> > > Just out of interest, why did you not take up DMZ's offer of his voxel handling libraries that handle making the files, editing the files and viewing the files? The HVAeditors viewer is easily the best voxel viewer available and HVAedit itself contains the full library. I seem to recall him offering them. I have his source code that he sent me to pass on to someone on the WW boards who was looking into writing a new voxel editor.

> > Because it's C++? Using his (very advanced) code in Delphi is not-so-easy. Creating a good GUI in a C++ application is a lot harder than in Delphi, and tight integration between VXLSE Gui and the voxel code would make it a full rewrite.

> Just to demonstrate my programming ignorance...isn't it possible to compile his functions into some kind of resource that can be called by another program or does that still need them to be in the same language?

kind of yes, possible but not straightforward. His library might also need to be slightly redesigned to facilitate it.

Also, you are taking developments out of chronological order. I wrote the first voxel editor from scratch, then the new editor. When halfway through writing the second editor in object pascal, I started to convert it (i.e. rewrite it) in c++. DMZ looked over my c++ code and was very helpful and pointed out that a straight port of the code was not very elegant in C++ (my code was much more c-styled than c++, without streams etc) and he shared what he was writing. But I went back and finished the second editor.

Another aspect is that DMZ's library (IIRC) stores the voxels in compressed format (similar to the actual voxel file on disk) and this is very efficient for displaying the voxels. But it is less efficient to edit them, because each z-span needs to be reencoded when you add or remove a voxel. My voxel editors expand the voxel sections into an XYZ array and this takes a lot more RAM but speeds up editing and is easy to visualise.

Yet another aspect is that I wrote my code in the tool that I enjoyed using, and really I wrote it for Haydn and the general good of the whole community is just a side-effect.

Finally, DMZ's c++ code was way ahead of where I was at the time, and I learnt a lot from looking through it. I might be able to understand it now, but I certainly wasn't confident at that time! DMZ is a master coder, IMHO. I aren't.