18 October 2012
A brief (or not so brief) history:
The concept of map porting for IW4M began with NTAuthority (possibly some of Pigo’s work there too) removing restrictions on loading SP fastfiles. The first real “mapper” (I use this loosely) was xetal. A member of the original aIW community and the first real person to advance our understanding of this side of the game engine. Next came LoserSM who came in and began his work on Contingency which he did not finish until the time fourdeltaone came around. I then entered the scene when I began my experiments with the system. I was able to get a map to run with difficulty (arcadia) and after some questioning of NTA about the dependency system. With a hex edited dll and very little knowledge of the system I released my first map which got very little attention because back then I had been a smaller member of the community. I helped write what is now Rendflex’s Entity editor (he wrote the base and I added a bunch of stuff). I also wrote the first version of my d3dbsp.ents Editor in this period. Didn’t do much except load and save which could be more easily achieved by using notepad++. Now it is my base for writing macros to use for editing. Through more iterations and versions of arcadia and boneyard, I was able to continue to to improve it but still got little attention on aIW.
Fast forward to now. FourDeltaOne has a large modding section for IW4 including maps, weapons, along with other interesting tweaks. I have tried to document as well as I could the methods used to port maps in my tutorial on the forums. The more advanced modders (they have evolved into that now with the open sourcing of IW4M) have been experimenting with some pretty crazy ideas in the game. Some of them include Rendflex, momo5502, trasto, zombiefan564, tsoPANos, Dasfonia, TheProphetHD, Opferklopfer, STvALKER, BODYGAURD, LoserSM, and myself.
The Future:
Now with IW5M there is again the possibility of SP map porting. I have attempted to replicate the patches in IW4M client to IW5 but had no success. Hopefully it is possible but will require more work. We will see what the future holds.
