Map editors

[taw]

Once map data gets out, what software will be able to edit it?

Give me programs and file formats I can put data in,
or all you'll get will be KML and Google Earth ;-)

[taw]

KML is no good for this amounts of data. I tried to load some big KML into Qgis and it just crashed.

Options people, I need options.

[The Hedge Knight]

What sort off programs do you need? Generic map editing programs? Image editors?

[taw]

Plain images are trivial. I have huge amounts of vector data for ETW campaign map that I need to turn into something editable.

[Primergy]

Hmm perhaps Microdem works.

http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pgu...m/microdem.htm

[The Hedge Knight]

Problem is it only works on 32 bit os though?

[Primergy]

I have windows 7 64x and it works for me fine....atleast the simple converting drm data in heightmaps for games.

[taw]

Height maps are the easy part as far as I can tell. What do RTW/M2TW modders use?

[The Hedge Knight]

Photoshop and gimp primarily.

.raw formats can be imported exported by many programs if its a grayscale image.

[taw]

Photoshop and gimp primarily.

.raw formats can be imported exported by many programs if its a grayscale image.

Wait, are you really saying all map data in RTW/M2TW is just pixels? No vector outlines, splines, quad trees and such?

[The Hedge Knight]

yeah it is pixels and txt files...


Infact rome uses about six file formats commonly...

.txt
.tga
.dds
.xml
.cas
.pak

[taw]

Well, in such case you can see why I'm having all these problems and why nobody figured it out earlier.
Campaign map in ETW is nothing like pixels and txt files. It's proper vector model, and not a simple one.

[The Hedge Knight]

Yeah...

The wide variety of obscure formats without converters is why people call etw and ntw unmoddable...

Would somthing like l3dt do it?
http://www.bundysoft.com/L3DT/

[taw]

Yeah...

The wide variety of obscure formats without converters is why people call etw and ntw unmoddable...

They're no longer obscure. Now what would converters convert them to?
I've been trying this and that, but none of what I found so far have been terribly promising.

[The Hedge Knight]

Well things like the model formats. We had one for infantry fairly fast but we only got one for rigidmodels (artillery and ships) a few weeks ago. Likewise with anims. We still lack one for ntw and there appears to be none comming any time soon.

Also the ridiculous esf files got people annoyed
And the luacs
And the layout scripts
And the unopenable tables with mysterious columns

Basicly there were until a few weeks ago a huge variety of unopenable uneditable formats... And there still are which has give empire and napoleon a reputation for not being 'properly moddable'.

[Primergy]

And there still are which has give empire and napoleon a reputation for not being 'properly moddable'.

And it seams it wont be "properly modable" for the majority of the people even if the map will finaly be cracked, since this thread points in the directory that you will need very special programs and knowlegde for creating new maps, atleast if you want to dont want to use the complete world map of empire.

[taw]

Well things like the model formats. We had one for infantry fairly fast but we only got one for rigidmodels (artillery and ships) a few weeks ago. Likewise with anims. We still lack one for ntw and there appears to be none comming any time soon.

Also the ridiculous esf files got people annoyed
And the luacs
And the layout scripts
And the unopenable tables with mysterious columns

Basicly there were until a few weeks ago a huge variety of unopenable uneditable formats... And there still are which has give empire and napoleon a reputation for not being 'properly moddable'.

TGA=always open
XML=always open
BIK=always open
CSV=always open
LOC = long open
DDS= long time
PACK = long time
ESF = now fully open
LUAC = it would take two days tops to fix luadec bugs
DB tables = fully open except one, which would take a few hours tops

None of them involved any effort on part of CA to make them difficult to mod,
they just never bothered to explain.

All data formats I've seen so far were just uint8/16/32, single precision floats, utf16le/ascii, 1/2/4 byte type tags, uint16/uint32 array length prefixes, uint32 segment end offsets, booleans as 0x00/0x01, and everything else encoded as obviously as possible.

DB tables were the only ones that required non-trivial code to analyze.

Am I the only one old enough to remember DOS and hex editors?

Which important format is still a big unknown?

[taw]

And it seams it wont be "properly modable" for the majority of the people even if the map will finaly be cracked, since this thread points in the directory that you will need very special programs and knowlegde for creating new maps, atleast if you want to dont want to use the complete world map of empire.

GIS is not as widely know as images and GIMP/Photoshop,
but it's not any more special than 3dmax or milkshape.
Googling for "geospatial" yields 29 million results.

I don't have any clue about either 3d modelling or GIS, that's why
I've been asking what you guys are using. I wouldn't even be here
if campaign AI didn't suck so hard, it is only by accident that I got
anywhere near maps ;-)

[Primergy]

Which important format is still a big unknown?

I would say the supertexture in the supertexture.pack and the farm_fields_tile_texture templates which are used to place the walls, hedges and buildings on the battlemaps.

but it's not any more special than 3dmax or milkshape.

Well, it took me 6 years to become a decent 3D modeler and texture "artist" (alteast i think so ) in Max.... so i hope GIS wont be that special ...but perhaps im only pretty slow.

[taw]

I would say the supertexture in the supertexture.pack and the farm_fields_tile_texture templates which are used to place the walls, hedges and buildings on the battlemaps.



Well, it took me 6 years to become a decent 3D modeler and texture "artist" (alteast i think so ) in Max.... so i hope GIS wont be that special ...but perhaps im only pretty slow.

.farm_template_tile is plain ESF

<esf magic='43982 0 1233251232'>
<node_types><node_type name='ROOT_FARM_TILE_TEMPLATE'/><node_type name='FARM_LIST'/>
<node_type name='FARM_DATA_ITEM_OWNER'/>
<node_type name='FARM_DATA_COLLECTION'/>
<node_type name='ID_LIST'/>
<node_type name='FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST'/>
<node_type name='FARM_DATA_ITEM'/>
<node_type name='FARM_DECAL_LIST'/>
<node_type name='FARM'/>
<node_type name='POSITIONED_WALL_HANDLE_LIST'/>
<node_type name='WALL_LIST_SECTION'/>
<node_type name='ROAD_HANDLE_LIST'/>
<node_type name='FARM_COLLISION'/>
<node_type name='WALL_LIST'/>
<node_type name='WALL'/>
<node_type name='ROAD_LIST'/>
<node_type name='ROAD'/>
<node_type name='WALL_POST_LIST'/>
<node_type name='WALL_POST'/>
<node_type name='EF_LINE_LIST'/>
<node_type name='EF_LINE_LIST_BLOCK'/>
<node_type name='EF_LINE'/>
<node_type name='FARM_TREE_LIST'/>
<node_type name='FARM_TREE'/>
</node_types>
<ROOT_FARM_TILE_TEMPLATE>
<ary_FARM_LIST version='1'>
<FARM_LIST version='1' >
<FARM_DATA_ITEM_OWNER version='2' ><s>field69</s><u>0</u><u>1</u>
<FARM_DATA_COLLECTION version='1' >
<ID_LIST version='1' ><u4a/></ID_LIST>
<ID_LIST version='1' ><u4a/></ID_LIST>
<ary_FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST version='1'>
<FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST version='1' >
<FARM_DATA_ITEM version='1' ><s>american_rural03</s><v2 x='453.651641845703' y='-121.325355529785'/>
<u2x>338</u2x><v2 x='1.0' y='1.0'/>
</FARM_DATA_ITEM>
</FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST>
</ary_FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST>
<ary_FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST version='1'>
<FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST version='1' >
<FARM_DATA_ITEM version='1' ><s>prop_field_cart</s><v2 x='642.912475585938' y='50.4002647399902'/>
<u2x>52829</u2x><v2 x='1.0' y='1.0'/>
</FARM_DATA_ITEM>
</FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST>
</ary_FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST>
<ary_FARM_DECAL_LIST version='1'/>
<ID_LIST version='1' ><u4a/></ID_LIST>
<ID_LIST version='1' ><u4a/></ID_LIST>
</FARM_DATA_COLLECTION>
<FARM_DATA_COLLECTION version='1' >
<ID_LIST version='1' ><u4a/></ID_LIST>
<ID_LIST version='1' ><u4a/></ID_LIST>
<ary_FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST version='1'/>
<ary_FARM_DATA_ITEM_LIST version='1'/>



.farm_fields_tile_texture is trivial container format, parts can be extracted with this:

data = STDIN.read
hcnt, = data.unpack("V")
ofs = data[4, 4 + hcnt*4].unpack("V*")
raise "FAIL" unless ofs[0] == 4*hcnt+8 and ofs[-1] == data.size # Sanity check
hcnt.times{|i|
part = data[ofs[i]...ofs[i+1]]
File.open("tmp-#{i}.xxx", "w"){|fh| fh.write part}
}

Now what the hell are these parts isn't immediately apparent, but if these are the big unknowns then we'll have ETW China mod before Christmas.