Battlefield 1942 Mapping Guide

Page Three - .RFA Wrangling

For me, there is no better way to learn something than to do it, and that is exactly what we are going to do here. In this section I will show you how to modify an existing level in the following 5 steps:

1. Set up your workspace
2. Extract the level files from the original .RFA file
3. Modify the map
4. Rebuild the .RFA file with the modified files
5. Test the modified level

Before you do anything, you should designate a directory to store all of the BF files you plan on editing. Go ahead and create a new directory in your BF1942 folder called Editing. For example, my folder is located at D:\Battlefield 1942\Editing. This folder is where you will extract level files for modification, and also where you will create directory structures and files for new levels.

I recommend creating a backup of all the default BF maps before trying to edit any of them, also. Create a subdirectory in your Editing directory called "Backups" and copy the "D:\Battlefield 1942\Mods\bf1942\Archives\bf1942\levels\" directory to the new backup folder.

Now that we have our workspace set up, we need to get all of the level data out of one of those .RFA files so we have something to edit! Open up the RFA Extractor you downloaded, click File->Open, and navigate to your Mods/bf1942/Archives/bf1942/levels/ folder. Open up Bocage.rfa, and RFA Extractor should now show you a list of files that are contained in Bocage.rfa. These are all of the files that make up the Bocage map. We can extract all of these files to our workspace for editing now, just go to the Extract menu, and select All Files. Now navigate to our Editing folder, and hit okay. Looking in your Editing folder, you will now see a new directory tree called /bf1942/levels/Bocage, which will now contain all of the files from the files from Bocage.rfa.

Now that we have the entire level in our workspace, we can work on any number of the files within the archive. **Add info for editing a basic .con file or something**

Once we have finished with our changes, we need to repackage all of the Bocage level files back into an .RFA file so we can use the level again. Luckily, the unofficial BF SDK also comes with MakeRFA, a utility for rebuilding map files into RFA. MakeRFA is a command line utility which will ask for the appropriate directories and file names, and then generate the new RFA file.

Go ahead and run MakeRFA.exe, and you will be prompted for the directory containing the files to be archived. Enter in the directory containing the Bocage files you have edited, e.g. "D:\Battlefield 1942\Editing\bf1942\levels\Bocage", and hit enter. Next you will be prompted for the path to be added to the .RFA file. This is the path that will be written into the .RFA file, not the path the .RFA will be written to. Enter "bf1942\levels\Bocage" into this line and continue (as you can see, this path reflects the path relative to the map path at "D:\Battlefield 1942\Mods\bf1942\Archives". Next you will be prompted to view the paths being written to the .RFA file. I usually hit yes and just make sure I entered everythign correctly. Next you will be prompted for the filename, type "Bocage.rfa" and hti enter. Now you will be prompted to compress the file. This takes a really long time, so just hit no to skip the compression. On a final release level you would want to compress to conserve space. Now, MakeRFA will proceed to build the new Bocage.rfa file based on your modified files.

Now that the new .RFA has been created, copy it from your MakeRFA folder to the default Battlefield map directory (e.g. "D:\Battlefield 1942\Mods\bf1942\Archives\bf1942\levels\"). Fire up Battlefield, and go start a singleplayer Bocage instant battle and check out your changes. If there are any problems at this point, revert to the old Bocage.rfa file we backed up in step one, and start over again. One small mistake along the way can break a map, so it's easy to foul things up your first time. Just be patient, persistent, and have fun!

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