Author Topic: Tile Group Viewer/toy  (Read 1990 times)

Offline Hooman

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Tile Group Viewer/toy
« on: September 17, 2009, 02:05:39 AM »
Here's the source, and a compiled exe of a VB project I wrote ages ago. It loads the tile sets from Outpost 2, and tile group information, and displays the tiles. You can also paste onto a test map below. You can either paste the entire group, or a single tile within the group (using the option buttons). It doesn't really do anything other than let you view the tiles, and play around with pasting some of them onto the scratch pad. It was never intended for external release, so the code is a little raw. It contains a lot of test code that is no longer active and such.

The main purpose of the project, was to sort the tile groups and attach meaningful information to them. You may notice the attribute section, which is empty, and never displays anything. It was never finished. The idea was, sort the tile groups into the base terrain types (done), and then attach attribute information to the groups, such as whether the group was meant to be pasted as a whole (volcanoes), or as individual tiles (collection groups of small craters or rocks). I was also hoping to attach directionality information to some of the tiles/groups, such as tile set transition tiles, and ridge groups.

If you're running the app in the VB environment, you will see numbers appears in the debug window each time you select a tile group. These are the tile indexes of each of the tiles in that group. This is particularly useful if you need to write code to scan for tiles of a given type in game.


To run this, you'll need the tile set files (extracted from maps.vol), as well as the tile group information extracted from one of the .map files. I've included the extracted tile group information in the zip file (copy+paste the end of a .map file with a hex editor), but it will need to be moved to be found. It looks for the tile sets and tile group files in "\Sierra\Outpost2\maps\". You'll need to extract/move files there to run the program. (Hardcoded path, yeah I know, but like I said, it was never intended for external use).