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Trickster Map Viewer/Editor

Initiate Mage
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great, thank you :)

[STRIKE]noob question: how do i run it?[/STRIKE]
Edit: found compiled binaries :)
 
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Initiate Mage
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I noticed that there's no feature to close maps once you're finished editing them. I wouldn't be surprised if this is in an extreme alpha state, but nonetheless it seems that some maps have issues--some won't open the tile sets, and when you have three maps open at once, the program will not open anymore.

Not a complaint, just a bug report. The Windows forms and already existing binaries are much appreciated on my end, though!
 
Initiate Mage
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In the latest version, just opening another map will close the existing tabs.
Some maps don't have tiles, so they don't show up in that case.
Oh, the binaries aren't the latest version? My bad! Let me see what I can do with the compiled version.
 
Initiate Mage
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Hello, sorry for necroposting a 2 year old thread, but i was looking for a way to extract full maps from the files, i understand that full map viewer was a planned feature of this tool, so i wanted to give a shot at trying to implement that myself.
i've already went ahead and dug a bit through the source code, fixed the tile display screen ,added a feature to export tiles, and i do have limited and general understanding of the .md3 .eff .bac and .tyl formats, but i do believe information about what tile has which bitmap is stored in the .Lyr files.
my plan is to use that data as an sprite atlas, and recreate the map files using the exported tiles, and the extracted images from the .bac .
so i wanted to ask if the OP or anyone here has any information on the .lyr format. i want to have a go at trying to implement that feature, but i have never reversed engineer a format like this.
 
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I was actually just working on this! Unfortunately, it's more work than you and I think :)

So, the first thing you should know is that the tiles are actually wrong in the currently uploaded version. I haven't had a chance to push a fixed version to Github yet. I believe you need to flip each tile bitmap on the X axis.

As for lyr, the file format seems to be quite simple. Some lyr files are compressed, but the TricksterMap repository should have a decompressor class that can handle them. At least, that's what I used for my map viewer tool.

I wrote some documentation just now based on the code I've written so far, and also with some help from a bit of old documentation by a few skilled Japanese developers. At this current moment, I'm not sure what some of the fields are. They mostly seem to be quite static, at least (mostly 0s). Here it is: View attachment lyr file format.txt

The dataGroupOffsets ignore the fact that the offsets are there. The data is (in bytes) [offset1, offset2], [offset2, 3], [3, 4], ...

I've been talking to a really cool Chinese dev about some things like water. Even he isn't quite sure how the water works. We get that its texture is obtained from another tile and repeated a few times, but the implementation of the "wave effect" that is applied onto the texture isn't that obvious. It seems that it might be a 3D object warped repeatedly to simulate a wave with a texture.

Some other things to look out for are also the "blend mode" and the effects. The blend mode is important for the shadows, where the shadow textures are essentially "blended" on top of the map at that given moment. The neon-colored things in the skill garden area of Megalopolis Square are seemingly rendered dynamically, as is the water. The lights in the center "walls" are also blended.

I plan to release the code I have soon, but I'm just not happy with the results I've gotten. I have some pretty devastating z-index issues that shouldn't even exist.

Finally, I mention "NORI animation" a few times in the documentation. I'd recommend looking into TO-Toolbox and TNT for information about that.

I don't know anything about the eff format at this time. .bac files are just renamed .nri files.

Please let me know how things go for you if you get anywhere!
 

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Initiate Mage
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thank you for your response.

Yes i have already went ahead and fixed the issue with the Tile display... its not that the tiles themselves need to be flipped. its just the way these atlasses usually work. Since we are dealing with Graphics, they are ment to be plotted, so normally vertical data is displayed from left to right as expected, but horizontaly its displayed from bottom(lower number) to top(higher numbers), i just had to change the display formula and all was fine. this might be relevant when attempting to recreate the map. this is the modification i made
MDIParent.cs line 138 changed to
(g.DrawImage(tile.Bitmaps[tileIndex], j * mapInfo.TileSizeX,(tile.TilesY-i-1) * mapInfo.TileSizeY, mapInfo.TileSizeX, mapInfo.TileSizeY);

personally since i wish to use these maps for D&D , i have no need for animations or special effects, but i will see what i can do. All i need is a list Mapping Tile Ids to coordonates which i believe are the PrimTiles, and NORI items to precise coordonates...

i will see what i can do.. i haven't worked in C# before. my speciality is embedded C.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
well.. here is some update...
i've managed to actualy get an image output with the tiles in their proper possition and orientation, so i am on the right track...
Test_output - Trickster Map Viewer/Editor - RaGEZONE Forums
i will go into a bit more detail later tonight about the problems,blocking points and anomalies i encountered, and i also wanted to ask ,iceblade112 , you mention that you were already working on it, do you have any updates and in which state are you right now with the implementation?



 

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That's good to hear! I haven't worked on mine for a while as I've been busy with some other things recently. The entire rendering process for my test program is very manual, to say the least. It reads XML data from TNT instead of implementing a proper NORI reader due to it just being an experiment at this point.
 
Initiate Mage
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hello, just a quick reply since i did not have a lot of time to dedicate to this and next week will be just as limited.
most of the problems i encountered were because the Lyr format desciption, was specific for the Square map, not all lyr follow that format.

im reffering to the number of layers, not all maps have 6 layers, so trying to read 7 Uint32s at the very start of the file when the map has more or less layers, would throw off all the other readings. numer of layers is already being read in the MapDataLoader.cs, everything else seems to be ok so far.

ill keep posting updates as i manage to progress.
 
Initiate Mage
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There's no binaries available for download (Appveyor deletes artifacts that are more than one month old). Maybe do a GitHub Release with downloadable binaries?
 
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