Battlefield 1942 Mods, Modding Tutorials & Forums

I've read through most of the tutorials here and watched the long youtube video by f00k, but I'm still completely unable to get anything to work beyond a very basic base 1942 map.

I'm mostly interested in Desert Combat, and nothing I've tried so far has resulted in a functional map. Going through the "Using ED42 to make a working map" tutorial I can't figure out how to make the map for DC. I think I added DC as a mod in Battlecraft when I did the initial map creation and rfa unpacking, but when I create a basic map with only 2 spawns it has the 1942 load screen then crashes. When trying to open existing DC maps in Battlecraft I get some DesertCombat.lst errors and I can't seem to find anything about how to download/create that file.

I also tried making some small modifications on existing DC maps but they either don't show up when I run the game or they just crash the game. For example I made a land bridge from the coalition spawn to the village on Lost Village. The bridge is there in both ed42 and Battlecraft, and in-game on the minimap, but it's not physically there in-game. I tried doing all the "Generate Surface Maps", "Generate Object Lightmaps" etc in Battlecraft, but after that the map just crashes the client.

Are there any other newbie guides out there, ideally one that works for Desert Combat? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Edit: Here's a screenshot of the minimap showing where I modified terrain, but it's not there in-game: http://i.imgur.com/iylr8.png

If you edited the terrain and it's not showin ingame, then it is not ingame . Though it is weird, as you apparently properly changed/generated the minimap into the .rfa, but somehow the terrain didn't update. The terrain info - or more specifically the heightmap info, is stored in the file "heightmap.raw" in the main folder of the .rfa archive. If you made this change with Battlecraft, it should be applied to the .rfa automatically. If you did it with Ed42, you have to manually make sure that the new heightmap.raw is packed into the level.rfa as well. As you're a beginner, you should just pack the entire level folder into a new .rfa (make sure you got a backup of the old one or name the new file "MAPNAME_999.rfa"). The number suffixes indicate "patches" that will supersede all .rfa files with the same name but lower numbers (DICE patches have the numbers _000 and _003).

You also always can just check again what your game files actually contain by just opening the map in the levels folder again in Battlecraft or unpacking it again and open it in Ed42. This way you will see exactly what the game uses and if/where a mistake during packing occurred.

You get a lot of .lst errors on opening DC maps with BC, because you don't have the necessary .lst files . These are simple text files that contain the names of all standardmeshes of BC42. Ed42 doesn't need this as it generates those automatically from its data folder, however BC42 has to have these. They usually are offered by the mod devs for free, and I'm sure you can google the DC files easily enough. Just download them and place them into your main BC42 folder.

Senshi wrote:You also always can just check again what your game files actually contain by just opening the map in the levels folder again in Battlecraft or unpacking it again and open it in Ed42. This way you will see exactly what the game uses and if/where a mistake during packing occurred.

Both BC and ed42 show the terrain changes when re-opening/re-extracting the rfa I created which is why I'm stumped.

I finally found out why my basic map was crashing, I had to change the game.setTeamSkin and game.setKit to the DesertCombat names/kits and edit Menu/Init.con d to change the map id and server icon. At least I can play aorund and get a working map now .

I figured out my terrain problem. \Init\Terran.con has the full path to the heightmap file, which was pointing to the old heightmap in the other folder. I updated that line and now it works!

Glad you found the issues . This is the best way to learn and understand these things, especially as a beginner. No matter how good the guides are that you use, you will stumble upon errors sooner or later. And usually it's these errors and solving them that leads to a better understanding of the code overall, so never falter if you encounter them.