noob question from a noob - error with 'corrupted' map file

Hello all,

First post here so maybe a little introduction would be appropriate; I played Wolfenstein 3d years ago and recently installed it again on my DosBox. My girlfriend started playing and after Wolfenstein 3d she got hooked, played through Spear of Destiny and is now playing Chemical Warfare. So I decided to create a small level pack for her based on Chemical Warfare (I like the texture set it uses).

So I downloaden HWE 0.3.3.0 (Havoc's Wolf3d Editor) and created 15 maps. Stupid that I am, I had best tested them earlier...but I didn't. The first 5 levels work fine, but then I enlarged some of the maps to be of bigger size. In HWE is all seems fine, but as soon as I started playing the game crashed (without any error - just a blank dosbox screen). Then I opened it in another editor, ChaosEdit, which displayed the first 5 levels as it should and the rest like the example you see in the attachment.

I thought there might be some kind of bug in HWE. So I exported the maps and tried to import them in ChaosEdit (even the working ones), but it just said the file format was unvalid. Then I decided to complicate things a little more and maybe look for a 3rd editor to 'bridge the gap' or at least make the files usable. I came across WDC. Within WDC I was able to (correctly) import the files from HWE and compile a new map data file. Yay so far....I don't have to start all over!...but only so far....

In WDC I (at first) tried opening the original map files and they too appear buggy (when I select my Wolf3d folder). But the imported files seem to work correctly. Yet those files too STILL don't seem to work in the game and when I open them in ChaosEdit the maps are all mangled. When I create a new, original sized, map in HWE or WDC it appears to work in both Wolf3d.exe and in ChaosEdit 3d view. I cannot find the exact format to export them from WDC to ChaosEdit or something. Right now I have 5 playable levels and 10 unplayable.

Do you guys have the expertise to help me out a little? I would sure don't really like it to redo all my work on the 10 maps. I know they are far from brilliant, but I worked hard on them and just don't always have the luxury of time. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Unless you updated the EXE file to handle them, no maps larger than the default 64x64 can be played. I don't know of any mods yet that play larger maps, I may be wrong.

No map editor other than HWE can handle maps larger than 64x64 either. ChaosEdit and MapEdit certainly cannot. EDIT: apparently WDC can.

So it doesn't sound like anything is wrong, you just tried to do the impossible!   

I would suggest scaling down your maps to all be 64x64 and you should be ok. Otherwise, check out how to use larger than 64x64 maps.


Andy

Thank you Andy, it seems this did the trick!

Yeah, I flirted with the idea of large maps on WDC long time ago.