Flight Unlimited III high resolution terrain processing workshop

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How to create your own targa maps

During fly and FLED you mostly see the merged maps of the levels 3, 2, 1 and 0. So this are the most important one. Having a Level 3 map, you generate level 4 by resizing the picture to 50% and so on ... At the levels 6 and 7 the 128x128 texture bitmaps will repeat in some strange way.

All files are build on a texture bitmap base of 128x128 texel.

bitmap locations in a quadrant
    bitmap locations in a quadrant - the background shown is level 0

after loading a .bin file with a hex editor you see the code going from 0000 to 3fff for the first square and 4000 to 7fff for the next square and so on until end of file. when you extract such a square and append it to a Targa-Template 128x128 you can view this square with your picture editor software (GIMP, Paintshop, Corel ... MS PhotoEditor 97)

here is a in deep description for Visual Basic peoples 


' Read tga Template
Sub ReadTGAHead(fina As String)
    Dim tga(786) As Byte
    Open fina For Binary Access Read As #1
' the targa header part 1
    For i = 0 To 11
        Get #1, , tga(i)
    Next i              '   base    level 3   level 2   level 1   level 0
' now the picture size    128x128  512x512  1024x1024 2048x2048 4096x4096
    Get #1, , tga(12)   '   &h80     &h00      &h00      &h00      &h00
    Get #1, , tga(13)   '   &h00     &h02      &h04      &h08      &h10
    Get #1, , tga(14)   '   &h80     &h00      &h00      &h00      &h00
    Get #1, , tga(15)   '   &h00     &h02      &h04      &h08      &h10
' the rest of the targa header
    Get #1, , tga(16)
    Get #1, , tga(17)
' now same colorpalette as FU3 resource 908
    For i = 18 To 18 + 256 * 3 Step 3
        Get #1, , tga(i)     ' red
        Get #1, , tga(i + 1) ' green
        Get #1, , tga(i + 2) ' blue
    Next i
    Close #1
' insert here the binary code of the square &h0000 - &h3fff
End Sub

the total file size should be: 17170 Bytes

the 4 Bytes of the size fields are &h80 &h00 &h80 &h00 for the 128x128 bitmap.

of cause you can read the targa template at once 

' Read tga Template
Sub ReadTGAHead(fina As String)
    Open fina For Binary Access Read As #1
    For i = 0 To 785
        Get #1, , tga(i)
    Next i
    Close #1
End Sub

This will work for all .bin map files but not for the compressed .cpd files. They have to be decompressed first. Sergey provides the utility you need for that in his toolkit. and there are also the utilities for the square shuffling to a total level 3, 2, 1, 0 map.

The shuffled squares has the ending .raw after conversion and for viewing you need to merge it to a targa template of the right size.

Information: André Meystre
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