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The Tomb Raider III Viewer Application

Here it is - our TR3 Viewer Application. You can download the zipped application below. Before you do though I suggest that you carefully read the following disclaimer and associated installation notes. The notes are rough at best but it is all we are providing. If you have any problems you can email me and I may help out - but no guarantees. We have considered releasing the source code but have decided against it at this stage.

Disclaimer

The TR3 Viewer application is provided as is with no guarantees. I have not intentionally placed any viruses/trojans or any other malicious code into the Viewer. You should however thoroughly virus check all of the downloaded software. It is largely untested on several hardware/software environments and I can take no responsibility for what may happen when you run it. The worst thing I could image it doing is hang your machine and/or not restoring the video mode properly after exiting. You are on your own in any event.

What the TR3 Viewer Does / Doesn't

Our TR3 Viewer application allows you to load a TR2 and TR3 data files and view the level through a first person perspective. You can use Descent-like controls to move through the level and rotate to look at the level from different angles. Some graphic features have been implemented and can be toggled on and off. Features include textures, fog, culling and lighting. Some important features that don't work yet are alpha blending and the inclusion of items into the level. These may be implemented later. The performance is only good on high end machines with good 3D video cards that have inbuilt OpenGL hardware acceleration.

System Requirements / Recommendations

Hardware

You need high end Pentium or a good clone. It may run like a dog on a P90. A P450 is recommended.
Plenty of memory. It may run like a snail with 32MB. At least 128MB is recommended.
A top of the line 3D video card with hardware accelerated OpenGL. This is the biggest factor of all. With software OpenGL you can expect less than 1/4 FPS from the application regardless of your cpu and memory - not enough o's in slooooooooooooow! It has been tested on a Diamond Viper V550 (NVidia RIVA TNT) and the Diamond Monster 3D (3Dfx Voodoo) and performs well (40-60 FPS).
60-65KB hard disk space - if you can't swing this one you are in real trouble :-)

Software

Win95, Win98, WinNT 4.0. It runs on the Wintel platform. The TR3 Viewer is a 32 bit application.
OpenGL. You will need opengl32.dll and glu32.dll in your system directory. It has been tested on Microsoft's version 1.1 OpenGL files opengl32.dll (753,808 bytes) and glu32.dll (140,224 bytes). It has also been tested on 3Dfx's beta version 2.1 OpenGL from www.3dfx.com. Non OSR2 Win 95 users are referred to ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/mslfiles/opengl95.exe. You may need specific video driver DLL's depending on your video card and OS - this I couldn't tell you.
TR3 and/or TR2 data files. The TR3 Viewer application takes as input a TR2/3 data file (*.tr2 file). These will most likely be on your TR2/TR3 CDROM in directory X:\data for the levels and X:\cuts for the cut scenes where X is your CDROM drive letter.

Installation Instructions

Download the zipped TR3 Viewer application file tr3view.zip by clicking on the link below.
Unzip tr3view.zip to where ever you like. Three files are created - tr3view.exe, tr3view.cfg and tr3app.htm (this help page).
Optional. Edit the tr3view.cfg file to specify the default directory for TR2/3 data files and default TR2/3 data file to load. The tr3view.cfg file has instructions on how to do this.

Running our TR3 Viewer Application

Double Click the tr3view.exe from Windows Explorer. A dialog box should appear prompting you to select a *.tr2 Tomb Raider II/III data file to load. Select your data file and click O.K. You may have to select a different drive and directory if you did not set up the configuration file above.
The level should now appear. You may not have text if you are using a 3Dfx video card. I have included the keyboard and mouse controls below for those without text.
Zip around the level and enjoy the new views that you could never see through Lara's eyes (Lara-cam).

Keyboard Mouse Controls And Functions

We have used Descent-like movement/rotation controls. Basically the mouse is used for rotation and the arrow keys/numpad is used for movement. Note you must have Num Lock on for the numeric keypad to work.

Movement

Up/Down Arrow Keys: Moving straight ahead or backwards maintaining the current view angles
Left/Right Arrow Keys: Moving sideways to the left or right maintaining the current view angles
Numpad 1 / Numpad 0 (Num Lock must be on): Moving up or down maintaining the current view angles

Rotation

Mouse X direction: This is for changing your Heading - turning Left/Light. i.e. Rotation about the up axis maintaining current position
Mouse Y direction: This is for changing your Pitch - turning Up/Down. i.e. Rotation about the side axis maintaining current position
Left/Right Mouse buttons: This is for changing your Bank - turning sideways. i.e. Rotation about the forward axis maintaining current position

Functions/Options/Toggles

F1: Toggles on/off the Help at the top of the screen. Doesn't work for 3Dfx cards
Esc: Exits the Tr3 Viewer application
F6: Pops up a dialog box so you can select a new level to load. You MUST select a level to load or the application will terminate
1: Toggles Light/Shade. This option currently works for TR3 but not for TR2. Lighting slows the application marginally
2: Toggles Fog. This makes far away parts of the level fade out so you can't see further than a certain distance
3: Toggles Cull. Close polygons (walls) will be cut away so you can see more in front of you
4: Toggles Text. Turns on off the text at the bottom of the screen.
R: Resets the view to the start of the level - in case you get lost
9/0: Halve/Double the back plane distance. Parts of the level beyond the back plane are not rendered. Increasing the back plane allows you to see long distances but is quite costly due to the extra polygons that have to be rendered.
[/]: Decrease/Increase movement (translation) speed in the X, Y, Z directions
</>: Decreases/Increase Mouse X,Y rotation speed (heading and pitch)
-/+: Decrease/Increase Mouse Left/Right button rotation speed (bank)

If The TR3 Viewer Shows Text

If the TR3 Viewer shows text then the bottom line of the screen shows

FPS (frames per second)
Position coordinates (X,Y,Z) in TR3 data file units
Direction coordinates (H,P,B) in degrees

When you press the F1 key, then help will appear at the top of the screen showing in addition to the above

The current TR3 level loaded
The current video mode
The state on/off of the various toggles mentioned above

Trouble Shooting

I can't spend much time on this area unfortunately. If you get a clean error then the application should exit with a message box appearing with a message indicating the error. Let me know what it is and I may be able to help. If the application hangs then there is not much I can suggest.

Uninstallation Notes

There are no registry entries or left over hidden files created by the application. Uninstallation is a simple matter.

Delete the three files tr3view.exe, tr3view.cfg and tr3app.htm.
Delete the tr3view.zip if you don't want to use it again.

Development History

You can look at some of the development history/status notes in the changelog.htm file.

Download TR3 Viewer (36 KB)

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