New World Map for Fallout 2?

QuantumApprentice

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
For the life of me, I can't quite seem to get my new world map to show up correctly in my Fallout 2 mod.
I've messed with MSKTools by ABel, (https://www.mediafire.com/file/8a6ekbxzvpxb1aq/MSKTools_compiled_by_ABel.rar/) with no success possibly because the BMP file format has changed since this program was originally written, managed to get FrameAnimator 2.70.1 (https://www.mediafire.com/file/5j459iahzyus5h4/Frame_Animator_v2.70.1_by_Jochua.zip/file) to work with creating FRM files from BMP's by saving the BMP files as 16bit instead of 24bit, but even then some of the FRM files show up as a mess in-game:
broken world map1.png
Any clues what I'm doing wrong?
 
Uh, Fallout cannot into anything more than roughly 256 colors. Best approach is to save graphic files with indexed colors based on Fallout's color palette. The *.act file can be found in Frame Animator.

The msk tool / msk files is only for defining where the player can walk - it has no influence on the visual graphics.
 
Fallout cannot into anything more than roughly 256 colors.
Dang...was hoping frame animator would output everything based on it's built in color palette, I'll try messing with it and see what happens.

The msk tool / msk files is only for defining where the player can walk - it has no influence on the visual graphics.
Yeah, but I wanted to figure that part out too since it didn't seem too difficult at first.
Plus there are some tools in the package that are supposed to convert to FRM for the map itself, but they don't seem to work on my BMP files. Only frame animator worked consistently.
 
working world map.png
Got it working. Turns out Frame Animator creates an alpha channel with an auto-detected color, this alpha channel messes up the header or something so the game reads it oddly when used as a map tile.
Changing the Transparent Color to "From Palette" so that nothing ends up transparent fixes the problem I was seeing in game.
 
Is there a better way to automate the FRM making process?
Frame Animator works well for critters, but I haven't figured out how to make a batch script that exports a bunch of individual FRM's from it yet.

bmp2frml from the MSK Tools pack only works on 256 color BMP images...
bmp2frlm fail on 24bit bmp.pngerror if more than 256 colors used
but it also appears to work correctly on PNG images regardless of color depth.
bmp2frml works on png.png
working world map2.png resulting file works

bmp2frm from the Borg Locutus pack seems to have the same limitations with BMP images as bmp2frml
broken world map2.png resulting file doesn't work
but is further hampered by requiring the image be a BMP filetype and needing an INF file with palette and size information before it will run.
bmp2frml fail on inf with bmp.png
bmp2frm fail on png.png


This suggests using PNG's with MSK Tools' bmp2frml batch along with ALCHLONG.EXE and bmp2frml_core.exe is probably the fastest way to convert new map tiles.
Is there a better method out there? Are there better conversion programs out there?
Can I use ffmpeg and just write a batch script to do the same thing?
 
Last edited:
From what I understand bmp2frm is the casual way to do it, I do it that way as well. Quite tedious if you say so going through each individual bmp but its sure to work.
 
Frame Animator has a batch function for such stuff.
/Edit: Ok, I see it doesn't have .bmp to .frm - but if you converted vanilla files first you should have .fpr (project) files, which then can be batch converted.
 
From what I understand bmp2frm is the casual way to do it, I do it that way as well. Quite tedious if you say so going through each individual bmp but its sure to work.
I can automate the process with a batch file so that's not a big deal, my problems with bmp2frm.exe by itself are compatibility issues and having to download another tool when frame animator may work in a similar way with more functionality.

Frame Animator has a batch function for such stuff.
/Edit: Ok, I see it doesn't have .bmp to .frm - but if you converted vanilla files first you should have .fpr (project) files, which then can be batch converted.
I got a script working that imports each individual PNG map tile, centers them and re-exports them as FRM files, but it's somewhat unwieldy since I have to have a separate entry for each PNG tile, meaning 20 different entries creating new projects, loading the PNG image, then saving as FRM.
Looks like this:
Code:
NEW
ADD_FRAMES, 0, wrldmp00.PNG
SET_OPTION,AUTOCUTTING,1
SET_FRAMES_OFFSET, 0,0,0
SET_OPTION,TRANSP_MODE,1
SAVE, D:\Fallout 2 Mod\Fallout 2\data\art\intrface\wrldmp00.FRM
NEW
ADD_FRAMES, 0, wrldmp01.PNG
SET_OPTION,AUTOCUTTING,1
SET_FRAMES_OFFSET, 0,0,0
SET_OPTION,TRANSP_MODE,1
SAVE, D:\Fallout 2 Mod\Fallout 2\data\art\intrface\wrldmp01.FRM
etc
etc...

Also, Frame Animator seems to chug a little when running this script, possibly because the program is a little slow when converting images.
Is there any way of improving this script?
Can anybody tell me if Frame Animator can be made to run a script from the command line?
I'd like to automate this process as much as possible.
 
I would just do it once manually and be done with it. 20 files is not (literally) the world.
 
I would just do it once manually and be done with it. 20 files is not (literally) the world.
Your point is taken, and I agree this is just a one time thing for most modders so it's probably not a big deal, but on the other hand anything to improve the process is always a good thing. Especially when trying to make a video explaining how to do the process for new modders. I'd like for people to be able to spend their time on story and art, not so much doing the same repetitive task for 20 different tiles.

Edit: Also, nice pun :P
 
Back
Top