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MAPFILE ORGANIZATION
The mapfile consists of thousands of tags and some headers. However, there is an organization to the data. If you were to run a utility like Filemon (www.sysinternals.com) you could watch HaloPC's file activity in detail. You would notice that it reads 4 major sections:
-The mapfile header
-The Tag index and metadata
-The model raw data
-The BSP(s)
The layout of these structs looks like this:
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Header | BSP(s) | Raw Data | Tag index and meta
The mapfile header is the first thing that gets read when halo loads a map. The header format looks like this:
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typedef struct STRUCT_MAPFILE_HDR
{
int id;
int Version;
int decomp_len;
int Unknown1;
int TagIndexOffset;
int TagIndexMetaLength;
int Reserved1[2];
char Name[32];
char BuildDate[32];
int MapType;
int Unknown4;
int Reserved2[485];
int Footer;
}MAPFILE_HDR;
decomp_length - this is the length used by the compression algorithm to decompress the mapfile.
TagIndexOffset - this is the offset to the Tag Index Header.
TagIndexMetaLength - this is the size of the tag index and meta combined.
MapType - determines that the map is single player, multi-player, or User Interface
Version - xbox = 5, pc = 7
id = "head"
Footer = "foot"
The header is never compressed, it is always 2048 bytes (0x800 bytes). On the xbox game disk, the header is uncompressed, but the data following it is zip compressed using the zlib open-source compression library. For HaloPC, nothing is compressed.
So Halo reads in the map header. If we are talking about xbox, Halo then decompresses the map data into a cachefile and appends garbage to make the mapfile fit into one of the xbox-defined cachefile lengths.
--The tag index header--
Next, Halo reads in the Tag Index Header and the Tag Metadata. The Tag Header tells Halo how many tags there are in the index (usually there are thousands). It also tells the offset and length of the model raw data.
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typedef struct STRUCT_INDEX_HDR
{
int index_magic;
int BaseTag;
int unknown2;
int tagcount;
int vertex_object_count;
UINT ModelRawDataOffset;
int indices_object_count;
UINT indices_offset;
int ModelRawDataSize;
}INDEX_HDR; /* index_header_t */
... Anyways, thanks a lot for writing that up... I'm not sure how in heck it'll ever help me, but I'm sure someone out there is building a shrine for you this second... 
