The Future of H&D2 Editing is Here

Writing this post on behalf of FlashX

Hello HD2 community, you probably haven't heard of me yet...
I wish happy New Year to everyone...
Today I am bringing good news to all Hidden & Dangerous 2 modders...

LS3D Editor

I want to announce that I'm working on Hidden & Dangerous 2 modding tools for some time now, but the most important tool is probably the first properly displaying 3D mission editor, which uses native game formats. The editor will bring not only the possibility to place objects in the mission (3D models in .4ds, lights, sounds, etc.) but also:

⚹ creating actors and setting up their equipment
⚹ creating special items such as weapons, ammo, Enigma, gold bars
⚹ creating collisions
⚹ creating checkpoints (navigation for AI)
⚹ creating effects (smoke, fire, leaves)
⚹ usage of morph animations from vertanim library
⚹ and probably a lot of other things ...

What may not be possible in the future:

⚹ lightmap generation (quite demanding study)
⚹ properly creation of volumetric lights (large amount of unknown values, at most it will be possible to set the position and some basic values)

Release date – probably around November 2020

The current editor shows contents of scene.4ds and scene2.bin and allows basic object transformations, so it's obvious that the editor needs a lot of work ... And by the way, programming 3D engines is quite demanding...
It is also part of my high school graduation project, so it is in my own interest to finish it...

Blender addon

Another new tool I'm working on is import/export addon for Blender (free and open source 3D creation suite), in which it will be possible to prepare 3D models (probably also animations in the future). I know there is already a plugin for 3DS Max, but I don't like this program so much... It costs a lot of money and I guess that most of the modders who use it, they use it illegally...

My Blender addon not only allows editing the model, but also provides more management options of the entire model and allows you to set up special settings, like culling settings, dynamic shadows settings, environment map settings (reflection textures), animated map settings (water textures), morphed meshes editing (flags, palms, water, facial expressions) and much more...

I am also planning to create an extension for Visual Studio Code that will support the syntax highlighting of the Hidden & Dangerous 2 scripting language ...

I want to make Hidden & Dangerous 2 modding as easy as possible, but I also want to provide as many editing options as possible...

I hope that my announcement was not so exhaustive...

Hardware and system requirements:

- graphics card with OpenGL 3.3 and higher
- .NET Framework 4.8 and higher

If there's anything you would like to know, don't hesitate to ask.

Here I attach some screenshots...