Battle Isle maps can only be loaded by the ASC mapeditor, not by ASC itself.
Due to our move to new terrain types which are not based on BI any more, importing BI3 maps does currently not result in very nice maps because most terrain is missing.
If you want to import a Battle Isle map, please help us by constructing a map translation file for importing which tells ASC which terrain to use for the BI fields.
To do that, extract the file bi-bi.asctxt from the main.ascdat and extend it. The comments in that file should be sufficient for understanding the system. Alternatively, download the latest version from the Mercurial repository.
Once the map is imported, it usually must be adjusted to make it playable from a game mechanics point of view.
The game engine of ASC is quite different to that of Battle Isle, since when we designed it several years ago we never intended to make ASC compatible to Battle Isle, which was decided much later. A major difference are the buildings: In Battle Isle a shop is totally independent of the graphics that are used to show it on the map, while in ASC every shop type has its own graphics. When ASC finds a shop when importing a map, it determines the ASC-building-type by the graphics of the object on the shop's and its surrounding fields. This building type may have completely different settings than the shop in Battle Isle ! Or for many exotic shops ASC may find no matching building type at all.
The only way to resolve this problem is creating more building types in ASC, or to manually place similar buildings and adjust their parameters (like production) according to the Battle Isle map.
Note that if a map is not completely imported because some terrain, objects or buildings are missing it might be easier to build the missing items and than import the map again then adding them later to an already existing ASC map.
After importing a map make sure that the airports have a runway that is long enough to be used by airplanes!
Last change: Sun, 2010-06-27 14:36