I've been trying to figure out how the ETW maps works but I'm finding it difficult to progress further, so I decided to post everything I've found out to see if someone else can figure out the rest of this.
Everything I've found is explained in more detail here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...272139&page=19
Below is a summary.
In the regions.esf I noticed that many of the coordinates showing where various regions were located on the ETW's map contained negative coordinates. As ETW cannot have regions that are not on the map I realised that the zero point must be in the centre of the map, and that the negative coordinates represented left or down from the centre, while the positive coordinates represented right or up from the centre. This is demonstrated on the map below (made from the campaign_detail_mask.dds).
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
While I don't know why CA choose to use this method I believe that it may be related to latitude and longitude, as their respective zero points are near to ETW's zero point.
Thought the exact area of the map is unknown as the Pacific Ocean region covers an area 2560 by 1131, it is highly likely that the map is 2560 by 1280. To test whether this was correct I enlarged the 2048 x 1024 campaign_detail_mask.dds to 2560 by 1280, resized the lookup.tga files to be the size of the theatres as listed in the regions.esf, and put on them on the enlarged campaign_detail_mask.dds at the coordinates listed in the regions.esf. As shown on the map below shows these theatres fit these coordinates perfectly.
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Each region is made up of one of more areas, which are used to tell ETW which islands belongs to which region and when two regions overlap they tell ETW which cities belong to which region. After adding several areas to the above map I found that the areas had a large degree of overlap, which would prevent them having the precise borders that can be observed in ETW. So there must be another entry which tells ETW what shape the borders should be.
The shape of the borders may be related the connectivity in the regions.esf or the 'land.rigid_mesh'.
While checking the regions mentioned in the regions.esf I wondered whether CA had made a world map but had hidden some of the unplayable regions. To test this I edited the coordinates of the India theatre so that I could travel beyond the wooden border. I found that to the right of the Indonesia region there was a Chinese Empire region and a South Chinese Sea. This means that ETW's map contains may additional regions that are not visible without modding.
2010 Updates
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
2011 Updates
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
2012 Updates
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
UPDATE 6th May 2013
I have used the official tools to move a farm in TWS2. I have posted all the changes between the vanilla version of the pathfinding and my modified version here:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...1#post12820027
Summary
1) ETW's full map 2684354560 by 1342177280. This map is -1342177280 to 1342177280 along the X axis (left to right) and -671088640 to 671088640 along the Y axis (bottom to top).
2) ETW's has a smaller map that's 2560 by 1280. This map is -1280 to 1280 along the X axis (left to right) and -640 to 640 along the Y axis (bottom to top).
3) All the coordinates on the smaller map are the full map's coordinates divided by 1048576 (2^20). The maximum length of a regions.esf coordinate is 7 digits (392.3914, 40.37837, etc). This means 1 pixel on the smaller map represent over 1 million pixels on the larger map.
4) ETW's map covers the whole world.
5) ETW's map is divided into 7 theatres, the 3 playable theatres are divided into several regions, each region is divided into 1 or more areas.
6) To prevent people seeing some unplayable regions CA has done the following:
6A) Restricted the the player so they can only move the cursor over a few parts of the world (the 7 theatres).
6B) Covered the unused regions with a black barrier to hide them. The black barrier and the theatre borders are created by the stpd and stpdi files in the supertexture.pack
7) Regions.esf determines where all the regions are; the region borders; whether a region is land or sea; which theatre the region belongs to; where all the rivers are located; how many areas each region has; where all the ports, towns, settlements, and resources are; and possibly which battle maps are used.
8) Startpos.esf determines what level all the buildings are at and their maximum level. The BDI_pool entries control how much an AI faction wants to do anything.
9) Pathfinding.esf tells ETW where units can walk, where ships can sail, and where all the settlements/towns/ports/resources are on the campaign map.
10) Poi.esf tells the AI how to get to different regions.
11) Sea_grids.esf tells ETW which regions each port can trade with and which seas it's connected to.
12) The heightmap.tga in the main.pack determines the height of the land on the campaign map. It has no effect on the sea.
13) The coastline_group and coastline_group.cs2 rigid_mesh files tell ETW how the waves should hit the coastlines.
14) The rigid_spline files tell ETW the shape of each region (their borders). However they are purely cosmetic.
15) ETW is constantly updating the BDI_pool entries, so anything added to ETW does not require new BDI_pool entries.
16) The stpd and stpi files form a giant image that is painted onto the ETW world.