WIP: WadViewer

Version: 0.4
Status: Released

WadViewer is TRViewer adapted to open/save .wad files.

It was created for the purpose of importing .3ds files directly into a .wad file so a lot of the TRViewer functionality has been disabled since it is incompatible with .wad files.

WadViewer.exe must be copied into an existing TRViewer folder to work.

WARNING: Use only on a copy of your .wad or have a backup of your .wad. The program has not been tested much.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/k85oxnm5k5i8vz7/WADViewer_4.zip

Building TRViewer – part 7

I found that TRViewer wouldn’t run on Windows XP.

Got a “Not a valid Windows 32 application” error.

The only change I had to make was to set the Linker>System>Minimum Required Version property in the Property Pages to 5.01.




prev  | next | first

Building TRViewer – part 6

Running the Debug configuration in Visual Studio’s debugger means we can pause the program at some line and investigate the values of the variables.

We can then choose to execute the program line by line to see if the program does what we want it to do.

You pause the program by setting a breakpoint which is done by clicking in the gutter of the text editor.

A breakpoint is shown as a red dot in the gutter.

Building TRViewer – part 5

If you are not an experienced programmer it can be difficult knowing where to start analysing a complex program like TRViewer.

C/C++ console programs usually start at the function named “main” so you look for that and start tracing the program from there.

Graphical User Interface (GUI) C/C++ programs also start at the “main” function but it may not be easy to find it, MFC hides it for instance and sometimes it’s called _tmain or WinMain.

Even if you do find it, it may not be much use since it usually just runs the program loop.

To analyse a GUI program like TRViewer, consider how you interact with the program.

Building TRViewer – part 4

TRViewer was written well before Paolone’s Next Generation Level Editor (NGLE) and next generation enhancement to tomb4.exe (TRNG) were on the scene.

Paolone did update TRViewer to open next generation levels and that version can be found in the Tools folder of your NGLE installation.

With help from meta2tr, I released a further updated version in this thread [link] that addressed some bugs and added some more features. Note that the changes were mainly tested with TR4 files and may not be correct for the other TR versions.

I have uploaded a zip containing the files that were changed to create the latest version (revision 5) of TRViewer at mediafire [link].

Building TRViewer – part 3

We have successfully built both the Debug and Release configurations of TRViewer but when you try to open a file using the toolbar or menu in the Debug version TRViewer stops with the following runtime error.



This is not a program “crash” in the ordinary sense.

The program “hit” an ASSERT statement which halted the program.

Building TRViewer – part 2

To build the release version of TRViewer, change the active configuration in the toolbar to Release and click BUILD>Build Solution.

Building TRViewer in VS2013 Community Edition

TRViewer is a program used in the Tomb Raider Level Editor (TRLE) community.



To compile and build TRViewer Microsoft Visual Studio must be used because TRViewer is a Multi Document Interface (MDI) program that uses the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC).

MFC is only included with the professional versions of Visual Studio and to use MFC with the free Express versions you had to complete a complicated process outlined at the CodeProject site. [link]

Microsoft has released a free version of Visual Studio that includes MFC called Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition so we will see if it can be used to build TRViewer.

TRViewer was originally built in Visual C++ 6.0 and Visual Studio.Net 2003 and if you have a copy of those programs you should use them.

Because there have been lots of changes in the C++ language and Visual Studio since 2003 we will get lots of errors in Visual Studio 2013 building TRViewer and there is no guarantee we will be successful.

I only know the basics of C/C++ and am a novice with Visual Studio and MFC but let’s give it a try.