Handling Content Packs and different Directory Formats

The past week or so I have been working to build a small collection of items to place in levels so demos give a little more depth. Sure I can do what I need, which is programming with simple boxes, circles and such. But part of game play does include the artwork and making the game move and feel and reflect the artwork. As an example, making a character climb a ladder you can do without a building or later. But, you will not know if it looks "Real" until you actually place a ladder with rungs and a building for the character to climb (no, I am not working on that - yet!).

So I bought a few of the content packs from the GG store and setoff to build a small map so I can test weapons and player movement. One thing I found after I got the packs is reading through a few of the recent posts, was a complaint that some of the packs had each object in separate directories. Sure enough I downloaded one and they were, and the directory structure was completely different from the new TGEA structure. So does that make the pack useless? Of course not. Two things are important here. One is the artist needs to keep all the files in one directory so they can export the object as well as the textures, map, and modeling formats all at the same time. For me, in developing a game, having everything in a single directory saves me time in map creation as well as prevents duplicate textures.
So how do you solve this dilemma? Well, for some of you more savvy computer users, the answer may be obvious, others may not, so I decided to show one way how I do it. The answer is in the ZIP file.

I use WinZip to unzip the files. And below are the steps involved in doing that.. Including pictures!

NOTE: This process is the same for DTS,DIF,JPG,PNG or any files in a ZIP.

First below is the directory setup for TGEA. Which is different than most of the Content pack directories since they are mainly setup for TGE or the old TGEA directory structure. To move DTS files create a sub-directory under shapes to identify the pack name. Here I created a dir called WarehouseDist where I will store all the Warehouse District DTS files. If you want to break it further down which I will do later, is had a sub directory for shapes and interiors.

OK the following steps will depend on the tool you use to unzip the pack, but all should have similar functions. I use WinZip, so I will show that one. The first step is after you open the ZIP file is to search all the file for all files with the *.dts extension.

Once you find all of the files, be sure to select them all. For DTS,DIS,MAX or other formats you can pretty much select them all regardless of directory. You can use this same process to later move the texture files as well searching for *.jpg or *.png, depending on what the pack was created with. Just be careful when you use these generic image formats, that you be selective and remove any that are not in a shapes or interior folder. You could easily pick image files used for the creation of example HTML files or documents, and while it won't hurt to move them. You just don't need to them and creates wasted space on the drive.

Also, you want to make sure to skip any sky/ground cover/water or other directories and separate them out.

Ok the next step is to select the output directory and which is where most people stop at. However, move over the advanced tab and check the box to prevent the files from being expanded into the path they were zipped up with. This will place all of the files into the root directory you are unzipping to.

Doing this you may get a file exists message. For DTS and DIF shapes I generally look at each one and manually determine to replace, or rename the file as something else. This lets me know of duplications. For DTS/DIFs in you should really have no problems, but as you can see it can happen. So I elected not to overwrite and took the file with the earliest modified date. For textures you can simply so No To All and ignore duplicate names.


So does it work? Yep.. Just start TGEA and start placing objects and only having to click one directory to have all the objects listed. (ok, just placed a few, wasn't trying to artistic about it).


Just a tip for those who may have never taken the time to see what options were actually available with their ZIP software.

And some packs come with example missions and I realize that doing this will require the .mis files to be edited. I generally have to do that anyway as they very seldom match the structure I already have.