Look familiar?

Speculation: I think the end half of the file may be used as lighting information for the tiles or something.

Hope this helps someone make more use of .ds1 files, I will keep looking into them in my spare time and see if I can make more sense of the other data.

"Diablo II Level Editor"

That would be sweet!

Maybe more people will help in this investigation- I mean the format looks remarkably simple...

However remember that things like loading info etc are stored in .ds1's (I assume so anyway, after all, why would duriel.ds1 appear in the patchfile when they fixed the loading bug with him?)

------------------
"A legend, is created by a hero.
A hero, is made by a legend"

Some problems however...

Ever try editing an image in notepad? Doesn't work. Why? Notepad can't display all of the funky characters right so it just "makes some up" as it goes along and when you save it becomes corrupted (even if you didn't edit a thing). In other words, you can't do jack with notepad.

I opened it up in WinHex thinking that there's the possibility of editing it there. Unless you've got an IQ of 500, you'd never be able to edit it there. Not only that, but there's a crapload of white space bytes (at the middle/end of file), ones that appear in the byte code but you can't see as a visible character.

Possible solutions...

Get Blizzard's level editor (doubtful).
Build some type of editor that edits the hex code. Good luck. I don't know enough C++ to do that, lol.

I'm going to try experimenting with the hex a little bit, like copying some bytes to some other places to see if there's an effect.

Funny you should say that, I was actually in the process of writing a lil' utility to read files in hex/ascii

12 00 00 00 <- in every .ds1 is 12h
20 00 00 00 <- maybe num. of cols? (32)
2F 00 00 00 <- num. of rows? (47)
01 00 00 00 <- same in every .ds1
00 00 00 00 <- same in every .ds1
05 00 00 00 <- num. of tiles used in

now there are tiles names spaced with 00

01 00 00 00 <- diffrent in diffrent .ds1's
02 00 00 00 <- maybe smthng to do with width of map? duriel's has more width than height

http://vdi.pl/~isilweo/duriel.txt
download this to view full 3 duriel's maps. they were created in small application i've written... unfortunetly it workes only with duriel.ds1 ))

Wonder if you switched some if you could have Duriel's chamber looking like Blood Moor in appearance.

Now, regarding the TG1, this is not conclusive (yet), but I think the .tg1 files are actually stored as sets of tiles/graphics inside a .dt1 file.

The main reason for my thoughts on this are that each .ds1 or set of .ds1's has a corresponding .dt1 file (duriel.ds1 has a duriel.dt1, etc.). Also if you look at temple5.ds1 it actually makes a direct reference to .dt1 files for its textures.

all objects on map has 3 (or 4) byte code. ie. doors are 91 04 00, collumn with small wall on left (eh... smthng like this I_ ) is 81 00 10, spacer between objects is of course 00 (or maybe objects are 4 bytes (91 04 00 00) but i rather think 00 is spacer). All of objects described above are in first map.

in 2nd map are hard walls... you can't pass them. if u look at duriel.txt i've posted above the second map shows contour of level. diffrence between walls in first and second map is that you cannot even teleport (sorc) to be behind 2nd_map_walls but you can do this in 1st map (small walls).

the third map is (i ain't sure) floor design.

that's all for today

ps. in data\GLOBAL\TILES\ACT2\Maggot\magSE2.ds1 there are no .tg1 files but there are .dt1)

some good news in investigeting :)))

X and Y size of level i've written in my first post was correct... i couldn't find way to draw a txt map from .ds1 file using x,y size because my brain didn't want to notice one simple thing... let's look again in duriel.txt... why the wall has spaces?! all walls should look like this:
###############
not like:
#___#___#___#
and answer...
duriel's lair has 32x74 map. each cell (don't know it's right word) is descripted by 3 bytes (and one space). When you remove 3 bytes from cell and leave only one you will have nice lvl map :) i've counted manually how many cells have been left in row and it was 32! (or 32+1?) so i changed a bit code in my app and again parsed duriel.ds1 with it. it worked... i've try it also with cathedral (cathy3.ds1) and it also worked =)

http://vdi.pl/~isilweo/ds12txt.zip <-- small (6k) DOS program to "convert" ds1 file to txt map.

my program does not support long names! so if u wanna convert something with longname rename it to short one (8+3) and then convert it.

few examples of converted files
http://vdi.pl/~isilweo/duriel2.txt
http://vdi.pl/~isilweo/fortess.txt
http://vdi.pl/~isilweo/cathy3.txt

ps. notice fortress.txt... yes. it is possible to change TOWN map!!!

ok... i'm going sleep (it's almost 2am in poland)

if you send over your source code I'll make it into a windows based editor for ya.
I think I can do it. Just let me know ok
and If you need examples of my older works
i'll email some of them

Are you guys on the verge of a MAP EDITOR?!?!

Jesus H. Christ with an egg in his beard!!! That would be great!!!

Anyway, I'll just sit here on the edge of my seat blowing an artery while I wait and see...

Saint Malaclypse

Give me a week, and I'll show you the world
(hopefully)

I'm going to continue tring to find a way to mapper it out or find something to mae it work. One question isilweo what codig did you use. Pasel or basic. I'm unsure of that

Well back to the salt mines

Time for me to buy a cable modem
i dislike V90's they log slow then a 36.6 lately