Euroland Blender add-on

Import and export intermediate Eurocom formats for Sphinx and the Cursed Mummy in Blender. This project aims to reimplement the missing 3ds Max (EIF, ESE) and Maya (RTG) plug-ins and make creating Euroland assets possible. Heavily work in progress.

➥ You can download the latest version from the Releases tab.

Formats

The formats we aim to support are documented here: https://sphinxandthecursedmummy.fandom.com/wiki/Technical

Here's a rough table with the kind of data they can work with, you usually need different formats for different elements:

Format	Entities	Maps	Animations + Skins	Scripts
EIF	✓	✓
RTG	✓	✓	✓	✓
ESE	✓	✓	✓	✓

For more info about which things each format supports, you can look at the wiki.

Current status / supported export features

• EIF (Eurocom Interchange Format)

  • Arbitrary polygons
  • Vertex colors
  • Layers
  • Maps: Issues with rotations

• ESE (Eurocom Export Scene)

  • Arbitrary polygons
  • Edge visibility: recombining the right triangles back into n-gons.
  • Vertex colors
  • Shape keys, or morph targets
  • Mesh skeletal rigging
  • Lights and animated lights
  • Cameras and animated cameras
  • Layers
  • Maps
  • Animations + Skins
  • Scripts

• RTG (Real Time Game)

  • Arbitrary polygons: Visible vertex edges is not implemented yet
  • Vertex colors
  • LODs
  • Layers
  • Hard edges
  • Maps
  • Animations + Skins
  • Scripts
  • Cameras and camera animations, but rotations need fixing

To develop

For ease of development it's a good idea to install the add-on in some place where Blender can find it, otherwise you would have to change the Blender startup script to add your folder to the Python search path, a good place to put it is the local scripts folder.

You can do this by cloning the Git repository and making a symbolic link from one folder to another. On Windows, open cmd, navigate to your local Git repository folder (with cd <path>) and type something like this, note the 2.93 version and adjust accordingly:

mklink /j '%appdata%\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.93\scripts\addons\io_scene_sphnx' '.\io_scene_sphnx'

Once you refresh the Blender Add-ons window it should show up; click under «Edit > Preferences...» to open the dialog with the «Add-ons» tab, click the «Refresh» button and you should be able to find our entry in the list and toggle it on.

Live-reloading

After editing the .py files you can live-reload the code (without restarting Blender) via shortcut; press F3 to open the search menu and look for the «Reload scripts» operator. Right-click over the «Blender > System > Reload Scripts» entry that comes up and select «Add to Quick Favorites».

From now on you can easily refresh it with the latest changes from the text editor by pressing the Q key and then right-clicking or immediately pressing Enter, as long as it stays as the first Quick Favorites menu option.

A normal cycle should be; save, switch to the Blender window and quickly press Q and Enter. Try your changes and see the results.

Useful tools

Other useful tools during development are the Python Console (Shift + F4) to view the internal data structures, and the System Console (Window > Toggle System Console) to view possible Python error output and dumping debug print("LOL") calls.

Keep in mind that there is a great extension for the free Visual Studio Code IDE to debug and auto-live-reload on save, making Blender add-on development much more straightforward. I found about this after the fact.

That should be enough.

Transforming coordinates

 Euroland       Blender
    Y+            Z+
    |             |
    |__ __ _ +Z   |__ __ _ +Y
   /             /
 +X            +X

 Blender: right is +X, forward into the screen is +Y, up is +Z.
Euroland: right is +X, forward into the screen is +Z, up is +Y.