Saturday, June 14, 2014

FMod - TED5 Temporary Files

One feature requested by the Keen community is the ability to edit Bio Menace levels, which requires understanding the TED5 internal map format. It appears that the BM developers didn't want to wait for TED5 to Carmackize and compile the levels into the standard iD Software game maps format, so they swapped out the TED5 loader for the normal loader. This means I will have to be able to load all that extra stuff and then adjust it properly for custom levels.

There was one problem with this before today: the ModdingWiki had incomplete documentation on the format. Fortunately, I have on hand the TED5 source code (in C), so naturally I went through it to find the MAPTHEAD entries I wanted. While doing that, I uncovered everything I needed and more! There was easy data on the GFXINFOE format and more TEDINFO fields, in addition to a better explanation (and in one case correction) of what was on the wiki. All the things about MAPTHEAD have been put up there, but there is a little bit more investigation (through the actual use of the fields) is required for the others.

I haven't actually implemented the formats, but I will be able to easily implement INextGenLevelSet with this, allowing easy integration into Abiathar.

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