Hack 74. Give Your Map Its Own Menu Image

Give your map a pretty picture in the maps menu.

The bitmap associated with your map can be viewed by opening Ch2r [Hack #51] and double-clicking globals/globals.matg. The test map [Hack #54] currently has no image associated with it. From this view, you can check the number of your map in the globals.matg they start at 0 and go to up 49. The Test map is currently the last entry so it's fiftieth on the list in other words, its value is 49 (see Figure 9-12).

Figure 9-12. The globals.matg tag

To alter the menu image that is associated with your map, you will need to swap a dependency in the mainmenu.map file.

To do this, you should first open Ch2r [Hack #51] right-click globals/globals.matg and choose Properties (see Figure 9-13).

Figure 9-13. Accessing the properties of globals.matg

Next, you will change the dependency of the bitmap. To do this, select the Dependencies tab and scroll down to find ui\code_global_bitmaps\multiplayer49 this is the number of the test map. Double click on this entry and click Change to change it to a different bitmap. Change it to the image for Ascension, which is ui\code_global_bitmaps\multiplayer0 (see Figures 9-14 and 9-15).

Figure 9-14. Swapping the image for the map

Figure 9-15. After swapping the image

After you have made the change, you can open the globals.matg tag again to see that the image is associated with the map (see Figure 9-16).

Of course, the more rewarding check is to fire up the Xbox and take a look at the maps menu (see Figure 9-17). Remember to choose sign your map [Hack #53] before you transfer the file back to your Xbox [Hack #54].

To create your custom map picture, you will swap the original image with a relatively unused texture [Hack #72] in the .MAP file. Prime candidates for this purpose are the ones at the bottom of the list. These are used in the Xbox Live menu options. You can safely use these since you won't need your modded menu for Xbox Live. Remember that you can use the DXTBmp program to convert BMP files to DDS format. To make your image look more like the other map textures, you may want to add a border and take a corner off the image in the alpha channel. You can also look online for mainmenu blank images, which often include a blank mainmenu picture and an alpha map (256 x 256) to accompany it.

Figure 9-16. The map image dependency after the swap

Figure 9-17. The new image for the test map

When you download modded maps, they will often come with custom map images (see Figure 9-18).

Figure 9-18. Some maps with custom textures assigned