Awesome Mapping Tool

[Patrick Proctor]

Gents,

An occasionaly complaint with scenario building over the years has been that map making is very difficult. The maps in AATF and ATF are very detailed and hyper-realistic, relying on actual, sattelite-determined, digital elevation maps. This means the most realistic gaming experience available in any commercial simulation. However, it also means maps are tougher to make.

One of our regular contributors, TDR (a.k.a. Nick Bosio) has created a tool that will go a long way toward solving this problem. This tool allows you to draw bitmaps with your favorite drawing program and then convert them into digital elevation models (DEMs) for use in the ATF or AATF Power Toolkit (this also works with RT, TFW, and TSATC). You can download it here:

http://www.prosimco.com/TDR_Map_aps_V0.2.zip

Just extract the contents to a folder on your computer. An included PDF file provides all of the instructions on how to use the application.

A very public thank you to TDR for building this application. I hope everyone will check this out. I think it will dramatically improve the ammount of user-generated content available for our games.

[TDR]

The following is a simple example:

The BMP map you draw. This one has a lake in it.

Once it is processed by TDRTBuild and teh data then converted with DEMCON you may view it in Microdem as:



Whne the DEM produced by DEMCON is converted to an ATF/AATF map you get the following. (I have just roughly outlined the lake).

[Panman]

TDR,

Sweet tool! Looking forward to breathing some life back into ATF and RT. Thank you for sharing your work. I look forward to seeing the other features implemented.

[junk2drive]

FYI for TDR's tool I had to get dlls to run the program. C++ files apparently.
msvcp71.dll
msvcr71.dll
I got them from www.dll-files.com and put them in the TDR_Maps_aps folder.