DISCLAIMER: Dr. Brackman's House of Maps is a searchable database of map information but does not host the maps themselves; links are provided to one of the GPG Vault mirrors for download. I am not responsible for broken links, viruses, corrupted files, etc. that may come from following these links.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance was released in 2007 and maintained the original game's strong following amongst RTS players for its engaging mix of huge maps and diverse units. GPGnet, the developer's official matchmaking service, included a searchable database of community-made maps to extend the playing experience far beyond the basic maps and mods shipped with the game. At its peak this GPG Vault contained nearly 2500 maps representing all sizes and playstyles. In March 2012 GPGnet was unexpectedly shut down, and while several people were able to mirror the maps the metadata for searching for maps appeared to be gone for good.
A couple of friends and I enjoy recreational SupCom play, usually while drinking Midwest quantities of booze. Since we play against Sorian AIs and most maps do not have AI map markers, this was a huge problem for us in trying to find interesting environments. There was simply no way were going through thousands of maps to find the few that were AI friendly. As a software engineer, it occurred to me that writing a utility to go through all the maps and find ones we like wouldn't be too difficult. And, there are probably others out there who could use something like this so I could put together a website to present the data. As design challenges go, this wasn't going to be hard at all.
The site is is in PHP with a mySQL database backend since these two technologies are free and play together *very* well. This is also my first legitimate attempt at creating a properly CSS styled site, as I'm not much of a UI guy and usually just hardcode something that looks semi-reasonable and focus on all that juicy, delicious data instead. Naturally, I did everything in Notepad because Real Men Use Text Editors. It only took about a half day to whip together the basic framework, and a bit more time to clean things up to the point of public consumption.
Behind the scenes there is a program which traversed the map files to pull out relevant stuff like name, size, and of course AI friendliness. It's written in C# and took about two days to put together. Map metadata is stored in lua data structures and I wasn't going to fool with finding libraries to correctly read lua, so the program reads them in as text files and pulls out the lines it wants to find. Once the data was read, it was converted to SQL insert statements to populate the database with this best-guess data. Thanks to the power of modern computing it only takes about 30 seconds to traverse through 21 gigabytes worth of map files.
Since the program reads text rather than lua, and there are a lot of formatting options to store the data correctly, it's very possible that some maps were misread and the database is not correct. The URL and AI markers are particularly troublesome, because they don't correspond to any single line from the map file and must simply be guesed. For this reason the program also has a map verify system where I can individually confirm that a given map's information is accurate. Maps with a checkbox next to the title have been verified this way, and I will be slowly going through maps with great preference given to the ~300 that have AI map markers.
Website, styling, and data backend all done by Bogus. Bogus is awesome at everything all of the time.
Special thanks to:
-Moose Jansen and Serge Slade for all the drunken SupCom fun that inspired me to create this.
-Chris Taylor and the Gas Powered Games crew for making a game worth playing five years later.
-THQ for not whining like greedy assholes when GPG removed DRM in an early patch. Suck it, EA.
-Sorian for making an AI suite that keeps the game interesting.
-Curlix for hosting the files.
-The SupCom community for all the great maps.
-And of course Dr. Brackman for being gangsta as only a cyborg college professor can.
Supreme Commander:Forged Alliance and game content (c) Gas Powered Games. Website content (c) Bogus. Community maps belong to their respective authors. Blah blah blah.
Site design by Bogus. Created with Notepad.