Packaging guide
This is mostly a set of guidelines for people packaging up their maps for redistribution among peers in the sandbox community
it's important to note that if you intend to distribute more than the ogz itself, that you're to use zip archives, or tar archives with either bzip or gzip compression.
rar is not to be used, simply for cross platform concerns (linux supports it poorly, and OSX I believe doesn't support it at all)
Contents
What to include in the zip
the basic zip structure
[] indicates a folder, - the level.
- [packages]
- - [base]
- - - map.ogz
- - - map.cfg
- - - map-art.cfg
- - - map.jpg
- - - map_big.jpg
the packages and base folders may be omitted in the hierarchy if desired
invalid substitutes for "map"
When one names his map, there's a few things they can't do, you're not allowed to name the map as to...
- contain any spaces in the filenames
just for social standards, mapnames aren't allowed to
- contain any form of prejudice against a group of people
- contain any "swear" words
taking the map.jpg screenshots
Note: png, bmp and tga are also allowed, but not recommended (the engine will identify the extension automatically)
map.jpg
- go into windowed mode and resize the window to 512x512 or 1024x1024
- press Ctrl-F12 to take the screenshot
- open the screenshot in the gimp or photoshop and resize it to either 512x512 or 256x256 and save it into packages/base, whilst substituting map for the map's name (note that resolutions that are not 2^n (where n is an integer) display oddly, and mapshots above 512^512 won't be accepted)
- you might like to play with /fov to try a different/better view for the screenshot
map_big.jpg
- use a standard 4:3 resolution in sandbox, such as 1024x768 (1280x960 or above is suggested, note that if the map's included in sandbox, it won't be allowed past 1280x960)
- ctrl-F12 to take a screenshot
- open the screenshot in the gimp or photoshop and save it to packages/base as map_big.jpg, whilst substituting map for the map's name