The COG Factory

The Toolchain coming soon

Everything on this site was made by the tools below. They are not released yet: they live in a developers' workbench repository that carries vendored reference material, several gigabytes of captured output and a great many notes, and it has to be slimmed down and licence-checked before any of it can be handed out. That is a later phase, and it is a real one.

factory.py

the generator and the runner

Scaffolds a project, generates its content, mounts the shared game data by junction rather than copying 593 MB of it, launches the headless engine on it, packs the GOB, and re-shoots the set pieces as publishable frames. A project is an engine basefolder.

the harness

a libretro frontend that is not RetroArch

Headless by default with a real GL context. Scriptable and drivable over TCP: walk, warp, place a free camera, probe a sector or a surface, wait for a log line, screenshot, save state. It shares one file with the core — the public ABI header — and links no engine code.

jklib / geom / uvlib

the level libraries

JKL, COG, 3DO and MAT written from Python, with the UV, lighting and adjoin rules encoded as checks rather than as advice. Several of the findings on this site are bugs these caught in each other.

the SED bridge + MCP

authoring inside the real editor, by script

A DLL inside SED and an MCP server in front of it, so geometry can be carved, cloned and adjoined by an agent in the editor that the game's own levels were built in — and read back and checked after every step.

jkspec + cogarchive

the reference

One merged authoring spec built from two vendored references and the engine source, and an index of the 540 COGs that shipped with the retail game alongside 617 of SM Sith Lord's own — the scripts behind two decades of his levels and mods, not a scrape of other people's work. A question about a verb gets an answer with a citation, and half the citations are his.

Until then

The core itself is released and open — source, builds — and every level on this site is a free download that runs on a stock install of the game with no tooling at all.