Map Importer

The scene tab includes a panel for the map importer. The map importer uses item placement (.ipl) files to import full sections of a map at a time.

Two folders are required to specify where game files can be located. The "Game root" folder tells the addon where to find raw game assets such as (.img) packages and (.ipl) item placement files. The "Dff folder" specifies where files extracted from IMG packages reside. These include files such as .dff, .txd, .png (TXD files converted to PNG files), and binary .ipl files.

Note: some IPL files are text-based and reside within the game folder structure, while others are binary and reside within IMG files. DragonFF supports both types of IPL files for loading of map regions and will directly pull binary IPL files from the IMG packages. However as of now, to successfully load a map region most of the contents of game IMG files need to be extracted into a folder for the addon to find them. In the future, IMG files will be read directly but for now it is necessary to use a third-party tool such as Alci's IMG Editor to extract their contents beforehand. Essentially, for GTA games it is sufficient to extract the contents of gta3.img to a folder and tell the addon where it resides.

Map Segments

Map import is based on the region prefix for the section of the map you want to load. After choosing a "Game", the "Map Segments" dropdown provides a list of regions to load. Upon selecting a region, press the "Import map section" button to start that region's import process.

Note: Some patience is required for importing regions of the map. Once fully loaded Blender will respond adequately, but the import process may seem clunky at times. Unfortunately, Blender is notoriously bad at handling feedback on a script's progression. Especially as more regions are loaded, Blender may appear more and more unresponsive as the import process executes. This is due mainly to Blender's expensive scene update cost which only increases as the number of objects in the scene increases. The more of a map you import, the more the import process will suffer and this process is exacerbated by the inclusion of collision objects on import.

Load Map Collisions

This option tells the addon to first import all collision files for a particular region before loading that region's geometry. Enabling this can significantly increase the time for the import process, which is why by default it is disabled. When enabled, the particular region's associated collision containers are all loaded into the scene and placed into a collision collection named after the game from which the region belongs and nested by the collision container (.col) file from which they were loaded. The collision meshes are also duplicated and transformed to where their corresponding map objects reside. This enables the in-place editing of a map object including its mesh-based collision. Note: Currently, any collision information based on empties (box/sphere collision shapes) is not made available for in-place manipulation.