New map - Aeolian Islands

[AtlasMapper]

21 hours ago, sanderd17 said:

a map should always be square

Ouch.. This is an issue.. I planned to remove just an area and resize as a non-square map. Ok so it is useless in this example.

Ok, is it necessary to use python or any script to access the pmp data ? Is there any way to uncompile the pmp file to get some human-readable format and access the data this way (or am I dreaming) ? Especially in this case, for just a small modification on one map (I understand the need of setting a script to batch process lots of map to allow compatibility between two game versions). It might be useful for later projects too.

[sanderd17]

The map format is binary, so unless you want to edit it with a binary editor, you'll need to at least have a script to do some conversion.

[AtlasMapper]

Well I was expecting something different from this...

I imagined it would be something I could modify (quite) easily, like some game saves you can hack easily by find and replace some values in the binary file.. I tried this way to find the values corresponding to the map dimensions in the binary file, but there are nothing that looks like such a thing. There's a few ASCII numeric and text values, but not much. By the way, I don't understand the need of a script to edit the values. I have a binary editor that let me set up some kind of macro (this would be an editing script then, right ?), but if I can't find the values, it is useless.

Anyway, all of this is just to satisfy my curiosity, don't waste too much time to explain me all of this. I guess going in the depth of the .pmp file would require lot of knowledge. I had to try. Thanks.

[sanderd17]

The meaning of the different bytes are explained as comments in that script I linked. The first fixed number of bits are some metadata, then you get a huge block of terrain heights, and then a huge block of terrain textures. And I guess that's all.

[AtlasMapper]

So the final size of the map is just defined by the amount of [terrain hight] and [terrain texture] blocks ? And both should have the same size ?

[sanderd17]

No, the map size is encoded as the 12th to 15th byte in the file, but it should match the number of blocks.

[AtlasMapper]

Oh yeah lol now I understand:

# 4 bytes PSMP to start the file
# 4 bytes to encode the version of the file format
# 4 bytes a for file size (which shouldn't change)

so 12 bytes

# 4 bytes to encode the map size

so bytes 12-15

I interpreted the comments in another way. I think I will try to play with these bytes manually to see how it messes the map (on a trashable map copy obviously). Again, thanks for your patience and knowledge sharing!

[sanderd17]

Oh, and file size would also change in your case (if you resize the map). But perhaps you can only calculate it after transforming the map.