(05-10-2025, 01:32 AM)huckleton Wrote: I would be so excited for the MIDI collection.
A possibly-silly question I've been wondering about the maps: Can one actually go in and explore them as Furcadia maps? Like, are they actually stored as PNGs in the game? You never know when games like Spore exist
Great question! No, the PNGs are just exports from the map editor. By default they're .MAP files, a format made for Furcadia which is pretty trivially readable with a hex editor.
It wouldn't be hard at all to fit the map data inside of the PNGs, if there was a good reason to do so. My PNG export of LEV01.MAP (the original Meovanni) is a staggering 7.7 MB, which is more than the map (31.8 kB) and its script file (4.8 kB) combined. Since we're working with an uncompressed tile-based map system, the largest a map file gets is 291.5 kB. One of the largest script files I have in my collection is a Tetris recreation at 536.7 kB.
So frankly, the PNG exports are embarrassingly oversized for what they are. If I can't come up with a compression solution I might have to do some sort of dynamic loading setup. I've even fantasized about building a Javascript viewer for the raw map files but that's getting into my flights of fancy.
babu baba baby