tabtop should become a one-to-one adaption of the "Lord of the Rings table top game" by "Games Workshop" for the PC. Therefore the round based rules of the original game should be realized. One could manage its armies and play against other human players over the internet.
The technical requirements of its simple 3D engine were targeted at low end consumer PCs. New Maps were created using the ingame editor which allowed easy terrain heightmap modelling and texturing. Finally, maps could be transferred to other players over the network, even while editing.
I only worked three to four months on this project, so it never got finished. But it was a good opportunity to see how far I can get in such a small amount of time.
The Mole 3D engine was named after its predecessor but, apart from that, had nothing to do with it.
Maps were now created with MoleEd, the map editor for Mole 3D. It featured a brush system (for structural objects) like that in Q3Radiant (Quake 3), a shader editor (actually a material editor) and many manipulation / transformation tools.
Lighting information was stored using lightmaps. This was done by a separate tool that also precomputed visibility information. On the whole one could say that the engine and its editor were very Quake-like.
Right after releasing Western Quakeł Beta 2.0, which was the last version I have been part of as a developer, I began to learn developing OpenGL applications.
My first project was planned to be a small game where one would have to run around as a mole attacking big insects with a shovel. Later on the moles were replaced by pirates and the map became an island. Although the game was never really finished, it served as a great opportunity to learn the basic principles of 3d graphics programming and experimenting with it.
The main components of the engine were the model format and the terrain system. The model format was very similar to the .md3 format of Quake 3, while the terrain system was procedurally generated using random paths, which then would define the space the players were able to move in.