Battlefield 1942 Mapping Guide

Page Two - The Basics

Before we jump into using any of the tools that are available, it's important to take a minute and understand some of the conventions Battlefield uses for its map files. While I won't suffocate you with terms and names we aren't even using yet, you need to understand the basic directory structure and file formats BF uses in order to be prepared for what we are doing.

During the course of this tutorial, I will be referring to the game directory pretty often. My copy of Battlefield is installed to D:\Battlefield 1942, so you will need to replace this location with wherever your game is installed (by default it should be C:\Program Files\EA Games\Battlefield 1942).

This tutorial is being written using Battlefield patch v1.2, which you can download here. In v1.2, all Battlefield maps are stored in the directory "Mods\bf1942\Archives\bf1942\levels", off of the root game directory. Maps are stored in .RFA files, which are basically archives of the original level files and directory structure (think .ZIP files). Take a moment now to go have a look at your Battlefield directory, and make sure you know where these files are.

There are two tools that you will need to extract the files from an RFA archive, and rebuild an RFA archive from existing files: RFA Extractor and MakeRFA. You can download both of these tools as part of the Unofficial Battlefield 1942 SDK, which I suggest you go download now. Extract the SDK to a directory of your choice, and you will see both of these RFA programs have been installed.

Previous Page   Next Page  

There are no comments on this article. Become a member and post one now!