Battlefield Mapping Tutorials

Adding Your Custom Loading Screen

This tutorial was written for adding your own custom load screen to your map. This is the screen you see when you loading the map you are about to play. This is written for use with BF1942 maps, other mods follow the same steps basically.

Tools used for this tutorial:

• Battlefield 1942 (obviously you need the game)
• Battlecraft 1942
• Adobe Photoshop 7.0 (older versions may differ slightly using certain tools, and possibly features)
• TGA Loading Screen Start File ( download here ) 2kb
• Init.con Start File ( download here ) 1kb

Step 1:

First open this TGA Loading Screen Start File in Photoshop, you will see it is just a blank 800x600 image. If you know how to use Photoshop and layers, you can now start designing your custom load screen. When you are all finished, be sure to Layer > Flatten Image and save. Save it on your desktop for now. So you should now have a loading_screen.tga file on your desktop.

It shouldn't ask you to change formats, but if it does, be sure to save it as TGA (Targa) at 24 bits/pixel.

Step 2:

***This next part is only for those that already have an Init.con file they don't want to lose. If you don't have a customized Init.con, please skip down to Step 2a.

Now, if you already have a Init.con file that you have made significant changes to, you'll not want to overwrite the one you already have. Instead, open both the Init.con file you downloaded from here and the Init.con file you already have. You can open these with NOTEPAD.

Paste this into your Init.con, over top any existing parts that you see that match.

Game.setLocalized 1

game.setLoadPicture ../../bf1942/levels/YourMapNameHere/Menu/loading_screen.tga

game.setMapId "bf1942"

Be sure to change the part seen in red, to your map name.

Step 2a:

This step is for those that don't have any customized information in their Init.con.

First on your desktop, create a Text file. Name it Init.txt. Then rename the text file to Init.con

If you cannot view file extensions, you need to enable it.

Open Windows Explorer ( Windows Key + E ), Tools > Folder Options > View Tab

Look for : Hide Extensions For Known File Types and check it.

Now you should be able to rename your Init.txt to Init.con if you weren't able to before.

Now, you'll want to paste this information below into your Init.con

Game.setLocalized 1

game.setLoadPicture ../../bf1942/levels/YourMapNameHere/Menu/loading_screen.tga

game.setMapId "bf1942"

Be sure to change the part seen in red, to your map name.

Step 3:

Now its time to import this into Battlecraft. So fire up Battlecraft.

Now Tools > Add File To Archive

It will bring up a dialogue box with 2 path boxes. The first one, click on the little button to the right of it to browse to your desktop files, first select the loading_screen.tga file and hit Open.

Then in the second path box, below the first one, it will show your maps path, just add a \Menu behind it, and hit OK.

The whole process takes about 2 seconds, and it will not give you a confirmation that the file was added, but it has.

Now, repeat the same steps above, by browsing to the Init.con file on your desktop, and adding a \Menu behind your map name.

DO NOT SAVE!!! Exit Battlecraft and load up Battlefield. Create a game and load up your map. If you see your custom load screen, good job! If not, you missed something above.

NOTE ** When you make any further changes to your map and test it through Battlecraft, your custom load screen will not show while its loading, but if you load it up through Battlefield it will. So don't think your loading screen was over-written.

If you want to be exact about it, only do this when you are ready to release your map, or when you are ready to submit it to a playtest site, such as www.stateofchaos.net/mapzone for testing. Some test servers require a custom loading screen, as it helps to weed out the n00b mappers that are too lazy to make one and make their map in 3 days.