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Falcon 4 Village Util by Snake Man, PMC.

This is automatic objective placer for campaign files. Source code from Github dos-village-util.

This is now obsolete util as we have Dem2Terrain and TCL scripts features which far succeed anything this util could do.

The Village Util CSV generator will read the dem2terrain created .TDF (terrain feature) files and write .csv output of the objectives which you can then import into the tacedit. These imported objectives are the villages, cities and airbases of your theater. They do not work as campaign/instant action by themselves, you need to edit them a bit which is explained in the other tutorials. The reason for this small util is simple - it takes too damned long to manually place all objectives and name them into their correct real world locations. This util takes the input data from dem2terrain created TDF files which are the real world representation of the cities, villages and airbases. This util also places additional objectives around the cities, these are two factories (mixed factory/chemical plant/power plant).

This is piece of [redacted] crappy program. This is completely free piece of software and can be distributed freely. It has no warranty whatsoever and we urge you to backup all your files before running it. PMC will not take any responsibility of this buggy software. Yes can you read? PMC takes no responsibility!

The configuration file called village.cfg explanation in depth as follows…

Line 1. one number digit, usually 2. This does not need to be changed on normal conditions, however in my tests I've seen two different sort of TDF files which either need 2 or 3 characters stripper from the end of the line. So if you are running the cfg with number 2 and your objectives names end short like “Americ” for “America” then you should use number 3 in the first line of village.cfg

Line 2. X coordinate for csv creation. For default sized theaters its 1024 and for those larger 128 segment theaters is 2048.

Line 3. Y coordinate for csv creation. For default sized theaters its 1024 and for those larger 128 segment theaters is 2048.

Line 4. Owner team number. The teams are as following:
1 - U.S.
2 - ROK
3 - Japan
4 - CIS
5 - PRC
6 - DPRK
7 - Gorn

Line 5. Control team number. Difference between owner and control is that owner is the original holder of objective and control is the team that currently holds (has captured possibly) the objective. In normal conditions line 4 and 5 should be the same. I personally use number 2, which is ROK.

Line 6. yes/no to add NoName objectives. If you type “yes” here, then objectives that has no name will be added and called “NoName”. If you use “no” then no objectives without names are skipped. In modern countries all even smallest villages have names usually, but lets say for example Afghanistan is one country which has huge amount of city or village entries in the e00 data where the TDF is created that does not have name included.

Village.dat

This file is not very important on normal operation, if its missing it will be created. When you create your objectives list you normally would want to start the ID's from number 4. However it can be useful if you need to start the objectives from different ID number. When you run the village util, the highest objective number is written into this file, so if you run the util many times the number will get pretty large. You can safely delete this file before you run the util and then it starts from the first available objectives number (4). Village util automatically skips the ID's that are reserved for Falcon units, some of you may remember the multiplayer hung on “Receiving Units…” part, well it was because there were objectives (ground targets) which had ID's that are reserved for ground units (tanks/infantry etc).

Place village.exe, village.cfg and possible village.dat into any directory, copy/merge your airport and label TDF files into one big village.txt file in Linux using “cat *TDF village.txt” command, or in windows systems open ms-dos box and use command “copy airport.TDF + label.TDF village.txt”. Then place this new village.txt into the same dir as village.exe, run village.exe either on win explorer or in ms-dos box.

If everything went ok it says something like this:

Village Util v0.3 - TDF 2 CSV converter (c) PMC 2001,2002
cfg file configs, ch_nuke: 2, xres: 2048, yres: 2048
First object number: 4 Added 2 factories. Added 30 objectives. 33 highest objectives num

Notice that this is shown only in the ms-dos box screen, if you use windows explorer and double click village.exe it only flashes shortly as it runs and shuts down the task when its done. I'd suggest you run it in ms-dos box. You should get village1.csv file into your dir when everything went successfully. You can open this csv file with excel or in wordpad, most likely notepad will barf on the file size.

What to do with village1.csv?

That my friend, is another tutorial :)

Village util is obsolete, use TCL scripts now.