BGLOB.DAT
This file is only used by tactical saves.
Always two bytes, describes ambient light on map.
First byte indicates overall level of ambient lighting. On night missions it is 10h, on day missions 00h, dusk and dawn uses values in the middle. Second byte is ambient lighting of shadowed areas (below and inside Skyranger, inside UFOs), usually it is first byte+4. On the end of turn TERMP.DAT is recalculated using appropriate value from BGLOB.DAT as maximum. What determines which value of two is used is not known yet.
The initial values held in this file seem to be determined by Mission.Dat[74-76].
- Offsets 74-75 looks like the 'local time' of the mission. It is translated into brightness by a 24 entries array of words (2 bytes) located at offset 0x6C99C. Seb76 05:39, 21 June 2008 (PDT)
So in decimal, the values are:
16,16,16,16,16,16,16,16,16,16,12, 8, 4, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
Well, yeah, those seem like the sort of values you'd expect to see in BGLOB. However, the highest value I've seen stored at MISSION[74-75] is 15... I'm not sure how you could map that range to the 24 values here. Also it's not really a "night to day to night" cycle, it just goes from dark to light.
Any chance MISSION[74-75] isn't the time, but a value derived from the time? That makes a little more sense to me.
- The value is computed from offset 2 of LOC.DAT and the time of the day so I assumed it was local time. Well anyway, it is a time representation of some kind ;-) Seb76 09:59, 21 June 2008 (PDT)
Note that MISSION[76] also as a purpose here, but I didn't tinker too much with it when I first found out about it (who knows how long ago)... I think I got the impression that the type of mission would affect the BGLOB lighting scheme?
- I could find the following usage for offset 76:
- Power source explosion check during map creation
- Clean up of LOC.DAT and CRAFT.DAT entries after a crash recovery mission
- UFO CRASH RECOVERY/UFO GROUND ASSAULT message selection before a ground mission
- I found it set to 1 only for crash sites
- Also the time is only used for mission types 0 and 1 (where dark zones use ambient level+4). Mission type 2 is hard coded to 8; and types 3,4,5 to 0x10 (for both normal and dark tiles).
- I could not find anything else. Seb76 09:59, 21 June 2008 (PDT)
- Bomb Bloke 06:03, 21 June 2008 (PDT)