Exult Forum

Well ever since i got the hang of studio i've spent many hours just fiddling around making new islands and forests, and other areas. I was wondering if there is a way I could maybe upload my changes to the net so other people could check out what i've done. Could whoever just copy my edited u7map in their patch dir over the u7map there and when theyre done messing with it just copy back over the backup? Or is it more complicated than that? I'm sure some of you folks have done some map editing yourselves and i'd like to see what you have done as well.
Secondly there are a few cool shapes and chunks in SI that arn't in BG that I would like to use in BG, is there a way to extract those shapes and chunks somehow and put them into the studio program to be used in BG?

SeaN

I think if you zip up your patch directory, then someone else could unzip it into their patch directory to get all your changes. They might have to start a new game, though, to see all changes. (This is something that might need some work in the future.)

Second, it is possible to export shapes as .png files, then import them. The trouble is that U7 currently only allows 1024 shapes, and they're all used. Our next development goal, after 1.2 is release, will be to increase that number.

There's no support for exporting/importing chunks. Maybe that could be a future feature.

one limitation to the above description of sharing patches:
you can only use patches with the same version of U7. Meaning a person without Forge of Virtue can not load a patch done with a Version that has FoV installed and vice versa.

also, you must provide both the u7map and the u7ifix (or was it u7ireg?) so that not just the map is different but the items on it.

The problem is, you might have to consider the legal ramifications. For instance, it would be must safer to distribute a patch (the content of you patch/ directory won't cut it).

Artaxerxes

Another problem I haven't figured out how to deal with: If you do map-editing on a game you've already played partly (which you're pretty much forced to do), then the "initgame.dat" created when you save won't represent the starting state of BG or SI. This isn't a problem when you just want people to play your mod separately from the rest of the game, but it's something we need to address.

I've noticed that too.
Maybe we should have another parameter to add to Exult, says "-createnewgame gamename" which will automatically add stuff in the .exult.cfg, add a patch/gamename/ to the filesystem and populate it with the essentials, like u7map, pointers.flx etc.

Artaxerxes