S3 Series

Warbirds uses DDS files for the background texture for the tower and inflight map.

DDS is Direct Draw Surface, an image file type. I use little free program called paint.net to modify these files.

Warbirds stores the map texture DDS files in the Warbirds root directory and the file name the game looks for is defined in the software.

Each terrain has a name the game looks for to load the appropriate terrain and map files.

New Guinea file name is newguinea.XXX where XXX is the extension.

So when the game loads the New Guinea terrain it looks for the newguinea.dds to load the map texture. Whatever texture you have saved under that name will load. If you don't have one under that name it will display white space.

When I was playing with the Marstown terrain, making a practice and dueling arena, I needed a way to load a specific map texture ONLY for that arena.

So SPINDZ created an arena level command to point the software to a different filename.

The Arena Manager can point the game to load any filename he chooses and the game will look for that filename FIRST.

If it doesn't find a file with that name it will then look for the default name to load.

Jabo has chosen to use defaultname + s3.dds for his alternate path.

So IF you have saved a maptexture as newguineas3.dds in your Warbirds ROOT it will display when you log into the S3 arena. (and the OPLOST arena as I set it to the same path for now)

If you don't have a file named newguineas3.dds then it will load the default.

So you might say "I will just save my texture like I always do to the default and I will be fine"

Right now that will work for S3 because Jabo hasn't submitted an S3 texture to iEN to include in the updates but in the near future I imagine he will have an S3 texture in the update prior to each S3 so everyone starts with the baseline texture prior to each S3.

To see what I mean, load Marstown terrain in free flight offline and look at the map texture then go online into Marstown Dueling Arena and look at the map texture. Its different than the default offline because I sent iEN a texture to include in the update and its in your Warbirds directory if you have updated in the past 2 months. So there are two map textures for Marstown in your Warbirds folder. There could be an unlimited number of textures in there and each arena could point to a different filename.

The biggest benefit for players is that you can save map textures for S3 use without messing with your default game textures.

Great explainaton Dawger. This stops all the overwriting of player supplied ingame maps when you update. So now when Muzz or Dawger creates a map it will have a different name than the default and the CM can point to it and the player is free to use or not use it.

PFM!!!

That is a great feature as now I don't need to remember to save the original map in another folder before I load the S3 map.