User:Digiku/Level Technical Data

From Talk:Silver Cascade Zone:

Making the Technical Data Section

One can find the Map Data simply by going into Wadauthor, opening up the map, and then going to the "Statistics" window by "View > Statistics...". The relevant details are in the first section of that window.

The Level Header bit is also easy: just grab the level's level header (usually in srb2.srb) and explain some of the attributes in simpler terms. This is an incomplete standard, so I wouldn't mind some improvisation here.

So this leaves the Things count. I made a Things Sorter program to facilitate making the Things count. Get a map's THINGS lump using a lump editor, save it as a lmp file, and feed that file to the Things Sorter program. It outputs a CSV table in the same directory, with same filename (extension ".csv"), which can be opened in Excel. In Excel, you can further sort the list to more easily work with it (the Things Sorter program outputs the Thing entries by their entry number.) The first column outputted lists each Thing # in the map. The second column outputted lists each Thing's respective flags, in decimal form. You may convert it to hex using the Calculator program and interpret it using the information provided in the "bitsetflags.txt" file included in the zip.

By sorting the first column, you can get all the same Thing #s together and determine how much there are per Thing. For example, # 2014 is the Ring. Counting the number of rows there are tells you how many rings there are in the level.

By sorting the second column within the clumps of Thing #s (e.g. select all 2014s only and sort the second column), you can then clump which Rings are in which difficulty. Consult "bitsetflags.txt" for more information.