Hired Guns editor

[Igor]

Hi.

I've started using the map editor for Hired Guns in order to create my own maps. It's not as hard to use as I first thought and my first map is pretty much complete already. However, there are two things that I can't seem to understand:

- first, there is a load/save map feature that works, but creates files that are much bigger than the map files already in the game. For example, I can load an existing 10kB game map from the hard drive, then save it without any edit on the same location, and boom, it's now 150kB. The size is always the same, no matter wether I edit the map for adding or removing stuff or not: exactly 157738 bytes. I'd prefer my maps to have a "normal" size for maybe sharing them, even though they still work, they'd be hard to put on a disk for example.

- second, I started my map as a new map instead of loading an existing one. There are some "panels", corresponding to texts you'd see on the walls in game, which gfx are for some reason not loaded by default when you create a new map (monster gfx are loaded by default, and the panels are loaded in all the existing maps too...). Anyway, there is an import/export feature that allows you to import "panels" or "horizons". Both "panels" and horizons have an ILBM file associated to them. When importing the horizons.ilbm file, the editor correctly convert it to raw and I get the following message

ilbm2raw v3.01 [authors, dates and other stuff]
Output ram:horizon1.bin for Amiga

When importing the panels.imbl file, I get an error message:

c/ilbm2raw: Unknown command
c/ilbm2raw failed returncode 10

and then the editor tells me that it couldn't open the file. I can't get the panels to load, which makes me unable to finish my map as I'd want to. I could restart my map after loading an existing one that already has the panels loaded, but that would take a while and I don't really like that solution anyway.

Any idea that could help? I'm using WinUAE btw (which I'm not extremely familiar with, and I'm a workbench noob too) and the editor found here: https://www.ppa.pl/hiredguns/download.html. If anyone wants guidance for installing or using the editor, I guess I can help.

[Don_Adan]

for ilbm2raw seems to be wrong path. create c dir and copy ilbm2raw.

[Igor]

Thanks, you were right
I copied it in workbench's C dir before, but it's in the editor folder that I had to create a C dir.

[Doomer]

Hello.
Maps are compressed, so you must download http://aminet.net/package/util/pack/RNC_ProPack and compress file in data mode.

Horizons and panels gfx are stored in map file. It's not loaded by default, because map use 32 panels at once, campaign maps have 81 different panels gfx. Years ago I create some maps, new worldmap gfx and remember ilbm2raw crash on my 3.0, only works on 1.3 so I ignore it and copy data by hex editor.
Horizon data is on 1208 byte, 2304 bytes long.
First panel data is on 10738 byte, each panel is 480 bytes x 32 panels so all panels is bytes 15360 long. In this way you can mix panels from different maps.
Load campaign map , save it, open in hex editor, copy data to your map, compress your map.

[Igor]

I think I played your maps, not so many custom maps for Hired Guns sadly.

Many thanks for the tips. For the panels and horizons gfx, it looks like it works out for me so I won't have to use an hex editor. For the map compression, I guess my very poor knowledge of how to use the Amiga OS is not helping... I extracted PPAMI.exe, renamed it PP, put it in my workbench C folder and tried to compress my map (say, map number 1) using the command "PP p d 1.map" with AmigaShell. It recognizes the propack tool, it tells me it's "packing data files", but it's taking forever... What am I doing wrong?

[Doomer]

My maps are unfinished project, not published.

Maybe need full path to file. Copy 1.map to Ram Disk and pack "PP p d ram:1.map", your packed map is 1.RNC in Ram Disk.

[Igor]

Thanks again. Worked perfectly.

[UnnamedCourier]

Originally Posted by Igor

Any idea that could help? I'm using WinUAE btw (which I'm not extremely familiar with, and I'm a workbench noob too) and the editor found here: https://www.ppa.pl/hiredguns/download.html.

Note this is the old incomplete release of the editor. Since July this year the original development files were released that has the complete editor package including the manual and the 3D viewer program. I'd recommend upgrading to this where possible. It also has all the needed libraries for the requester versions etc included.

You can get it from https://archive.org/details/hired-guns-cd-32-dev-files in the main LHA archive in the path Test/Hired Guns Editor/


More info here: https://tcrf.net/Development:Hired_Guns#Map_Editor

[paul1981]

I had no idea there was an editor around! I don't know how I missed this.