Introduction

Like many others before me, I have watched Battlefield 1942 quickly become the most
played game in my arsenal. The down side to this newfound addiction is the severe lack
of new levels to play; but more importantly – the severe lack of a good map editor.

This is not to say that you can’t make your own BF maps, but it takes a lot of
time, patience, and persistence. When I first decided it was time to start making
some maps, I spent hours and hours hunting the web for tutorials. Information on
mapping BF1942 is not easy to come by. Sure, there are dozens of tutorials out there,
but mostly they use expensive tools, leave out important steps, or even just leave
you hanging as if they plan on continuing the tutorial via psychic communication.

So, for the sake of all you aspiring mappers out there, I have decided to compile
all of the information I have scrounged from around the web into a simple, easy
to follow guide that will walk you step-by-step through making your own maps
in Battlefield 1942.

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.

.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

Step 1: Set up your workspace

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.

Step 2: Extract the level files

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.

Step 3: Modify the map

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**

Step 4: Rebuild the .RFA file

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.

Step 5: Test the modified level

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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