Talk:GameMaps Format

The values in that table are also good for Keen Dreams, except for the !ID! tag.

Cleaning this mess up

I think this page should be merged together with the Keen Dreams level Format and the TED5 page to get a clean documentation of the general file format. A lot of the stuff in here is only partially correct. For example, Bio Menace (and the first version of Wolf3D) uses the uncompressed form (MAPTEMP) of the format, not the carmackized version as is implied at the end of this article and in the TED5 article (it says that the MAPTEMP file is not used by the games).

I also noticed that this article claims that the MAPHEAD file is 402 bytes long, giving it space for 256 level entries (which makes no sense at all, there are exactly 100 level offsets), but the MAPHEAD also stores the TileInfo data, giving a much larger size. You can see this in Bio Menace, where the files are external, but also in every Keen game. The TileInfo data in the exe starts directly after the MAPHEAD data (add 100 bytes in between for games that use the Huffman-compressed version, like Keen Dreams and Dave 3 & 4). --K1n9 Duk3 21:06, 11 February 2011 (GMT)

You're welcome to clean it up, but just remember that all this stuff is work in progress so it's only a "mess" because nobody has had the time to finish it off yet. If you're able to do so, then that's great! Also don't immediately assume something is wrong because it doesn't fit what you have seen - there are many versions of games around the place so make sure you consider something carefully before deleting it (I learned that the hard way!) I don't think this page should be merged with TED5 though, that page should be solely about the editor and perhaps some files that are not used elsewhere. If it's used in a game it should be on one of the "xyz Format" pages (so by all means move some stuff *off* TED5.) -- Malvineous 12:36, 12 February 2011 (GMT)

Yes, several points are worth noting. There should be a single article for all the TED5 formats with perhaps sections explaining the different compressions used (None-Biomenace, Huffman-Dreams,Dave3\4, Carmack-Keen) and especially a note about the tileinfo, for Keen only the 402 MAPHEAD was extracted and patched, seperate from the tileinfo, nobody really realized the two were connected and that TED could be used to edit tile properties, this is thus something of great interest to modders. I have a lot of data on what format of MAPs various games use. TED5 is a program and should be kept separate though. --Endian? What are you on about? 03:46, 14 February 2011 (GMT)

Wolfenstein-3D maps

"About Wolfenstein-3D (6 episodes version): after decompressing the planes, I noticed that --1-- Each plane starts with 0x0020, --2-- The third plane is always empty (except for the 0x0020), --3-- Decompressed planes are always longer than necessary: assuming every map is 64x64 tiles and a tile is stored on 2 bytes, a plane should be 8192 bytes long (8194 bytes if you count the 0x0020 signature). Am I missing something here? When displayed, the map makes sense to me but I'm just not sure if I did anything wrong..." -> Scratch that, I'm an idiot, the first UINT32LE is the size (in bytes) of the decompressed data, I thought it was a part of the RLEW-compressed chunk and had to compute the decompressed chunk size by myself... Anyway, the wiki page states that "The header for each level that is pointed to by MAPHEAD is 42 bytes long and RLEW compressed", unless I misunderstand what the sentence means, it doesn't apply to Wolfenstein-3D (the RLEW compression I mean). --Ilovemyq3map2 (talk) 16:09, 14 October 2013 (GMT)

InfoPlane values

So, it'd be real nice to have a list of what the values in InfoPlane map to. Not sure where to put them, as they're a per-game thing. Additionally, some item IDs are things that appear in certain difficulty levels only - ID 47 in Keen 4 is a Lick that only appears in Hard (and perhaps Medium) Having a list somewhere might help with this. Any thoughts? Szevvy (talk)

For many games using this format, you can just use the first couple of tiles from the TILE16M tileset as icons for the InfoPlane entries. Things that only spawn on certain difficulty settings usually have the number 2 or 3 somewhere in the icon graphic, representing normal and hard difficulty levels respectively. That should work for Keen 4-6 (not all versions, though), Keen Dreams, BioMenace, Dave 3 & 4 and the Catacomb 3D series. Wolf3D-based games usually don't have any TILE16M tiles, so a list or a table would be more helpful for those games.

I'd say that a detailed table of InfoPlane values should be a separate page for each game, since there are some very game-specific quirks, especially in the Gamer's Edge/JAM games (Dave 3 & 4, the Catacomb trilogy and the Blake Stone series). How the game interprets the various InfoPlane values doesn't really have anything to do with the GAMEMAPS format itself. --K1n9 Duk3 (talk) 20:43, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

Location of data in exes

On thing to note when filling out the location of data in exes - UNP and unpklite decompress exe's slightly differently, so any PKLITE'd values need to have the decompression tool marked in the table.Szevvy (talk)