q3dv, a landscape generator and viewer
Last updated: 8 December 2005 (version 0.1)
Licence and terms of use
q3dv is distributed in the hope that it will be found to be useful,
but comes with no warranty or guarantee of fitness for a particular
purpose. You may do what you like with q3dv, except that:
- You may not sell q3dv, ever.
- You may not remove any names from the credits.
- If you want to use part of q3dv as part of something
else, you must state that you have done so, with a link to its
webpage. Something like "Portions of qFoo were originally used
as part of q3dv"
will probably suffice.
- You may not add any further restrictions to what can be done
with q3dv.
About q3dv
First off, q3dv can turn this:
into this:
Description
q3dv is a program which generates heightmaps and displays them in
simulated 3D - "simulated" because a computer monitor is of course
two-dimensional. It is a replacement for my earlier "x3dview", which
nobody ever seemed to use.
q3dv is not meant to create amazing works of ray-traced art; for that
you need something like povray or
Bryce. Rather, I hope that it
will eventually form part of a full-featured and freely-available
landscape generator for use by people who need to generate landscapes
for role-playing games, novels, and the like. Such programs currently
tend to be either expensive or Window$-only, which isn't much use to a
Linux user like me.
Installation
q3dv is written in Python and uses the Qt toolkit from Trolltech. If
you're running Linux, you should already have Python and Qt, and you
may only have to install PyQT. Otherwise, you'll need to visit the
following websites:
The Official Python website
Trolltech's website
Riverbank Computing, for
PyQT
So far, q3dv has been tested on Fedora Core 4 with python 2.4.1, Qt
3.3.4, and PyQT 3.14.1. Please don't ask me questions about how to
install this software - if the instructions aren't on the websites, I
won't know what to do!
To install q3dv, download the zipped files into
a new directory (anywhere within your filesystem will do).
Running
From the command prompt, simply run python q3dv.py. Read the
file q3dv_doc.html for further instructions, and have fun.