How do you edit maps?

[Hawkers]

I've been looking at the possibility of editing the maps to show the convoy routes at higher magnification - right now you can only see them at the lowest 2 magnifications in the game - it'd be good to have those routes showing when you zoom into 250km scale for more precise navigation plotting.

I'm using Photoshop 7 to look in the RAW images, and of course I get the image with 2 alpha channels (black and pink). How do I go about converting this to show the map as it appears in game?

In the maps folders there are also a stack of RL files - how do these correspond to the different zoom settings and zones? And how do I edit these to show the routes at the higher zoom settings?

Hawkers :up:

[Jace11]

I was wonderin about adding the channel that Prien sailed through to Scapa Flow, but editing the black and white raw file...

[Rubini]

Great idea Hawkers, I hope that you find a way to do this. I'm using the map that you talking about and I always want the convoys route when I zoom it... :up:



Rubini.

[Hawkers]

A closer look at the map files in the Map 2 directory shows a whole bunch of .RL files: there are 9 sets of files numbered from 0000 to 0008, and within each set there are 17 files.

I'm assuming that each set corresponds to the different magnification settings for the navigation map. And my guess is that within each file there is a RAW or TGA file that shows the actual map area seen on the in-game navigation map.

Question is: is there a way to open these .RL files and actually see if there is such a TGA, and if so to extract and edit it?

RL is a file type I'm not familiar with, and a utility like Timetraveller's SH3 Unpacker won't work, as they are not .DAT files.

A search on the web hasn't yielded any results: Windows XP site doesn't recognise the file extension and I haven't found anything that works with this type of file.

Any of the mod gurus out there have any ideas?

Hawkers :up: