🔴 OPEN BUG: Arcade Moving Map

[Krishty]

TFXplorer currently displays the Red Sea map for Arcade a.k.a. Seaworld, which is wrong. There does not seem to be a moving map for Arcade as there is for Red Sea; there is no unknown 320,012 B file either.

But there is hope. LEV/ARCADE.LBM seems to contain a Seaworld map:

image.png (759 Bytes) Viewed 2011 times

Note that it seems to use the same format as EF2000’s moving maps. I.e. if we manage to get EF2000’s working, this bug will most likely be fixed as well.

As an additional reference: My code says for Seaworld

  // TODO: DKD mentioned “noname604”; investigate

Maybe that’s ARCADE.LBM, maybe not. I could also swear I saw an additional tileset in the unknown file set. All of that should be checked before I start working on it …

[mikew]

That LBM file is what I've been considering some sort of design file, from the which the terrain is built from and not much use for the moving map.

This is noname604:

noname604.PNG (118.68 KiB) Viewed 2006 times

This may be the correct source of the moving map data for 'Arcade' or it might not, and it's somewhat smaller than redse_.lbm used by the main game.
I'm not sure if there are any terrain files in 'Arcade' that are not used in 'Redsea', but probably the thing to do is to create a 'arcad_.map' by cross-referencing from 'redse_.map' etc.

I can't remember what I used to produce that EF2000 moving map for TFXplorer, but I have scripts somewhere that deal with this stuff I'm sure.

[Krishty]

Thank you for finding it! This file is definitely in the same format as REDSE_.LBM. The black lines are a special feature for smooth interpolation between tiles in the moving map.

Is it for Arcade? I don’t know.

It could also be from a beta version of the game.

Speculation: DID first used the “old” moving map format as in the EF2000 moving map and ARCADE.LBM in my first post. They built Arcade during this era, before Red Sea was ready. Red Sea was also built with such an “old” moving map format.

When they found it insufficient for ADF/TAW, they introduced the “new” tiled map format we see here. Now they already had a REDSEA.LBM file with the old map, so they generated the new one with the name REDSE_.LBM. They probably didn’t make one for Arcade because at this point during development, they didn’t use it any more.

[mikew]

I don't know. EF2000 already had a tiled map ready to go, but it never made it to the final game.
There was an EF2000 file 'noname255', that had the tiles, but I had to convert it to put those black lines in before I could use it in TFXplorer, and ended up with this:

ef_map.PNG (130.98 KiB) Viewed 2001 times

My theory is that they didn't use it because the map looks a bit repetitive:

mov2_s.png (446.54 KiB) Viewed 2001 times

But anyway, for 'Arcade', I've looked at some files from 2010 and I reckon I can produce appropriate moving map files in 'Redsea' format.

[Krishty]

WOW 😲

I didn’t know EF2000 had some kind of tiled map (even if just planned). Fantastic work!

[mikew]

I have a candidate moving map file, which I've called arcad_.map in the same format as redse_.map for the main game. I'm not sure how TFXplorer is detecting scenarios these days, so don't know how to implement it.

[Krishty]

1. open TFX\DIDtoUAW\DIDtoUAW F22 scenarios.cpp
2. at line ca. 1550, there is an array paths_tfx3Arcade
3. last two entries are for the moving map; change at will and see what happens!

[mikew]

That procedure works fine!
I just need to find out whether my map is upside-down or back-to-front.

arcmap.png (378.78 KiB) Viewed 1922 times

[Krishty]

Looks stunning 😍