any progress in editing *.pak and *.cam?

[Guest]

Still collect basic data for campaign concept and event list.
wonder if any progress/tool/tips to edit *.Pak and *.cam.

BTW, any chance to export tiled Falkland theater to a larger 20x20 DEM map?
I prefer to make a campaign workable in 10x10 first, yet better ask it in advance.

[Guest]

I've done nothing for campaign and nothing is heard from anyone else either.

10 by 10 map conversion to 20 by 20... well I was talking to Julian Onions and he told me that it will be possible. I think there is no such script/program to convert it to larger size yet.

There is still the problem with larger map and TE map/object locations as the resolution is not only the 1024 x 1024. I hope this issue will be resolved soon.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Snake Man]

Here is something for the PAK map. I'm about to fix Vietnam PAK image soon so it would be nice to have the most efficient way to do that.

This following is what I found on my doc textfiles pile. The first part is from f4terrain knowledge base and my conversation with Schumi.

---


<<How>>

by Manfred, F4terrain team.

=============================================
Q: It sounds a bit hard to understand PAK file, maybe we can have a tool?
A:Well, unfortunately there is not yet a tool for creating the PAK maps.

Meanwhile you can use PaintShop Pro to create the "blink areas" of the PAK map.

In short (well, got rather long ):

As the major cities describe the PAK area with their parent links, you first have
to change the tac file so that only the cities you want to become PAK defining
cities have a priority above 80. Using the "Show Primary" option of TacEdit helps
to see which cities hit that condition at the moment. The exact priority you want
to have later isn't necessary here, they must be just above 80. This can be to a
maximum of 49 cities, and thus 49 PAK areas. Create links between the objectives.
Create parent links, starting from the major city to all other cities and other
objectives according to the layout you want the PAK areas to have. At first the
other big cities get parent links to the major city. The towns get links to the
other cities and the villages to the towns. This rule is not to be seen as being
fixed. If there's a village directly adjacent to the major city, it will have the
major city as parent objective nevertheless... Remember that objects that are named
"Nowhere" will get the name of it's parent. So if a bridge or factory named "Nowhere"
has Rome as parent, it will be called "Rome bridge/factory".


Export all objectives.


Load a korean .cam file and delete all objectives, units and squadrons. Change the
theater name and scenery name to e.g. balkans.

Save the new cam, quit TacEdit, reenter and load the .cam file.

Import your above saved objectives. Add a F-16 squad to an airbase. Save the campaign
file.

Go into F4, load the campaign, go into priority control.

Go to the PAK map and open the PAK area dropdown list.

Write up all cities and their respective PAK area number.

Quit F4.

Go back to TacEdit, open the campaign file, View the parent links, load a background
map of the theater without any features, save this as bitmap (not yet implemented in
TacEdit, I asked Julian for that..).

Now you only need to load the bitmap in Paint Shop Pro or another Gfx prog.

You need to know or compare with TacEdit where your major cities are. If for example
Rome would be PAK area 5, then the whole area that contains objectives that have
Parent links that go out from Rome has to be filled with color number 5. For example,
Beograd would be PAK area 31, then the whole area that contains objectives that have
Parent links that go out from Beograd will get color number 31, and so on.

The ocean gets the color number 0.

When this work is finished, resize the picture to 256*256 pixels and save it in raw
format, RGB ordered.

This way you'll get exactly the file F4 needs for the flashing fields in PAK area view.

I don't think all of this steps can be put into a tool...

Later,
Manfred
-------------

From: Manfred Schumi Nelles <mnelles>
Date: Tue Dec 19, 2000 9:00am
Subject: Re: How to make PAK maps ?


--- In f4terrain@egroups.com, falcon4@n... wrote:
> > Then the PAK layout has to be painted into a 256*256 targa
> > picture, where the color slot defines the PAK area (so if you
> > paint with the color in color position 5, you'll paint the PAK
> > area 5)
>
> I'm not sure I understood this color position thing, can you
> further explain please (I mean, isnt all the pak areas colored
> white in the korea?).

Well, Seould and P'Yongyang isn't very white in my version .

The colors are given to the map by Falcon 4, not the map
raw "picture" itself.

A 8-bit raw image doesn't contain color information, it only contains
the color slot each pixel "uses". So for a normal raw file you always
need a color palette. If a "05" is found in the raw file information,
then the program looks in the color palette which color is in slot 05
and paints this pixel with that color. When you change the color
palette, the colors of the picture itself, although the raw data is
the same, will also change !

Falcon assigns PAK numbers with increasing ID# to cities that have a
priority above 80.

So in Balkans Tirane is PAK 1, Ioannina is PAK 2 and so on.

The parent links should be the same as the desired PAK layout is
wanted to be, starting with the "main city" (Tirane, Ioannina...) out
to all other objects in the PAK area.

For the balkans.pak I use "View All Objects" in TacEdit, and load the
background map without any terrain features, only the map.

Then I magnify the map so that the PAK layout derived from the parent
links can be easily seen. I took screenshots of each area from the
balkans and composed them to one big picture.

Then I edited the palette of the big picture and added as many colors
as I need for all PAK's to be painted.

Then I use the color that is at position 1 in the palette (the
palette starts with position 0!) as fore- and background color and
used PaintShopPro Point-to-Point line tool to paint the borders of
the Tirane PAK.

This procedure is done with each other PAK area, using the
appropriate color.

That's all (well, it's much work though... ).

> When I have created this 256x256 .raw Order RGB image, what next?
> where will this .raw be placed?

It will be renamed to balkans.pak, vietnam.pak or whatever..

Later,
Manfred
---

Post here if you have updated information or neat tricks to produce good quality PAK image.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Snake Man]

I just created my first fully working PAK map, looks fine and it actually helped the campaign to run more smoothly. Very nice.

Hope to put somesort of PAK tutorial online in near future.

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Snake Man]

We definitely need a quick way of producing the PAK display from Tacedit as image file. Its pain in the butt to create four different screenshots of the tacedit screen and then paste them together.

Hmm wonder if 1280x1024 desktop resolution would fit tacedit fully into the screen...

Any suggestions?

PMC TFW
Snake Man

[Widowmaker]

bump