL as it was done for a University course as a project and those were the requirements

As far as I am aware, this is probobly the best resource for w3d files and their format that exists.