Until now, our maps downloads for the Flash client weren’t updated as frequently as the other downloads. The reason for that is simple: these downloads had to be created manually by installing the latest version of our map data, then opening the Tibia Windows client, exporting the map data as an *.exp file, navigating to the file in Windows Explorer, and finally creating a ZIP archive of it. Doing all that every time our map files are updated is a lot of work (on top of maintaining the actual map data itself), and since I don’t use the Flash client myself, I never made it a priority to update these files.

That changes today.

Our tibia-maps tool learned how to convert our map data into an *.exp file directly, meaning all of the above manual labor can now be automated.

To make this happen, I spent some time reverse-engineering the export file format used by the migration tool. If you’re interested to see how exactly it differs from the binary .map file format, check out my analysis of the .exp file format.

From now on, whenever our map data gets an update, the Flash maps in the download section get updated accordingly, just like the other ZIP downloads! 🎉