Just a general inquiry as to whether the type and format of the world level data is published and available?

The reason I'm asking is I integrated the EKI One AI engine with Leadwerks Engine 2 and might be interested in doing the same with Esenthel. In order to make this happen I would need to develop a tool to export level information and objects to an EKI One project for loading into their configurator; so would need to be able to parse whatever file is used to store this data or conversely load the level in code and iterate through the objects.

In addition to this, once terrain has been designed and finalized is it possible to then export the terrain as a height map/s?

Anyone?

Out of curiosity, what does EKI have that would make it worth that much trouble? AI programming is generally not difficult, and the waypoints can make it just plain easy.

Hey,
I'm pretty new here also, but look at the headers.
http://www.esenthel.com/wiki/index.php?title=World

In theory, you could right an exe which reads world data and outputs it.

EKI One AI engine , to me looks like it does path finding which EE does already.
The complication is Net support, read the wiki:
http://www.esenthel.com/wiki/index.php?title=World

You would need to write your own tool for this. Take a look at the Area.h header. You will need to iterate through the area's of the world once loaded in your code and export out what you need. Also search the forums as this sort of stuff has been discussed before, over the years, just can't remember where all the threads are now.

Try this..

http://www.esenthel.com/community/showth...esh+export

Thanks for the response guys, that's helpful.

(03-09-2013 12:10 AM)Rubeus Wrote:  Out of curiosity, what does EKI have that would make it worth that much trouble? AI programming is generally not difficult, and the waypoints can make it just plain easy.

Firstly, it wouldn't be that difficult for me as I already have the bulk of the code written in C++ due to having already integrated it into another engine.

Secondly, with all due respect, simple AI is easy ... complex AI is anything but in my experience.

EKI One brings a huge amount of added value for complex AI design. True I don't need its nav mesh capability as Esenthel already has that but as I understand it doesn't have Detour crowd and as such lacks steering. But that aside, EKI One supports a full Hierarchical FSM system along with great toolsets to support this based around flowchart design. In addition to this it supports a complete ambient AI system which is really nice and great tools to support cut scene type design. Although I had my own FSM system that worked reasonably well for AI it lacked the tools to take this to another level, EKI One provides these and I estimate it would have taken me years to write anything like those myself. It also supports a full sensory system too for NPCs. It's Windows only but my projects are aimed at that platform so that's not an issue for me.

@fatcoder thanks for the pointer. That's really useful and is a valid way of producing what I need and avoids having to parse files so long as I'm able to programatically get at the actual model names of the objects in the areas (the positional information presumably goes without saying). I'll take a look at that.

Thanks also Dalmat and gwald for the links, both of which are useful. I also found a thread regarding heightmap export in the meantime with a few useful suggestions. I'll do some more digging and try to estimate how much work is involved in this before making any decision.

Yes,

Iterating Game.World.Area.Data for each world area like in posts mentioned earlier, is definitely the way to go to extract world area data (meshes, heightmaps, and objects)

Thanks for the confirmation. I'll construct a small level and play around with this.