Joystick Magazine 1996 September/cd joy 74 No16.iso/pc/data/cooli/agpg/pzgedit.txt

Text File | 1995-09-24 | 23KB | 492 lines

Panzer General Map Editor
Version 0.2 -- September 24, 1995
Copyright (c) 1995 Charles Tyson.  All rights reserved.

Version 0.2 of this program may be freely redistributed.  All three files
must be kept together:

    PZGMAPED.EXE (the program itself)
    PZGMAPED.TXT (this file)
    PGPLAY.BAT   (a batch file for running new scenarios)

E-mail to
GEnie:  C.TYSON1
CIS:    102004,333

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1.  Introduction

Panzer General Map Editor (PzGMapEd) is a program that allows you to revise
existing scenarios, or create brand-new scenarios, for Strategic Simulation's
"Panzer General" game.  Now you can bulldoze that highway to Moscow you've
been wanting, or construct an impassable moat to keep the Boche out of Paris.
You can even have the armies change sides...have the French and British
slug it out in a remake of the Hundred Years' War!

PzGMapEd is a Windows application, written with Borland's Delphi.

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2.  Getting Ready

If you have the CD-ROM version of Panzer General, you can edit maps but you
won't be able to use them (since the program loads all its map data from
the CD-ROM).  If you have the floppy disk version, you can substitute your
revised scenarios when you play.

While the editor does not intentionally change the game's original
scenario files, it would be a good idea to make backups.  You should
back up the following types of files, all found in the Panzer General
DAT subdirectory:

     MAP*.*          (both .SET and .STM files)
     GAME*.SCN
     MAPNAMES.STR    (not modified by this version)
     PANZEQUP.EQP      "     "    "     "       "

PzGMapEd consists of a single file, PZGMAPED.EXE.  It can be placed in any
directory, but the most convenient spot is the DAT subdirectory of your
Panzer General directory.

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3.  Starting

After you start the program, click on File | Open or File | New. If you are
not in your Panzer General DAT subdirectory, you'll have to navigate to it
via the Open File dialogue.  When you get there, you will see a list of maps
(files with the .STM extension).  Click on any one, then click Open.  In a
moment, a sketch version of the hexmap will appear in the upper left of the
screen.

(If you chose File | New, you'll be asked to specify the size of the map and
the default terrain (to begin with, the entire map will be that terrain).
Then you'll have to show PzgMapEd where your Panzer General data is located.)

Hopefully you'll recognize the symbols used.  Rivers are blue dots, rough
is green hills, fortifications are barbed-wire fences, airfields are
magenta runways, escarpments are funny brown cliff-type thingies, etc.
Roads are thin red lines.  Below the map you'll see the description of the
feature the cursor is pointing to, plus its map coordinates and its "Pict,"
which is a pointer to the screen depiction used in the actual game (there
are different pictures of most features for artistic variety).  Below the
terrain description are two lines which describe any units present in the
hex.

At the bottom of each hex is a 2-digit hexadecimal number, which keys to
the terrain type.  Note that there are several types of clear (and other)
terrain, but these appear to have no effect in the game:  a type 01 clear
hex is the same as an 02 as far as I can tell.

Scroll bars below and right of the map allow you to move to different
sections of the map.  The area displayed is about the same size that you
see on the screen when playing "Panzer General."

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3.5 Editing Modes

At the bottom left of the screen, you see a set of tabs labelled "Terrain",
"Units", "Start Hexes" and "Scenario".  These are the four editing modes of
the program.  You'll spend most of your time in "Terrain" and "Units".  To
change modes, click on one of the tabs.  The right-hand side of the screen
will change to show the details of what can be edited.  The map itself may
change to show units (marked by crosses and stars for Axis and Allies) or
Axis campaign game starting hexes.

When you start the program, you're in terrain editing mode.  You can enter
and leave each mode as many times as you wish.

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4.  Terrain Editing

On the right side of the screen is the editing box.  The editing box is
inactive until you left-click on a hex.  When you left-click on a hex, it
is shown in inverse.  If you DON'T want to change the hex, you can

     -- right-click anywhere on the map.  This deselects the hex.
     -- left-click on another hex.
     -- left-click on the Cancel button at lower right.

(See below for a special editing shortcut which involves use of the
right-click).

Assuming you do want to edit the hex, you can

A.  Change the Terrain.  Use the upper left scroll box to see the
    choices, and click on the one you want.  When you change the terrain,
    you change the movement costs to enter and leave that hex.  You aren't
    changing the appearance or depiction of the hex--if you change clear
    terrain hex to swamp terrain without changing anything else, it will
    obstruct your movement even though it still looks like a clear hex on
    the game screen.

    Note, "Coast" terrain is the type of hex from which you disembark on to
    land hexes.

B.  Change the City Owner.  This applies to all city, port and airfield
    terrain types.  It identifies the country that occupies the hex at the
    beginning of the game.  Note that there are a number of countries with a
    minus sign before their name.  These countries DON'T have any military
    units, but they can still own cities and be either Axis or Allied players
    if you want them to.  (I identified all the countries by staring at their
    tiny flags, and may have gotten some wrong--e.g. the Czech flag may
    actually be a duplicate Luxembourg flag.  Go figure)

B1. Identify which cities (and ports) are "Victory Hexes", by clicking in the
    checkbox below the terrain list.  If the terrain isn't city or port, the
    checkbox is ignored.

C.  Change the Placename.  This is the word that appears at the top of the
    screen when playing the game.  The common terrain types are at the top
    of the list, followed by hundreds of cities and rivers in no particular
    order. Be sure to check out some of the comical misspellings, e.g.
    "Great Vermouth" for "Great Yarmouth."

D.  Change the Road Net.  Roads can be placed in clear, river and bocage
    hexes.  To make a road extend through a hexside, click on one of the
    six boxes that correspond to the hexsides.  A checkmark shows that a
    road is present.  Click again to turn off the road.  You can have as
    many road hexsides as you want, though you'll have trouble finding an
    appropriate screen depiction of complex roads.

E.  Change the Screen Depiction.  There are over 200 "tiles" used in the
    game to make an attractive pictorial representation of the various
    terrain types.  I don't know how to display the actual tiles for you,
    so you'll have to scroll through this list, deciphering the mysterious
    descriptions.

    To describe the visual appearance of a hex, the sides and corners are
    given numbers and letters.  The sides are numbered 1 through 6, moving
    clockwise from the top.  The corners are lettered A through F, moving
    clockwise from the upper right (the "1 o'clock" position).  So when a
    tile is described as "Road B-E", it shows a road going from the
    rightmost corner (3 o'clock) to the leftmost (9 o'clock).

       F---1---A
      /         \
     / 6       2 \
    E             B     Something like this.
     \ 5       3 /
      \         /
       D---4---C

    Note that while roads and rivers logically pass through hexsides, they
    are depicted as moving through hex corners--this is an artist's trick
    to cut down on the number of different variations that need to be
    drawn.

    The description begin with the hexadecimal tile number, which you can
    ignore.  Then comes a word or two describing the basic feature shown,
    followed in some cases by a specification.  For roads and rivers, you
    will find which two hex corners are connected by the feature.  For some
    other terrain types, an indication is given of which way they are
    "facing."  For instance, tile number CE is a fortification picture
    which points toward hexside 2, the northeast (or "2 o'clock").  You
    would use this information to make your tiles seem to fit together
    better.  As mentioned above, the tile you choose for screen depiction
    has NO effect on movement or combat.

    "Shore" tiles are mostly land, with some water.  "Coast" tiles are
    mostly water with some land.  There are so many Mountain tiles that I
    gave up trying to describe them.

    Here are some of the basic depictions for the various terrains:

    Clear..........81     Swamp..........7C     Airport........80
    Ocean..........49     City...........7D     Rough..........83
    Forest.........8A     Bocage.........A7     Fortification..A9
    Desert.........B7     Rough Desert...C8     Port...........1A
    Mountain.......C1     Scarp..........D0

None of the changes you make in the edit box take effect unless and until
you click in the OK box.  You can cancel any changes you have made by
clicking the Cancel box, or by left- or right-clicking on the map.

(The commonest mistake I make is to fully change a hex, then to click on the
map instead of clicking the OK box--all the changes are thrown out.  Beware!)

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6.  Shortcut for Repeat Editing

You will often want to change a number of hexes to be of the same type, for
instance to drain a swamp, clear a forest, a build yourself a river. You
can do this with the right-click shortcut.

As noted above, a right click on the map normally deselects a hex.  But if
you have just edited a hex, and NO hex is currently selected, the
right-click has a special meaning:  it pastes a copy of the
previously-edited hex onto the current hex.

You don't have to change the original hex you edit; just left-click on it
and press the OK button.  Pressing OK copies the current hex into a buffer.
Now, right-clicking on any hex will paste down a copy of the original hex
UNTIL you left-click on any hex.  Once you left-click, the buffer is
cleared.

The buffer is also cleared when you change editing modes.

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6A. Unit Editing

Click on the Units tab to add, change or delete units.  Units appear on the
map as gray crosses (Axis), or red stars (Allied).  There may be both a
ground unit and an air unit in one hex.  There is a built-in limit of 255
units.

Left-click on a hex to begin editing.  For ground and sea units, click the
radio button in the upper right marked "Surface."  For air units (and ground
units which begin the scenario in air transports), click "Air".

If a unit already exists in the hex, its statistics will be shown in the
right-hand panel for you to adjust.  There are a number of variables that
must be set for each unit:

1.  The unit's country.  If you set this to the first entry, "No one," and
    click OK, the unit will be DELETED.  When creating a new unit, "No one"
    is the default owner.  Be sure to change it, or your unit will disappear
    when you click OK.

In the upper right is a scroll box filled with types of units.  They are
basically sorted by country, with a bit of scattering.  This scroll box is
used 3 times:  to identify the unit itself, to assign it organic
transportation, and to assign air/sea transport at the start of the scenario.

2.  The unit type (e.g. is it a French infantry unit or a Panther A tank?).
    Scroll through the long list of units in the upper right scrollbox, click
    on the one you want, then click on the first of three check buttons
    (marked either "Unit type" or the current unit type).  If you select the
    first entry, "Reserved," and click OK, the unit will be DELETED.
3.  The ground transport, if any (for infantry and towed weapons).  Scroll
    through the unit list again, and select any unit whose name ends with a
    colon (:).  Then click on the second check button ("Land transport").  To
    remove transport, select "Reserved."
4.  If the unit begins the scenario on board a ship, locate the ship
    Transport unit in the scroll box, select it, then click on the third
    check button ("Air/sea transport").  Note:  if a ground unit (including
    paratroopers) begins the scenario in a transport plane, it should be
    considered an air unit--click on the Air radio button first.

Note that it may be possible to trick PzgMapEd into doing something
unwise, such as assigning sea transport to a bomber unit.  The results are
unpredictable (in testing, I once ended up with a group of fighter planes
with organic truck transportation.  The planes refused to cross bodies of
water!).

5.  The radio buttons marked Main and Auxiliary apply to Axis units only, and
    only matter when playing a campaign.  In a campaign, the units marked
    Main are deleted and replaced by your core units.
6.  Next come three "spin-edit" boxes which describe the unit's strength,
    experience level and entrenchment level.  The program knows that strength
    is limited to 10 + experience level.
7.  Remember that your changes are ignored unless you click the OK button.
    Clicking Cancel or clicking on the map will toss out your changes.

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6B. Repeat Unit Shortcut

The right mouse button repeat trick, described above for terrain, also works
for units.  After you click on or create a unit and press OK, you can paste
copies of that unit on the map by right-clicking.  This happens until you
left-click, or until you change editing mode.  If you right-click over an
existing unit, it will be replaced.

It is MUCH faster to paste a unit and adjust its characteristics than it is
to create each unit from scratch.

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6C. Start Hexes Mode

While PzGMapEd is constructed with standalone scenarios in mind, you can try
to alter existing campaign scenarios.  Start hexes mode simply sets the
locations from which Axis Core units begin the scenario.  Starting hexes are
shown as gray crosses (these do NOT necessarily denote unit locations in this
mode).  Left-click to set or unset a hex as a starting location.  The
right-hand box suggests how many starting hexes should exist, based on the
maximum number of core units allowed for the scenario.

Also displayed on the right-hand panel is a list of victory cities.  This is
solely for reference; you have to go to terrain mode to change the list.  It
was placed here because there wasn't any room on the terrain page.


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6D. Scenario Mode

In Scenario mode, you can click on the "Edit Scenario Values" button to
edit certain known properties (more on this below).  There are a number of
bytes in the scenario which I don't know the meaning of.  These are listed
below the button.  Change these at your own risk.

The labels for the unknown quantities describe the byte location within the
GAME___.SCN file:  S+12 means 12 bytes from the Start of the file; U-8 means
8 bytes before the beginning of the Unit list.  The next number (2 or 1) is
the number of consecutive unknown bytes.  The final numbers are the most
common values in existing scenarios.  If you are creating new scenarios, it's
probably wise to enter the most common value for all these quantities.

Under the "Edit Scenario Values" screen, you can

1.  Set the starting date, number of turns, and number of days per turn (this
    last is purely cosmetic as far as I can tell).
2.  Define the Axis and Allied countries.  You can designate up to 6 Axis
    powers; any other units or city-owners are regarded as the Allies.  There
    must be at least one Axis country.  If too many Axis (or Allied)
    countries are present, PzGMapEd will discard the extras.
3.  Set the starting prestige level for both players.
4.  Set the AI prestige pool and its turn interval--this is how the computer
    player comes up with gobs and gobs of new units.  For details on how it
    works, see the Strategy Guide.
5.  Set Max Core Units applies for the Axis only, and only matters for
    campaigns (? it may also affect the total number of units the Axis player
    can buy during the scenario).
6.  Set Maximum auxiliary units for the Axis (the non-core units in a
    campaign).  For the Allies, this number defines the maximum total since
    Allied units are not distinguished between Core and Auxiliary.
7.  Set air and sea transport points for both sides.  Remember to adjust
    these values if you create transported units.

Click OK to exit this screen.

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7.  Saving

In this version, the File | Save option is always disabled.

The File | Save As option is enabled as soon as you load a map.  You don't
specify a full filename to save under.  Instead, you give a 2-digit number
which is incorporated into the various map files.  The number must be in
the range 39 to 99:  this prevents you from overwriting the original game
maps.

You will get a warning message if you are about to overwrite one of your
own maps.

Note that in this version, you are not warned to save your work before
exiting the program.  Your changes are lost if you don't explicitly save
them.  Sorry about that.

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8.  Printing

You can print a tolerable copy of the full map.  It's just a glorified
screen dump, but it's useful for planning your revisions.

Under File | Printer Setup, you can choose the printer you wish to print
to.  Other options are currently ignored--the maps always print out in
landscape orientation and expect letter-size paper.

I've adjusted the printing routine to work well on a 300 dpi Laserjet or
compatible.  Hewlett-Packard inkjets also work fine.  I don't know if the
routine is correct for higher resolution printers.  Postscript printers are
not supported (a problem in Delphi, as far as I can tell).  Inkjet users
should beware of maps with lots of sea hexes--they'll use up your cartridges
in a hurry.

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9.  Using Revised Maps

To use your revised map in place of the original, you need to do some
file-shuffling in DOS.  PLEASE MAKE BACKUPS OF YOUR ORIGINAL FILES AS
RECOMMENDED ABOVE!!!  To repeat, backup your MAP*.* and GAME*.* files (the
current version of the program is only concerned with the MAP*.* files, but
future versions will probably create replacement GAME*.* files).

Let's suppose you've altered the Barbarossa maps (MAP23.SET and MAP23.STM),
and saved your changes as MAP40.SET and MAP40.STM.  These files are all in
your \PG\DAT directory.  You have backups of MAP23.* in a \PG\DAT\BAK
subdirectory.

To use your map, go to the \PG\DAT directory and issue the command

     COPY MAP40*.* MAP23*.*

If you're running a recent version of DOS, you'll be warned about
overwriting existing files.  Do it.  Then go to the \PG directory and start
the game as usual.  Select the Barbarossa scenario, and your new map should
be present.

After playing, you can restore the original version from the DAT directory
with the command

     COPY BAK\MAP23*.*

Your revised MAP40 will still be there for future playing.

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10. PGPLAY.BAT

A batch file called PGPLAY.BAT is included which can simplify this file
renaming chore.

PGPLAY.BAT is a simple-minded batch file which renames the scenario files
so you can access the new scenario from within Panzer General.  All you
have to remember is that the new scenario always hides under the name
"Warsaw"!

A few one-time steps are necessary before using PGPLAY.  I'm going to
assume that your Panzer General directory is named \PG.  If it's not,
substitute your directory name for \PG.

1.  Use the MKDIR (MD) command to create a subdirectory \PG\DAT\BAK.

2.  Copy three files to \PG\DAT\BAK:
      MAP02.SET
      MAP02.STM
      GAME002.SCN

3.  Copy the enclosed file PGPLAY.BAT to your \PG directory.

That's all for setup.  Now you can create a scenario with PzGMapEd.  When you
save it, it will have a number between 39 and 99.  From your \PG directory,
type the command

    PGPLAY nn

where nn is the 2-digit number of the new scenario you want to play.  Don't
enclose the number in quotes.

This batch file will copy the "nn" scenario files over the existing "02"
scenario files ("02" is the Warsaw scenario).  Then it starts the Panzer
General program.  Click "S" (play a scenario), and choose the Warsaw
scenario.  But presto-changeo, Warsaw has turned into your new scenario.

After you end the game, your original Warsaw scenario will be recopied
from the \PG\DAT\BAT directory into the \PG\DAT directory.

(Why Warsaw?  Originally I tried replacing the Poland scenario (number 01),
but found that both sides are prohibited from building airplanes in that
scenario--or any scenario taking its place)

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11. Bugs

I'm not aware of any actual bugs (as opposed to "inelegant design choices
and incomplete functions," of which there are many).  Error checking, to be
frank, doesn't exist.  If you find something horribly wrong or even just
moderately annoying, email me at the addresses above and I'll try to look
into them.

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12. Note for version 0.1 users

Version 0.1 saved only the two map files.  Since this version wants to edit
entire scenarios, it insists on looking for the associated GAME0__.SCN file.
So to open a previously-edited map with a scenario number from 39 to 99, you
need to create a GAME0__.SCN file with the same number.  Use DOS to copy
the GAME0__.SCN file from the original scenario, and version 0.2 will be able
to open the map.