TheaterMaker is a package of tools by Fred “BaldEagle” Balding.
Quick information for Fred “BaldEagle” Balding created programs.
Quick list for files in TheaterMaker-??.rar package:
The Object Placer & Tiler Utility is a multifunction program. The Object Placer functions currently places bridge objects automatically, generating a Tacedit compatible CSV (Comma Delimited Variables) file which can be imported into Tacedit. Tacedit export CSV files can be edited (selected objects exported or deleted) and reimported into Tacedit. The Tiler Utility scans the L2 terrain file to find road and river tiles which are not aligned or terminated. It also finds improper transitions between cover types (e.g., farm to forest). For each type of scan, a report is generated in CSV and/or text format.
A script-driven program which simplifies the L2 Level Of Detail file in order to lower the number of Fartile.raw tiles below the 2-bytes maximum (65,535) F4 can address. Or it can be used to lay incredible amount of tiles into terrain, making it auto tiling tool in case of 4-tile-sets. You can specify your own patterns of what tiles to use or you can lay the basic cover tiles. You can also tell LODFixer which areas of the map you want to process. This utility works on 64, 128 and 256 segment maps. Cover types to choose from:
Ocean Cover Type
Forest Cover Type
Farm Cover Type
Makija Cover Type
Rock Cover Type
Mountain 1 Cover Type
Mountain 2 Cover Type
Valley Cover Type
This will pretty nicely auto tile your theater very fast. We can achieve very nice results when we load untiled map to terrainview, load river features an apply Auto Stuff → Compute Feature Tiles. Then we select File → Clear Features, and again we load features but this time road & city features. The the final Auto Stuff → Compute Feature Tiles. Now we have pretty nicely those important features tiled. Its time for LODFixer. By the default script you can get nice results on korean/Balkans type of terrain. Start it up, select your theater from the Theater menu (you need to add it to the .ini file first. Simply copy paste Korea for example and change the name with lat/long coords for your theater). Load your L2 map from File → Open L2 File, wait for it to build terrain matrix. When the map is loaded, choose what cover types you wish to use and which areas you want them to be applied. LODFixer defaults to whole map which is:
Map Work Area
Start at Map X coordinate: 0
Start at Map Y coordinate: 0
End at Map X coordinate: 1023
End at Map Y coordinate: 1023
Sector Work Area
Start at Sect X coordinate: 0
Start at Sect Y coordinate: 63
End at Sect X coordinate: 63
End at Sect Y coordinate: 0
Please note that the numbers are always one short from the actual map sizes because the count begins from 0, so 64 segments is 63. When you are ready to autotile, just click the 4-Tile Replace. After the process is complete (amount of time depends how detailed script you have created), select File → Save L2 file. You should save it to “theater.l2”. The scripts are pretty complicated first and we are hoping to get some nice ones done, if you have made good scripts, please let us know.
WitchFix is a utility that converts .wch/idx file to a text file that you can edit. It then converts the edited text file back to a .wch/idx. The pointers in the .idx file are adjusted to point to all the strings, original and edited/added strings.
This program (TVC) converts the terrainview tile coordinates into tacedit coordinates and the other way around. For example you can look airbase location from tacedit, enter the coordinates into TVC and it tells you which terrainview segment and which tile has the exact spot of the airbase.
This will make your day on texture.bin editing. You can draw different types of data into the texture's records (texture.bin) itself like where there is road, river, water and rough areas in the texture. The other useful and very critical part of theaters are the THR file creation, its created from reading the different types of tiles from theater.L2 file, so you need to have correct texture.bin set up before you get real picture of your terrain. Create the THR file only after your tiling has been completed. Theater.map editing does not require anything configured like theater or loading of L2/texture.bin, you just start to edit. Most useful its for changing the theater sizes and Flags. Flags are very important when we change the terrain 2 byte to 4 byte and theater size, many things are depending on the correct flag in here. This is the description of the flag meaning:
0 = 2 byte
1 = 4 byte
2 = 128 theater 2 byte
3 = 128 theater 4 byte
As 1 + 2 = 3, 3 = 128 theater + 4 byte
As 0 + 2 = 2, 2 = 128 theater + 2 byte\\ Use this util also to create MEA file (MEA = Minimum Enroute Altitude) for your terrain, its used for planning and height checks. Also Tacedit's recalculate radars option reads this file to see the terrain.
These great programs are made by Dr. Fred “BaldEagle” Balding, who will be monitoring our forum (here) from time to time, so if you have some problem with any of these utils please post a message to the forums and not sent email to Dr. Balding. This way we can save his valuable time to build us even better utilities :)
The staff off PMC Tactical will be helping you out too. Be noticed that this page is no way complete, we will add more detailed info… soon :)
