Speaking of TFL

[Olong2]

Went looking through an old folder of TFL plug-ins, and I was struck by some of these maps that never really "made it" for one reason or another.

One such map was "Green Eggs and Hamlets". I don't know about anyone else here, but that map provided myself and my friends *endless* amazing games: The variations of terrain, the housing obstacles, the interesting passability issues, and the general layout made for *such* great (and sometimes lengthy) games, with lots of cool stories.

Not sure how maps like that kind of fell between the cracks. No doubt from all the "Desert" and "Grave" rank whores who could never be bothered to do anything outside their comfort zones.

C'est la vie.

Anyone else got an "Unloved Fave"?

[Jon God]

Went looking through an old folder of TFL plug-ins, and I was struck by some of these maps that never really "made it" for one reason or another.

One such map was "Green Eggs and Hamlets". I don't know about anyone else here, but that map provided myself and my friends *endless* amazing games: The variations of terrain, the housing obstacles, the interesting passability issues, and the general layout made for *such* great (and sometimes lengthy) games, with lots of cool stories.

Not sure how maps like that kind of fell between the cracks. No doubt from all the "Desert" and "Grave" rank whores who could never be bothered to do anything outside their comfort zones.

C'est la vie.

Anyone else got an "Unloved Fave"?

Harbour and Combat, great WWII maps.

As for regular maps, hmm.. All the PRASP maps?

I'm Jon God, and I approve this message.

[luckylegs10]

I agree someone should put together a map pack of some good third party maps.

[vinylrake]

If you are looking for ffa/team maps you can't beat Baak's 3 Battleplan BigZip collections

http://www.orderofhpak.com/BattlePlan.php

[Olong2]

I was really talking about TFL maps, specifically. So many of those seem to have been overlooked and then forgotten.

I think one of the best Myth maps ever made---for any version of the game---was a TFL map called "Vessel". Beautiful to look at, innovative, and some very violent battles with unexpected turns. Would be lovely to see that in a modern format.

[iron]

Years back I actually started work on a 2nd TFL map pack for Myth 2, but it fell in a hole because (a) TFL Loathing didn't work in Sheepshaver and (b) I lost interest...

Technology-wise if someone could export reliable heightmaps from the TFL meshes, recording the height settings so they could be imported the same way into Myth 2, then it'd be possible. Is there the will to do it, and would people play the maps when it was released?

[GodzFire]

Sounds like it's time to resurrect those TFL porting apps Iron and update them for OSX

[Jon God]

Years back I actually started work on a 2nd TFL map pack for Myth 2, but it fell in a hole because (a) TFL Loathing didn't work in Sheepshaver and (b) I lost interest...

Technology-wise if someone could export reliable heightmaps from the TFL meshes, recording the height settings so they could be imported the same way into Myth 2, then it'd be possible. Is there the will to do it, and would people play the maps when it was released?

I'd download and dtex them. Well, for sure at least the first one.

I'm Jon God, and I approve this message.

[iron]

Godz I have no idea what you're talking about.

Anyway, the difficulty was in reliably extracting all the info from the TFL mesh. The colormap etc wasn't a problem as Amber could load TFL collections & export the map, but I couldn't get TFL Loathing to work in Sheepshaver. It required Macsbug, which crashed Sheepshaver when anything that used it tried to load up - same thing with Vegas too.

Without TFL Loathing I couldn't reliably export the height map - there was a 3rd party tool to extract it, but no way to know the height settings importing it into Myth 2's Loathing. The couple maps I did work on - Sieve and Calling Ktulu - were obviously wrong when I imported units & trees using the mesh converter, half of them underground, half floating in the air. So a faithful port would need TFL Loathing or a better mesh converter that extracted the data directly from the mesh and whacked it into the Myth 2 mesh.

Sorry if I've lost people while rambling there. Short answer is I'd like to do it but I haven't time, haven't the energy, and sadly I doubt they'd be played anyway.

[GodzFire]

Too bad Oak couldn't be made to read and interact with M1 gor tags

*slowly shifts glance to Melekor*

[Olong2]

Have any of you on SheepShaver tried the OS9 version of "Textura" for TFL? It seems to easily export height maps, and all the other stuff, too. I believe it even allows level editing to some degree.

I know that it does do an excellent job exporting colormaps and shadow maps, and is as easy to use as Loathing for Myth 2, in that regard.

[iron]

I had all the old TFL tools on my Sheepshaver install, probably used that - if not then it was Bartok or MythTech or something similar

They all used to be hosted here: http://www.udogs.net/home/gfa/mapediting/index.html but now the links are dead.

Anyway, the problem wasn't getting the height map out - I could get one ok. The problem was that Loathing is very sensitive when it comes to deciding how far to raise the mesh for white pixels, how far to drop it for black ones, and everything inbetween.

In Loathing you can choose Edit Range to set the upper and lower bounds in "world units". So if you could use TFL Loathing, you'd set the range at something large such as -5 & 5, then export it. If there's no black holes on the top of hills then you know the range encompasses all the terrain variations. Export it, then in the Myth 2 Loathing you set the range to double what you used in TFL Loathing, eg -10 & 10, as the world unit size is half TFL's in Myth 2. Import the image and it should all be exactly as it was in TFL.

When I got the displacement map from some other 3rd party tool I had no way of knowing what the height & depth range should be. Therefore when I imported it into Myth 2, things were off kilter. Either a bit too much terrain variation in heights or not enough, and it was near-impossible to get it right.

I hope that makes sense

[vinylrake]

I still have an OS 9 mac, so if anyone has genuine interest in converting TFL maps to SB I'd be willing to export some TFL maps. Pretty sure I have all the tools too.

[GodzFire]

And I have every Myth tool that was ever created (seriously), so just name which one is needed and I can get it.

[vinylrake]

True, a more accurate version of my comment would be "Thanks to Godzfire's sharing, I am pretty sure I have all the tools too"