Extracting the Minimap

[Skeeve]

Does anyone know of a utility that was written to extract the minimap from an HOMM3 map file (.h3m)?

[ByteBandit]

Welcome to the Round Table Skeeve.

Minimaps are made, not extracted. Open up the map with the map editor, then press Print Screen. Then open up MS Paint, select paste. Now use the Select button and cut a square where the map appears. Afterwards, "Save As' whatever map you want. Then open the map and trim it up a bit. I generally like to have all my maps sized 144 x 144 pixels. And in JPEG format.
Hope this is what you wanted.

[Skeeve]

Thanks - that's what I've been doing, actually. I was hoping there was a faster, easier way, since I was planning to do this with hundreds of maps.

[ByteBandit]

It would be nice to have a more simplified way of making them, but if there is a program for this, I am unaware of it.

[Ojcar]

In the last version of Wog editor you can save or load minimaps. (Right of the minimap screen)

[ByteBandit]

That's right, but to make a minimap from scratch, it still has to be done the good old fashioned way.
I thought one may be able to extract an H4 minimap using the H4 util, but I've never done this with it. Is it possible?

[Angelspit]

The Heroes Minimapper found here:

http://www.celestialheavens.com/viewpage.php?id=157

... works for Heroes 3 and 4, but not 5. I have been using it for a long time, it even removes the white rectangle from the minimap.

[ByteBandit]

Niiiice....Thanks AS. I need a program like this for the translation project I'm working on. Thanks a mill .....

[Skeeve]

Thanks for that link AS; The minimapper tool is great. Still time consuming for hundreds of maps, but useful nonetheless.

In my search, I found that the .h3m files can be renamed to have the extension .gz which supposedly can be unzipped by winzip. The binary data is then readable from that point - so it's theoretically possible for someone to reconstruct the minimap from that raw data.

I haven't a clue how, but if someone could figure out which data represents terrain, town, dwelling and mines - the minimap could be re-created outside of the HOMM3 environment and if done correctly, you could generate minimaps for every single map file in any given folder in a single execution. I believe I could write such a program myself - but the key is knowing what the data represents.