Dumping Vanilla Maps

This page will go through the process of using Divine Ripper to dump vanilla maps, as well as helping glean what you can learn from them before taking on the challenge of making your own.

This assumes you have read the Unity guides on this wiki already, and have a basic understanding of Unity using the template.

Important

You can do this!

Dumping a Map

Note

This page in and of itself is not strictly necessary to follow, but if you are making a map for the first time, or even the second or third time, it is HIGHLY suggested you follow this process as it will help you out exponentially in the long run.

In order to actually study a vanilla map, we need to rip it. We're going to use Divine Ripper, which should be included with the Engage project template you used to set up your Unity project.

It is suggested that you decide which map is most similar to the one you want to create. This is so that you can possibly repurpose or edit assets like the terrain, should they fit what you're trying to accomplish. However, if you are comfortable with sculpting and texturing your own floor, this may not be necessary.

This guide throughout its various pages is going to start with fe_scenes_fld_c001_2 as a base, which is a Tempest Trials map.

Warning

It is recommended that you create a project specifically for map dumping that is separate from any project you choose to actually work on things with, as dumping maps can create a lot of confusion in Unity if you already have some of the assets from the map contained in your project.

To start, go to the Divine Dragon tab at the top of your Unity project, and open the Dumper tab. Click Extract a bundle.

This should direct you to find the settings.json file from your RomFS dump, if you haven't already.

Once you've done that, you can find your map file in the \Data\StreamingAssets\aa\Switch\ directory. Within a few minutes (or less than a minute, if you have the specs for it!) you should have a fancy new project file and all of the assets it contains included with it. Your new scene should be under Assets/Share/Scenes/Map, but if you're having trouble navigating around your project filesystem, you can simply search Fld_XYZ in the searchbar and it should appear there too.

Doubleclick the scene to add it to the SceneView on the left. Remove, hide or unload the sample scene, especially if anything is still in it. Your dumped map should be available for you to toy around with as much as you wish!

Learning From the Developers

While the map is unfortunately not exportable in this state due to a variety of reasons (which will hopefully be covered in the next pages) it IS free to be studied as much as you want! Feel free to click around and explore. A LOT of what you see is going to be replicated at least at a base level in order to create a working map.

You can click on an asset inside most assignment boxes and it will immediately show you where that asset is located in your project filesystem.

Note

Most of the objects on the map are completely unpacked and loose. When placing objects is covered by the guides, prefabs will be used instead.

Aside from checking the different parts of the map and looking over things like the components and scripts, here are a few things you can do to expose information that is not immediately apparent:

Rendering

You can view how the baked lighting interacts with objects by clicking on the Draw Mode dropdown and selecting either the Baked Lightmap, Directionality or Shadowmask tabs to see how the different aspects of pre-assigned lighting work with the MapTerrain and the objects on top of it.

More on these later, but Shadowmask at the very least is mostly self-explanatory.

Environment

You can view different additional aspects of the lighting and environment by clicking on the Window bar at the top of Unity and then opening the Rendering tab and clicking Lighting. This will open a window that lets you see different parts of the lighting settings, particularly on the second and third tabs.

Ignore the Scene tab for now, it will be covered later.

You may see the script component memo used a lot! While it's not exactly clear what this was used for, it likely served a purpose similar to the "comment" field of some of the xml files. For us, it serves no purpose.

Once you've had your fill of playing around with your exported map, you can begin the initial process of creating your own. Move to MapSetting.