Pikmin 3 radar files

The radar-related files in Pikmin 3 can be found in the /content/CMCmn/map2d folder.

General information

Internally, each section of the map is called a "room". For instance, the large overworld section in Garden of Hope is one room, the arena with the Armored Mawdad is another room, the corridor to reach that arena is yet another room, etc. Basically, anything that causes a transition when walked to/from is a room.

Room textures

Textures for each of the game's rooms can be found inside the /content/CMCmn/map2d/<area name>_2d.szs files. These are simple GTX files. To note is that their orientation might not be the same as North in-game; the rotation of each room is defined elsewhere.

Room data

All radar metadata can be found inside the /content/CMCmn/map2d/<map name>_2d_indirect.szs files. Within, radar.txt is read by the game (replacing its contents with garbage will crash the game), but it doesn't seem to have any impact in the game.

Boundaries

Each room texture has one "map bound" file, with the file name being something like map_bound_0<room number>.txt. It delimits the boundaries used for panning the radar around. These boundaries are defined by a polygon.

The first line seems to always be 1 # converter version.

The second line is a comment for the { } block that comes after, and reads # map bound info.

The block itself is consisted by one number and an arbitrary amount of coordinates. The first line in the block is that one number, and specifies how many vertexes there are in the delimiter polygon, and is commented with # joint num.

The following lines in the block are the coordinates for each of the vertexes, in the format X Y Z. The function of the Y value is unknown, but it looks like each file uses one Y value, which can be different per file.

Radar positioning

The map_2d_define.m2def files include information on which room textures should be placed where. Although the file extension is m2def, these are just plain text files. They contain a series of numbers, separated by spaces, and ending with a space.

The first number is unknown, and appears to have no impact, but it seems to always be 111205. As such, it is likely an unused value that simply specifies the format version or file date (2011-12-05 in this case).

The second number indicates the number of rooms.

The remaining numbers are sets of X Y Z coordinates. Each room gets 4 sets. The coordinates in a set represent the positions of each corner in the room's texture:

1. Bottom-right corner
2. Bottom-left corner
3. Top-left corner
4. Top-right corner

The X indicates the horizontal position (negative = left, positive = right), the Y appears to have no function, and the Z indicates the vertical position (negative = up, positive = down). Writing down numbers such that the coordinates are not parallel will cause weird zooms, as opposed to causing a shear transformation.

Other information

• It is not yet known what causes the Battle Enemies! variants of maps to use a different radar orientation.