I've been working for a long time on a utility to handle most of the task needed to edit Falcon's terrain system. Finally I've reached a stable enough version for a public release, through the beta testing we did back in EMF group.
The need for this program came from the idea to edit the terrain tiles directly as a whole map and not one segment at a time. It started as a small test utility for exchanging parts of terrain (through importing/exporting) for EMF, and because of the complexity of the terrain system in Falcon, I didn't expect at first to public release it (that's why the current version now is 3.1.2). I kept adding features, until we reached current version, which can handle a lot of stuff.
Firstly, let me clear something: This tool will only work with Open Falcon (fully tested) and possibly Free Falcon (not tested but in theory it should).
The reason will be very obvious once you try it. It doesn't load pcx tiles (texture.zip) at all. All the functions that includes tile manipulation (even fartiles) require only DDS tiles.
The things you can do with the program in general are:
- Edit the L2 terrain file (tiling, elevation, import/export chunks of it, complicated search function for a tile etc).
- Edit the elevation data of L0 file (or keep it as raw data - filetype ELV - which is handy for MakeTerrain program [see below]).
- Display all sort of additional data on top of you L2 file (Areas, Paths, TDFs).
- Fully edit texture.bin file (complete edit of sets, tiles, areas, paths).
- Fully edit theater.map file.
- Create fartiles.pal file.
- Create THR file.
- Display and edit the objectives in a tac file.
- Create a TGA image of the existing PAL offset data in your L2 and the palette of theater.map.
- Create a new TGA image of what the palette of theater.map should be (according to your tiling) and what the L2 PAL offset should be (can be used by MakeTerrain as well).
- 3d view of the terrain.
- Automatic online update of the program.
Two other command line utilities are shipped with TerrainEditor. The names are ModTerrain.exe and Maketerrain.exe. The first one is used for extracting data from terrain files, save it in a file, editing them and putting them back to the terrain. The second one is used for recreating the entire terrain from a couple of files. Both of them have a GUI built in TerrainEditor for better every day usage (because the command line is a bit complicated).
I've setup a site to hold the documentation for all the above utilities, and I strongly encourage you to go through it.
Here are the links for the documentation: http://docs.sakgiok.gr/manuals:home
Finally here the links for the program:
Primary: http://programs.sakgiok.gr/TerrainEdito ... _setup.zip
Mirror: http://rapidshare.com/files/417263572/T ... p.zip.html (The first link might not work, corrupted downloads were reported.)
The installer above is for the version 3.1.1. Since I discovered some minor bugs, I allready created version 3.1.2 which is available through autoupdate. You can do a manual update to v3.1.2 (after you install 3.1.1 - more info on the online documentation) and the link for the update is: http://programs.sakgiok.gr/TerrainEdito ... 3.1.2.zupd
Of course the program is freeware, and if you want to host it on any site, please feel free to. This is the only site I'm doing this announcement (I don't know so many sites with active Falcon developers). If you think it might be useful to somebody else, please spread the word.
Sorry for the lengthy post. For any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact me.