I made an almost 1 to 1 port of
mdx-m3-viewer that was a desktop Java program instead of a JavaScript web program (these are different languages). I dumped this port inside of a LibGDX game engine container, and I combined this with UI components drawn using
LibGDX Scene 2D. What this means is that the
mdx-m3-viewer model instances in the scene can combine into a cohesive output that also contains a LibGDX library's
ExtendViewport with some LibGDX Scene2D stuff rendering to the same output GPU context. So there is literally an
mdx-m3-viewer Camera object, and all of its associated math, and also a LibGDX
Camera object.
So I know this is possible and it may be sort of similar to what you are doing, although it took
quite a bit of effort/expertise.
Here are some videos of the resulting program running:
In each of these videos, whether we are rendering some units and UI that are masquerading as if they were Warcraft III:
or units and UI that were masquerading as if they were some primordial version of WoW
or even something that has a bunch of Reforged models loaded and was trying to look a little bit like Reforged
... I can nevertheless assure you that all of the provided videos are recordings of this spinoff of
mdx-m3-viewer dumped into LibGDX game engine and not recordings of Warcraft III, nor of WoW. This starts to become apparent if we look at my render's minimap, which shows my own units in player color without coloring them white, does not have minimap controls such as ping or formation rank, etc. Similarly the toy WoW UI that I threw together is missing the correct targeting frames and a bunch of stuff isn't loading properly and the "Action Bar" doesn't do anything. Hence why in one of the videos I just disabled it entirely:
This technology was also copied from fhowtsohg's repo
to create the render systems on Retera Model Studio itself and so there are obviously similarities there, and that's an example of how you can dump the logic of the rendering into some crappy Java UI, although I would gather that might not be exactly what you're trying to accomplish. For my purposes, the actual code from Retera Model Studio was
unusable for the purpose of rendering many models simultaneously (as in the above videos) because it was a
very non-performance sensitive "bad" port of the
mdx-m3-viewer repo. And that inspired my "second" port of the viewer into the same language, which allowed me to build off of that and make this one that I mostly use for simulating game experiences for fun as a hobby.
The biggest challenge you're probably going to have is the issue of the
software and
what the computer is doing because although I can paste a somewhat interesting and prolific showcase above, and all of these
are derivative works of
mdx-m3-viewer, it is nevertheless the case that none of these solve the problem of
accurately converting Warcraft III assets to some other format.
Rather than
converting these programs are rendering directly. And so as an example of the kind of bugs that you might have, in one of my initial drafts of trying to use this in combination with LibGDX there was a problem where the
mdx-m3-viewer based GPU commands were leaving some OpenGL state (failing to clean it up) before then calling into the LibGDX Scene2D render pipeline to render the UI, and as a result
all fonts that rendered on the screen were exploded graphical visual errors instead of putting text on the screen. The error was that prior to calling into the font shader, the LibGDX stuff was assuming that other OpenGL function calls in the same program didn't leave behind stale OpenGL state.
If you go the other direction of a model
port where we try to parse the Warcraft III model and then
save it as a different model instead of using it as a basis for OpenGL calls, doing that often loses information because almost nobody has successfully documented everything that's
really going on in a Warcraft III model. The above visual renders are the result my eccentric devotion to MDX/MDL format for 20 years as a hobby rather than going and learning other technologies. I don't know how to use Blender, I don't know how to use Unity, I've never used Biturn, I don't recall ever using three.js, and lately I wasn't using Windows and as a result Ladik's MPQ editor didn't work here. But because I used to spend hours playing in Warcraft III World Editor and trying to get custom 3D models to load, and I would run into insane undocumented errors (such as models with two layers on one material that animate one layer and not the other, having issues with the animation of one bleeding into the other, such as maybe
here) and these gradually made me accustomed to understanding if I see a visual error when rendering a model outside of the original game what the likely misinterpretation of the data might be.
