Decompiling Maps

Before you read on make sure you know that decompiling maps can be a very sticky business. It is widly frowned upon by the majority of professional level designers. For good reason, when you decompile a map you are taking their hard work and using it for yourself. So before you get the idea to go around decompiling every map and throwing the vmf's up on the internet, please take the time and think about something you have dedicated a small portion of your life to, and then imagine someone breaking it into a million pieces.

When you decompile a map you should be thinking one of two things:

• You are curious how a certain part of his/her map works
• You are going to greatly change the map and only use the skeleton, and of course give the author full rights to your work.

The Hackers Toolbox

To decompile maps I suggest the following tools:

• enyspy
• vmex
• AXE (or any general purpose hex editor)
• BSP2MAP
• MapFool