Map Utility Beta Documentation
by C.A. Flinchbaugh

Questions,comments,problems: email: Amflin@aol.com


USING MAP UTILITY

This is first version of the MapUtility program that I began coding July 1999 and finished in September 1999.  It is fairly streamlined, with not too many bells & whistles and not many functions, but it is good at converting game map formats.

Using it is fairly straightfoward.  Right now there are two main operations the program does... you can "Open" a map file or "Save As" a map file.  Other operations like "New" and "Print" are displayed in the menu but are not implemented - yet.

You can load any map format and save any map format in any order... it doesn't matter.  You can resize maps from the same game if you want.  When you "Save As" you are prompted to enter a horizontal and vertical size for the output map.  It tells you what constitutes a legal size for that game map and won't save an illegal sized map.



SUPPORTED FILE FORMATS

There are currently four types of files that can be loaded or saved.  Civilization II maps, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri maps, Railroad Tycoon II maps and PCX files.  The latter, PCX files are a graphics format like .JPG or .GIF and deserve some extra mention.  Currently, MapUtility doesn't support .PCX files being saved... future versions will...

The accepted format of PCX files is 256-color palette,  with greyscale colors.  Pure black (RGB=0,0,0) is ocean, and pure white (RGB=255,255,255) is the highest mountain.  Needless to say, most elevations only a little above sea level, say like 50 meters, will be extremely dark, almost black on the PCX bitmap.

There is a good government NOAA site with elevation maps of regions and continents all over the world.  They use a color palette (ColorElev.pal) that uses shades of green, yellow and brown for elevations... but the Greyel2.pal palette included in the zipfile can be used to replace the palette and make it into a compatible PCX file with MapUtility.  

You will probably need a semi-decent paint program to convert the NOAA files from .BMP or .GIF or whatever format into .PCX 256-color palette format, using the ColorElev.pal as the palette.  Then just replace the palette with the Greyelev palette.  It is not too difficult.  I'm certainly not a master at using paint programs but I was able to do it in only a few minutes the first time I tried.




A FEW WEBSITES FOR GETTING MAPS

	NOAA (graphic files of elevation maps of all over the world)
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/topo/globegal.shtml

	Civilization II
http://www.lilback.com/civilization
http://www.cyberaddiction.com
http://www.sidgames.com/civ/links.cfm
http://apolyton.net/civ2/

	Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
http://civilization.gamestats.com/smac


	Railroad Tycoon II
http://www.cyberrail.net/rt2

	General Site (have links for more than one game MapUtility supports)
http://www.sidgames.com

	My Website - which is not up yet but eventually will be up in late October to November 1999, so check from time to time.  When it is up I should be able to post maps useable in MapUtility.
http://members.aol.com/amflin/index.html


LIMITATIONS

Regarding the other file formats... Railroad Tycoon II maps are larger than SMAC or CivII maps, and therefore produce better results converting to SMAC & CivII, than from them.  (Converting from CivII maps to RRT2 maps, you end up with fairly obvious diamond-shaped squares of the same terrain type & elevation - something I make take care of in a future version with some sort of rounding and smoothing algorithms)

Currently, you can only save a Railroad Tycoon II map as a 500hX500v map.  This is because of problems I've had with generated maps of different sizes.  I hope to work this out eventually.  But you can OPEN a RRT2 map of any size, and then resize it bigger to 500x500 if you want.  Also, currently rivers will not save to a RRT2 map - yet.

A limitation regarding Alpha Centauri maps is that SMAC maps created using MapUtility and then edited in the SMAC map editor will lose a lot of their terrain types due to how SMAC handles arid, moist and rainy land types. (arid is desert, moist is plains and rainy is grassland)  But the rives and coastiles should be okay.  Forest and jungles will also be preseved.  The only thing you have to watch is a mountain range along the coast that is right across from another coast.  (For example Morocco's mountains right across the water from Spain.) No limitation of course in loading a SMAC map and saving as something else.


FUTURE PLANS

I plan to incorporate graphics into MapUtility so the map is displayed when you load it.  Also want to be able to print maps, and create from scratch and edit maps.  

Also... I will have an option that will allow you to recalculate hills & mountains squares by changing the values that sets a given elevation to be a mountain or hill.  This comes into play when converting a map like Railroad Tycoon II into something like CivII.  Different maps in RRT2 have different degrees of elevation and won't always produce accurate hills & mountains in CivII.  Going from RRT2 to CivII, I made maps of Korea & Britain... Korea was chock full of hills but Britain had hardly any even in Scotland and Wales.  This won't matter once I allow the user to adjust the elevation settings.

I also plan on being able to load and save green/yellow/brown elevation maps like on the NOAA site.

Game formats I hope to incorporate in the future, among others are "Age of Empires", "Civilization: Call to Power", "Age of Kings" and "Imperialism II".

Also adding more error checking routines and verifying files built in.  This first little version of the program will give basic error messages, like out of memory, or bad files, bad  map dimensions, etc...  Its not airtight yet in the sense that NOTHING you can do will make it crash...  But it won't write to the harddrive to save any data or maps unless a load is successful, so you shouldn't have any funny stuff happen on your harddrive, even IF you make it crash, which it shouldn't in the first place if you use valid game maps.

Also plan to add the capacity for using Starting locations, Civilization II save & scenario files, and cities.  (e.g. you can load a Railroad Tycoon II map with cities on it and save it as a Civilization II scenario file with the same cities on it, or in the case of "AOE", Town Centers in those spots.)

Many other ideas also planned for future versions of MapUtility...



REGISTRATION

Registering is simple.  To register, send $5 cash or check and your name and email address  to
C.A. Flinchbaugh
4 Fallridge Court Apt B
Baltimore, MD  21244

Registration means you will be emailed the advanced versions as they are programmed and updates also...  Also any ideas you have or bugs that might exist will get first priority.