*lol* you can easily "read" the files with a file editor. But to decode the content may be a problem. At first it's probably packed - you need the right extracting algorythm to get the raw datas. Then you have to analyze the complete structure in which order the datas are arranged. Perhaps you will succeed, but most probably your grandchilds will wonder what you're doing .. *g*

Even when you do manage to 'read' them, I doubt it would make converting from a scenario to a random map easier. Because it's totally different.

I know of something! The AoE3 editor!

*ducks*

*g* @ BigFatZ

In theory it's possible to take a scenario structure and place all objects by RMS script.
But please imagine: every object from buildings/units upto trees, stones, embellishment, ... have to be placed after scenario pattern. With all definitions and placements you will get a RMS file with at least 100k lines.
Like the name says: it's not sense of Random Map Script to build a fixed scenario. For this concern the scen. editor is the right thing.

create a scenario, define objects by a grouping... place the grouping on the blank map and add the player buildings and maybe triggers... then your map is ready

AOMEd can do a reasonable job of reading AoM's .scn files, and AoE3 uses a very similar format. At the highest level, it's just a load of chunks like in .3ds files - two-byte header ("TR" for triggers, "J1" for map data, etc), four-byte length, then that much data. And some other stuff in the header. And, as far as I can tell, a completely pointless addition of a variable amount (typically ~400KB) of random memory contents stuck at the end of the file, which looks very much like a bug and doesn't give me much confidence in the quality of ES's .scn tools (but maybe they have very good reasons for working that way).

The contents of each chunks depends on what it is, e.g. "J1" is another set of chunks - "T3" for terrain, "Z1" for units, etc. AOMEd nicely handles triggers to give output like

<Trigger Name="D_16MonkeyBlood" Priority="Medium" Loop="No" RunImmediately="No" Active="No">
    <Condition Type="Always"/>
    <Effect Type="Change Unit Type" SourceUnits="4065;4045;4082;4041" ProtoUnit="Blood Flow"/>
    <Effect Type="Change Unit Type" SourceUnits="4084" ProtoUnit="Destruction 3x3"/>
</Trigger>

but for units it does more like

Z1_176_id: 176
Z1_176_head: "H1"
Z1_176_length: 225
Z1_176s_en_head: "EN"
Z1_176s_en_unknown01: 72
Z1_176s_en_id: 176
Z1_176s_en_unknowns: 0 0 8 0 1 0 3 41.7667999267578 -2.41013407707214 68.790168762207 0.717554688453674 0 0.696502208709717 0 1 0 0.696502208709717 0 -0.717554688453674
Z1_176s_un_head: "UN"
Z1_176s_un_unknown01: 9
Z1_176s_un_name_length: 5
Z1_176s_un_name: "4240"
Z1_176s_un_unknown03a: -77
Z1_176s_un_unknown03b: 0
Z1_176s_un_unknown03c: 0
Z1_176s_un_unknown04: 1 1 1 -2.41013407707214 0 0 0 00000000 0 1.49999976158142 10 0 0 0a610ac4 1
Z1_176s_bd_exists: 0
Z1_176s_unknown02: 0 0
Z1_176s_unknown04: 256
Z1_176s_unknown05a: 2 0 2.04699921607971 2.04699921607971 2.04699921607971 0 0
Z1_176s_unknown05b: 68
Z1_176s_unknown05c: 0 1 -22
Z1_176s_unknown06: -1 0 -1 0 0 0 0

and it doesn't attempt to convert the terrain heightmap / texture map into a nice bitmap file or whatever. But there's nothing exceptionally obscure in the .scn, and you can completely ignore all of the chunks you don't care about (unlike, for example, AoK's empires2.dat in which you have to be able to read every single structure in the entire file before you can reliably parse a section of it).

But I'd be surprised if it was ever feasible to convert .scn files into RMS scripts

(Oh, and it's all compressed with the header "l33t" and then a standard Zlib-compressed stream of data. That's slightly nicer than in AoK, which removed the two-byte Zlib header and made it harder to recognise what compression algorithm was used...)

Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed...

(Reading that post made my head hurt and my stomach cramp... Seriously! )

Thank you all for replying to my post.
I've never intended to convert a scn file into a RMS one, but to be able to copy and paste parts of scn into RMS in order to create some kind of random-scenario map.
The size the file will have is not that important, because players have reasonable connections are d/l time will be short enough.
I absolutely respect the RMS creators, but i am just a scenario maker. Unfortunately scenarios of AoE3 can't be played on line, so i have tried to find an alternative to this problem.
Any sugestions? Thanks, guys.

Xamolxis

Oh, you mean like have a map that has objectives or something, but is set up randomly each time? Phew, don't think it'd work if that's what your after...

Quoted from Ykkrosh:

Well, I'm unsure if it's an unintended fault (=bug) or a frequently used programming trick to allocate a coherent block of memory to yoke saved datas and others like variables, shadow data, whatever. Anyway it isn't good programming style .. eats unnecessary disk space.

Are you able to change unit size and etc like we did by editing AoM's scn files?

hhmm .. my personal opinion: the granny 3D system should allow arbitrary scaling of models. But the crux: so far nobody has found a way to do ...

When I played a bit with the Granny Viewer, I saw that many data in .gr2 is defined by numbers between -1.0 and 1.0 (although sometimes higher seems to be used; HC models can go to well over 200.0...). Still my guess is that if you'd increase the 'box' the model is in, you can probably enlarge it.