readme.txt

Hi there,

I can't offer much support for these-- it seems unlikely they will be usable out of the box.  But, you might be able to backwards engineer them so that you can export levels from Blender and such.

The last time these were compiled was under Visual Studio 2003, using 3D Studio Max 3 (or possibly 5, I don't remember) on Windows XP.  So you MIGHT be able to build a system for that by grabbing the necessary ingredients online.

This code is ancient, but let me see what I can remember:

MeshExport was to export discrete models, like the hamster itself, or anything you see moving in the game, centered at 0,0,0.  Meshworld exports the whole level, all broken up into a QuadTree for visibility culling.

The levels themselves have either a point or an object embedded in them that is given a codename-- something like STARTPOINT1, as I recall, or the names of a creature.  I'm including the original meshes in this collection so that you can examine them.  I think if you don't include the tags I put in for the start points and the goal point, it will simply crash when you try to run it.  Everythign is very user un-friendly because I never actually expected to distribute this to anyone.  I probably won't be very helpful if you have questions because I wrote all this 15 years ago, and the guy who wrote it is a stranger to me, even. :)

I was going to give you the source code to the game itself as well, but I seem to be missing parts of it.  If I can locate it, I'll send it along-- but digging into my archives to find it is the sort of thing I expected people to do after I was dead.

You can distribute your own creations however you want, as long as you don't distribute an unlocked version of the game with it.  Hamsterball 2 will have a lot of tools that allows level creation, so if you can mention that it's in the works when you distribute stuff, I'd be very grateful!

Good luck!
John Raptis
Raptisoft