What is PAK? Well it defines the Primary areas in your campaign. Primary areas are the cities that have objective priority 81 or above. Secondary cities are those that fell in the priority range of 16-80. These values are set in the campaign\<theater>\falcon4.aii file, so they are not necessarily the ones we mentioned here, but its the default on Korean campaign at least. The secondary cities gets parent link to the primary cities automatically (Objectives → Reset Parents). Total number of Primary cities or PAK's as we call them is 49.

Usually in a theater you'd want to have country capitals or otherwise historically important places to be PAK cities. Lets say few examples: Vietnam HANOI, DA NANG. ODS Baghdad, Kuwait. etc. These however can be what ever cities you choose, but it would be good idea to select city that is at least central area of that PAK you're creating. The whole range of the PAK (primary citys to secondary citys) will be the PAK coverage of which under the air/land operations are then concentrated in campaign.

You should have Terrainview load up country border (Load Terrain Features → Coasts tdf files) and also city features (Load Terrain Features → City tdf files). Now you have nice overall view of your theaters countries (borders, coasts TDF's marked in green) and cities (city TDF's marked in red). Use Operations → Save Bitmap. Now load the just saved bitmap into tacedit. As you now have the background map in view, select the biggest and/or most central parts of those big red chunks which are the populated city areas. Select now the View → Objectives → None, View → Objectives → Cities and then View → Primary. Now the screen should display big purple circle around all the primary cities but since you read this tutorial we assume there are none yet. Ok now double click some of the cities (city objectives on the big red populated city background) you want to became PAK's and edit their Prioritys to 81 or above. There should be those purple circles around the primary cities you just edited. The priority affects how cities are targetted by the Air Tasking, so in the 81-100 range, capital cities and other high value objectives should have larger (nearer to 100) priorities than lesser known cities.

After you have added enough of primary cities (remember, no more than 49) its time to set the parent links. Use the view parents button on the menu or View → Show Parent Links. Nothing should appear at this point, but now run the Objectives → Reset Parents operation and voila, lot of green lines should be displayed from the primary city into nearest surrounding secondary cities. These green lines indicate the PAK areas. You should add so many primary cities that the green parent link lines will not across other teams PAK areas.

Now that the Primary cities and parent links are set, go to the Campaign view and click Map. This is the Occupation Map of your theater where you need to adjust the size according to your theater's specifications. Tacedit will let you know what the correct map size is, after you have set it use the Colors menu Clear to wipe out any existing occupation paint. It would be good idea to save and exit at this point. After you have restarted tacedit select Insert → Build Occupation Map, it will ask you about the THR file which you should have made by now, then it starts to process it which takes quite some time in 128 theater. Be patient. When its done you have the team colors painted into the correct areas, there are some “lakes” or empty spots which are also displayed in the PAK itself… now I'm not sure but I have always touched up the occupation painting myself manually to paint over these small empty dots in here. However its not necessary for the PAKs to work.

Now as your occupation map have been painted its time to actually create the PAK file. Click on the Map View and then Insert → Build PAK Map. It takes few seconds to create that and it will be displayed for you to see. If it looks satisfactory select File → Save PakMap and save the file into you campaign\<theater> dir under the <theater>.pak filename. Now would be good idea to restart tacedit.

Now in the Map View select View → View Objectives → None and View → View Units → None. This will display simply empty screen for you, good. Now select View → Show PAK Map and it asks you for the <theater>.pak file which you just saved into campaign\<theater> directory. When you got your brand new pak map displayed in the screen, select File → Save Bitmap to save it, use any name you wish but remember to add the ending “.bmp” to it, in this tutorial we are simply calling it “pak.bmp”. Also be advised that in Win95/Win98 if you zoom the view too much it will crash, this happens any time when you have PAK map, relief map or background bitmap loaded. Windows 2000/XP don't have this limitation anymore so its suggested not to zoom in win9x or use win2ky2ky or xp.

Now use your favorite paint program and open the pak.bmp where you see the overall land usage of your theater with the PAK's marked with bluish colors. The image should be 16bit (16million colors) when you choose the color palette 251,0,248 and fill all the slots with this color. Leave the border line black 0,0,0 colors untouched. Resize the image to 256×256 resolution if you are using 64 theater or if you have large 128 theater then use 512×512 resolution. Now flip the image vertically and save it under the PAK_REGION_OVERLAY.tga and PAK_OUTLINE_OVERLAY.tga filenames. Also you need to make the KOREA_256.tga according to the theater size, 256×256 for 64 and 512×512 for 128 theaters. The korea_256.tga is only 256 colors image.

Now unpack the intel.idx/intel.rsc with procidx1.pl perl script using the command ./procidx1.pl index.idx and then overwrite the existing TGA's from that intel file with your newly created PAK tga's. When you are ready, just pack it up again with command ./irc2res1.pl index.irc take note about the ending “.irc” here. The new intel.idx/intel.rsc files will be placed to the same directory as earlier, which is art<theatername>\art\resource directory.