View Swat 3 maps in your browser

Ever wondered how the original Sierra developers made their Swat 3 maps? Now you can view these maps in your browser and see the methods they used.

You can spin the map around and zoom out. You can also go into a first person view and fly around the map. You have the ability to turn off/on point entities and geometric entities like portals, ramps, etc.

I think this will be an invaluable tool to learn how to make Swat 3 maps and only wished it was available in the golden years of the game.

One thing that I was shocked to see and I didn't know about was that the Sierra developers put portals over all the mirrors. The other item that I learned was that they used the "threatnode" entities to indicate where the AI officers should clear (I never used them in my maps and feel a little embarrassed).


Note: You may find that Chrome gives you a better FPS rate than Firefox but you will have to test it out for yourself. It requires a fair amount of horsepower so I would suggest you view this on your desktop computer or a fast laptop.

Swat 3 Webgl Map Viewer

Credits:

Alien Abducter gets full credit for figuring out how to get this all working and doing the initial hard work. He originally posted a link to Mission A in the Furryclan forums and then generously left the code on Github for all to use.

Noisyboy took the base code and tweaked and expanded upon it. He also fixed and expanded the Python exporter that allow us to export all of the maps. I was responsible for the HTML interface and CSS, helping migrate the code, exporting of all the textures and map files.

Also if you do use the program please tell us your opinions, bugs and or any features or ideas you might want us to add.. Thanks

Can we get a option under geometry to turn the sky box on and off. A suggestion would be to either to have it removed on checking a box, or if not possible have the textures replaced with something less distracting (black, blueprint paper etc). as it does not scale with zoom controls, it can annoy the eye.

Great work by the way, much appreciated.

Great suggestion. Will see if I can get NoisyBoy to work on it. He starts back to university tomorrow so he may be in a lazy mood and not get to it right away.

Update: Noisyboy added the skybox toggle. Originally we tried black and then we tried dark grey but both conflicted visually with the interface and/or map textures. We settled on a dark blue sky colour instead.

Reaper, you are using the first person view in the viewer also right? Just checking.

Thanks for that, looks a lot better.

i have used both the FP view and the outside. It is in the outside where I find it distracting. Was just getting an overview of the portals/triggers etc.

Ya, I figured it was the outside view that was bothering you in terms of the skybox.

I have been tempted to add a second page of maps and include some famous community made maps but never got around to it.