Maniaplanet Forum

Yesterday on the Openplanet Discord there was a request for a tool like this, so I figured I'd quickly write one.

Introducing Openplanet Map Thumb:

• Export the thumbnail of any Maniaplanet map file.
• Replace the thumbnail with any arbitrary image file.
• Drag'n'drop an image file on the window to replace the thumbnail.

Download: https://openplanet.nl/files/14
Source code: https://github.com/openplanet-nl/map-thumb



(I'll probably be making a lot more tools to add to a sort of Openplanet unified tool collection, if people are interested!)

Amazing tool

Looking forward for more openplanet tools

Looks interesting
Small and convenient

But... What about password protectet maps?
Nobody shall be allowed to exchange any others maps content, right?
Are there such or other usage restrictions?

There are no password restrictions on this tool. Even if I knew how to check for a map password inside the file, it can be bypassed either way since the tool is open source.

Also, this tool doesn't change any other information about the map. Meaning it will keep the author name/login, map name, password lock, Uid, etc.

Ok.
But I would expect that also the thumbnail is kind of protected by a checksum.
So at least it could be checked that the mapfile content was modified unintentionally.

I would not like to see my own maps with a new thumb or preview image that has a server or team emblem only because someone is taking my maps for their own...

So simple and useful!

TMarc wrote: ↑08 Jan 2018, 16:45I would not like to see my own maps with a new thumb or preview image that has a server or team emblem only because someone is taking my maps for their own...

Exactly this. Some people put a lot of effort into the correct positioning of the preview picture of a map to show some of its characteristics or the general mood of the map.
Just because it is possible to do things, not everything should be done that is doable.

I had already written in the Openplanet Discord channel that I don't provide such a tool because it can be used for abuse.
I also don't want that someone can add tasteless or forbidden images to my maps and that these maps then can be downloaded from servers.

The tool should at least read out the login name from the Trackmania or Maniaplanet profile and allow the saving of a new thumbnail image only with own maps (e.g. like the tool ChallengeEdit does).

When editing, you could also make saving the image more efficiently. A 70 KB JFIF consumes 256 KB of memory in the map. 186 KB are filled with zeros...

Last but not least, this tool has nothing to do with Openplanet. This thread should therefore be moved one level up directly to General Tools.

Like I said, it's a tough thing to verify since the tool is open source. (Even if it was not open source, a decompile is very quick.)

Ah, I know why it adds the 0x00's. Fixed on Github, thx for the report.

I decided to release it under the Openplanet name since it's an "internals" tool and that's basically what Openplanet is. People ask me for very different things all the time so why not add some branding to it..?

Anyway, if people think this tool shouldn't exist, I'll remove it. However, I personally don't expect much harm to be done with it at all, it's just a useful tool especially for the people using the Trackmania Maker titlepacks. Will see if I can poke Nadeo about this.

I have developed many of these small tools for Gbx files in the past. One of them was ReplayToChallenge, which could extract the Map from a given Replay file.
If you had overwritten your Map while building it or it was not readable anymore, you could still save your work with this tool. Some users were very grateful to me for that.
Under TrackMania Nations Forever such an extracted Map was still completely playable and could be loaded on a server. Some players didn't like that and attacked me because of that.
Therefore I am sensitized to similar tools. For example, I published my tool which extracts the Lightmaps from a Map, while the tool for extracting the embedded Items is not publicly available.