UTILITY: Map Making Utility and Save Viewer

[Kal-el]

Maybe I'm slow

Or did you mean the small pic in the retirement screen? Just thought of that now. That may work.

[LookANinja]

Re: Maybe I'm slow

Originally posted by DJensen
Or did you mean the small pic in the retirement screen? Just thought of that now. That may work.

I meant you can just load in your .bic file in the BMPToBIC Utility. And take the screen shot from there. It really is quite simple to convert it to the bitmap, and thats why I didn't add the functionality into the program itself to begin with. However, I may add it in when I get around to finishing the next version.

Thanks for the comments, glad I could be of help.

[DaddyHolby]

You are really going for that Sixth star aren't you.

[LookANinja]

Originally posted by DaddyHolby
You are really going for that Sixth star aren't you.

Don't you have some work to do or something?

[DaddyHolby]

Work? What is that?

[Dr Strangelove]

Can this program be used to edit maps made by the Civ 3 editor? One of the major problems with the current Civ 3 editor is the inability to zoom out to see the big picture.

Can someone describe how to use this program to edit Civ 3 maps?

[LoD]

Dr Strangelove: This is only a conversion program. It changes .bmp files to .bic files (or extracts .bic maps from .sav or .bic files, but that's another case). So, to create maps using this tool, you also need any graphics editor. But don't worry, included is the relevant palette, so creating a new map is a breeze.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by LoD
Dr Strangelove: This is only a conversion program. It changes .bmp files to .bic files (or extracts .bic maps from .sav or .bic files, but that's another case). So, to create maps using this tool, you also need any graphics editor. But don't worry, included is the relevant palette, so creating a new map is a breeze.

What I'd like to do is take maps created by the Civ 3 editor and alter them to my own liking. Can this be done using this program?

[LookANinja]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove



What I'd like to do is take maps created by the Civ 3 editor and alter them to my own liking. Can this be done using this program?

It depends, are you interested in preserving information such as resources, rivers, goody huts, etc. If so then no.

If you are just interested in getting the land masses along with the terrain types from a civ3edit map, then yes that is something you could do.

The idea behind the BMPToBIC utility is to allow you to create a map with terrain from an image, so that you don't have to use the very rudimentary tools in Civ3Edit to do the hard part. Then you load the output of the BMPToBIC utility into Civ3Edit to fine tune the map the way you want it.

Hope that helps

[Dr Strangelove]

I'm looking for a way around Civ3editor's lack of a zoom out feature. It's very difficult to create a map without the ability to see more of the world at a glance.

[LookANinja]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
I'm looking for a way around Civ3editor's lack of a zoom out feature. It's very difficult to create a map without the ability to see more of the world at a glance.

It is possible to get a mini-map view of an existing BIC file using the BMPtoBIC utility.

[rt41uk]

Great utility - i just have one question.

How does the BIC format actually work? I've tried using your map editor
to duplicate map detail that's already there (so that each Civ gets the same terrain), but if i copy and paste in a bmp file, things go wrong if i rotate anything. Provided you copy an even number of pixels in each direction, simple pasting seems to work, but rotating/reflecting doesn't.


Ideally i'm looking for a way to generate custom maps automatically, so was wondering how i could write the map information to bic files direct from a C program say.

Rob

[LookANinja]

Originally posted by rt41uk
Great utility - i just have one question.

How does the BIC format actually work? I've tried using your map editor
to duplicate map detail that's already there (so that each Civ gets the same terrain), but if i copy and paste in a bmp file, things go wrong if i rotate anything. Provided you copy an even number of pixels in each direction, simple pasting seems to work, but rotating/reflecting doesn't.


Ideally i'm looking for a way to generate custom maps automatically, so was wondering how i could write the map information to bic files direct from a C program say.

Rob

I would look in the BIC File Format Thread under the files section of this web site. The actual layout of the .bic format is described there. The thread was very helpful to me when writing the bmptobic utility.

[wervdon]

Suggestion to make people's lives easier Rather than have a preset pallette, why don't you actually load it from BMPToBIC.bmp.

Basically, just load the bmp into memory at startup and grab the color in each labelled box to use for that terrain type. (you could even expand it to have rows of 2 or 3 boxes, so multiple colors can reference the same terrain).

It'd make it easier on people, since then they could just use a flood fill operation in whatever editor they like before they convert to specify what colors they used for what, and I dont think it'd take you over half an hour to implement since its relatively easy compared to what you've already done.

[LookANinja]

Originally posted by wervdon
Suggestion to make people's lives easier Rather than have a preset pallette, why don't you actually load it from BMPToBIC.bmp.

Basically, just load the bmp into memory at startup and grab the color in each labelled box to use for that terrain type. (you could even expand it to have rows of 2 or 3 boxes, so multiple colors can reference the same terrain).

It'd make it easier on people, since then they could just use a flood fill operation in whatever editor they like before they convert to specify what colors they used for what, and I dont think it'd take you over half an hour to implement since its relatively easy compared to what you've already done.

Actually, what you describe is what happens. So, it is possible to change terrain types by just changing the color in the BMPToBIC.bmp box for that terrain type. However I would recommend making a backup of the original BMPToBIC.bmp before you do this, so that you can pull back in the original colors, because the palette is also used for all the map previews, etc.

Hope that helps.