The .cw3 File Format

[GameGibu]

So I've obviously been derping around making maps for CW3 for a while now, and I found an old post in the CW1 forum where virgilw responded to a question about the binary file format of custom maps with the phrase "I wondered if anyone would ever ask about that... :) "

I know this is a different game, but I too now wonder what the file format is for CW3 maps, whether such information could ever be released by virgilw, and what interesting new features could possibly be unlocked via access to lower-level properties in a map file.

I know I may not get any response from virgilw directly, because he's obviously busy doing what he loves, but does anyone else know anything about this?

Quotes provided below:

Spoiler

I'm curious to see if a utility can be made to convert, say, a BMP or PNG into a custom map. You might even be able to work with a more advanced format and use an alpha channel as the height map, which would give people the ability to use tools like Photoshop to build creeper maps. Is there documentation as to the binary file format for the custom maps?

I wondered if anyone would ever ask about that... :)
I actually did this in an internal tool I have.  This is where the special ops maps "Mouse Shadow" and "KC" came from.  Mouse shadow actually started out as a the Creeper World main menu page rendered as a graphic.  So that round shape in the map is actually the blue world on the CW main menu.

KC is the words Knuckle Cracker that were rendered as a reduced size bitmap first.

The way the tool worked was was allow you to pick an image, then define with sliders the thresholds for each terrain level.  In other words, imagine an image that you wanted to reduce to 3, 4, or 5 colors.  Then each color became a terrain level.  Note that the resolution of the image is 70x48, so it is pretty small.

I never released this as part of the map editor because it is a difficult tool to you depending on the image you start with.  For something like a white box on a black background, it is easy.  For a color photo it can be hard to get results.  I also realized that you can manually do the same thing by loading a background image into the editor then manually tracing out different terrain on the image.  Then you can get rid of the image and replace it with a normal background terrain.

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[FOXX]

If you are planning on making a Utility for Image to Land:

Willbir Converting Utility

http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=23906

[close]

Greets
FOXX

[GameGibu]

If you are planning on making a Utility for Image to Land:

Willbir Converting Utility

http://knucklecracker.com/forums/index.php?topic=23906

[close]

Greets
FOXX

No, I already vaguely understand how that works. It's probably javascript that writes CRPL. Pretty much the first thing I came across when I returned to these forums a week ago.

What I'm asking about here is the actual ".cw3" file format. I'm guessing that only virgilw actually has that information, and it's his choice whether to release it or not, and whether he should read this post in the first place.

[FOXX]

No, I already vaguely understand how that works. It's probably javascript that writes CRPL. Pretty much the first thing I came across when I returned to these forums a week ago.

I believe it is.

What I'm asking about here is the actual ".cw3" file format. I'm guessing that only virgilw actually has that information, and it's his choice whether to release it or not, and whether he should read this post in the first place.

Good luck with this.

And welcome back :)