Are there any game assistant programs available?
 

It's been a while, but the urge to conquer Europe meter by meter has struck again and here I am.

Over on the other side of the hill with SPWAW, there are a couple of add-on programs that lets you print out a map of the battle field you are about to fight over and lets you adjust the commanders names and ranks. Is there some way to do these with winSPWW2?

Map program is called Map Thing.

Re: Are there any game assistant programs available?
 

This site has alot of useful programs for the various Steel Panthers games:
http://hosted.wargamer.com/ChlandaWorkshop/index.htm
You might find something useful there.

I know that the ww2map allows you to save the map as a image file:
http://hosted.wargamer.com/ChlandaWo.../SP/ww2map.zip

Using that program can be a bit complicated so here are some instructions:

After you have extracted the files to directory of your choice you start the program "WW2Map.exe". Then click on "Files" and "Set SHP directory" and navigate to your \WinSPWW2\Game Data\Graphics -folder. Then select any SHP file there and click "Open". What this does is it tells the program where the games graphics files are so it can display the map you load.

Now click on "Files" and "Load Map" and navigate to your "\WinSPWW2\Maps" -folder. Select the map you want to view and click "Open". Now the map should display on the screen.

Now this program allows you to do all sorts of edits to the maps, but you just want a picture file of the map. So now again click "Files" and this time click on "Save bmp". Then navigate to where you want the picture to be saved and type in some name for the picture file and click "Save".

And that's it. You should now have a picture of the whole map saved in bitmap format that you can view.

You can notice that there is also an option to save the image as a JPG file if you click "Files" and "Save Complete image". The JPG file is lower image quality but it is much smaller in file size. So you might want to use that option if you want to send the picture in email or post it on the net.

I prefer the bmp image because I can just use an image editor program later to change it to JPG if I want to. Also sometimes the map picture does not look right when using the JPG format.

Just as an example I attached a low image quality JPG image of the SPMAP05.

Re: Are there any game assistant programs available?
 

Here is a larger (1600x904) JPG image of another map. I forgot what map this was.

http://i.imgur.com/tC1zk.jpg

I uploaded it to imgur since it is a 1MB sized JPG image and the forum only allows up to 97.7 KB files.

The original BMP image file is 104 MB in size and 6240x4400 pixels. So you can imagine it needs to be reduced in size before posting. :D

Re: Are there any game assistant programs available?
 

JPEG uses a loosy compresion and BMP is primitive and really big. However after creating BMP file you can convert it to any lossless format to save space and I recommend PNG. That will save you much space comparing with BMP and give you the same 100% quality of BMP.

......and if you decrease colour depth to 256 colours before saving as a PNG you will save a lot more space and not loose any clarity with game generated images as they are already 256 colours

You can change the leader names right in the game, just right click on the unit and then change the name on the screen. Further work can be done with scenarios using ScehHack which allows all kinds of changes to be made

Don