Tile Lab Window

The purpose of this window is to divide and save an image into separate tile files. Usually you will use this tool when you have a big image of an area (let's say from Google Maps) and you want to divide it into tiles (do the cutting and resizing of each tile).

The image you want to slice, is loaded as an overlay to the Theater Window Map, which you can move or resize directly with your mouse, using the buttons on this form or using the keyboard shortcuts. After you are satisfied with the position and the size of your image, you can create the tiles, which will be cut along the grid of the Map.

This button opens an image for cutting. The formats that can be opened are BMP and DDS. As soon as the image is opened, it will be displayed on the Theater Window Map.

When this checkbox is checked, all size operations made to the image, keep the image's proportions which had, before the operation started. If you uncheck it, change the size (and the proportions) and check it again, it will lock to the last proportions and not the original one.

These two areas are identical. They are used to move and size the image respectively. By pressing on the arrows, you move or size the image towards the direction of the arrow. The amount of pixels to move or size is defined by the value in the textbox. By pressing on the arrows which end to a line, the image will be snapped (either by sizing or moving) to the nearest grid line.

The keyboard shortcuts for doing the above task, are the arrow keys for moving and Ctrl + arrow keys for sizing. For snapping to the grid use Alt + the shortcut keys. For the shortcut keys to work, the Theater Window must be in focus.

This slider controls the transparency of our image in the Theater Window Map. This feature was added, in order to see both layers (the image and the underlying map) at the same time, to help the moving and sizing of the image.

This combobox controls the size of the resulting tiles after the cutting. The unit for this value is pixels.

Here we can define the naming of the resulting tiles and press the Create Tiles button, first to select a folder to save the resulting tiles in, and then ofcourse to save them.

The names of the tiles will be defined by the two textboxes. The Prefix will be common between all produced tiles. The Start Count is a Hexadecimal number and will be added to the Prefix, always adding 1 for each subsequence tile.

This naming convention, although not necessary any more, was used by the original Falcon 4 version. The four first letters (after the H letter) defines a set category, the first two hexadecimal numbers are the number of the set that the tile belongs to and the last hexadecimal number is the position of the tile in the set (from 0 to 15, or 0 to F).

When you open the Tile Lab Window, the Start Count textbox will be populated by the next available set number in texture.bin file and tile number of 0. The label below will represent these values in decimal for reference.