Good thing Xav quoted you, Paul, I didn't spot your edit. :P Fantastic to hear, and I'm looking forward to the AE background extractions. ;)
Scraby, thanks for the link, that interview is new to me. It doesn't say the game was originally 3D, just points out that the character sprites are made from animated 3D models. |
yeah i know,i found something about it from lorne that everything was made 3d at the first place,np max :D
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I don't have much free time these days with real life and all, here is a short list of what I've got planned:
1. Clean up the cam decoding stuff and release it as a quick command line app so AE cams can be converted. 2. Get AE sprites decoded to the same stage as AO 3. Fix the AO (and likely AE) sprite W/H issues 4. Attempt to decode the FG1 segments of AO/AE cam files 5. Try to convert the basic sound samples for game speak 6. Start work on tagging all of the data/making an editor for a new engine Edit: I suppose fonts should be in there somewhere too.. |
Well good luck with it Paul!
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GOOD LUCK PAUL!!!!!!
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This is not the place for this Oddworld_game_maker.
I'm editing it out, go post it where it belongs. |
Yeah Paul, good luck with making the level editor!
If you do complete it, Paul, then I will be so happy. :) |
re:.lvl files
Longest thread ever, I remember when i first saw this, the thread is nearly older than oddworld itself (with exaggeration ofc)
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Ahh yes, this has sure come a long way...just remember to include a readme file for the people who download it Paul, it'll save your PM box from exploding!
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Yeah, nearly all of us would need some sort of readme file to be able to use it. Good thinking Chubfish, and thank you Paul. :)
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good luck paul.... hope you do it quickly so that you have more free time :)
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Thanks guys, I'm about half way there with the silly little GUI app at the moment, so will likely be a few more weeks before its done :(
It will only support converting AO and AE PC format cam files. |
Sorry to keep asking, but what exactly will hopefully be done in a few weeks? :)
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A tool to convert AE cam files to bmp\png\whatever
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Or what the levels look like? |
The look of the levels.
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No this will only allow you to view all of the background images, re compressing AE cam files is out of the question (unless you feel like donating a large amount of cash to me ;)).
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Yeah. But it would look stupid because each background is made for the screen's specific platform loacations.
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Paul, have you already made the program to convert exoddus cams into bmps, but in a console version? Cause im just happy with that.
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Ahh, it's ok Paul. I will just just make Abe's Exoddysee/Oddoxodus or something! There are some screens which are very similar both on Exoddus and on Oddysee (obviously not graphically, but the layout is) and I intend to make some sort of weird level by mixing cam files around.
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Chubfish I hope to see your work someday. Abe's Oddysee with the Exoddus Graphics would be awesome!
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So here is the decoder app at last, download the file and remove the .ttf so it ends with .zip and extract. Follow the readme and there you go!
From my testing it all seems fine apart from there could be an issue with 1 AE cam file not converting properly (STP01C11.CAM). Or it could be this is how the file is supposed to look. Don't bother asking about replacing CAM images in AE because its NOT going to happen. Edit: Oh BTW this will also convert pretty fast since its mulit threaded, it took about 2mins to convert all AE and AO files on my laptop :D Since this uses Qt it builds and runs on Linux (which is what I developed it on) but I won't be releasing any Linux versions, I tested it under wine and it appeared to function correctly. |
I found something weird using this tool. In ba.lvl, we have BAP03C15 and BAP05C15 which are exactly the same (And a few others, too). What could this possibly mean?
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Exactly the same? Are the source files the same?
Edit, I see them, strange.. maybe one has some extra data blocks such as Font or whatever.. could try removing one or the other and going to that screen. Also what does your STP01C11.CAM look like? |
Thanks for that! I'm going to try it out this afternoon.
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THANKYOU so much for making it multi-threaded! It took me 13 seconds to convert all cams from each game!
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Black, a few cyan lines on top. File attached. |
Hmm I'll have a look at it later, I think the problem is that it might be getting detected as an AO cam file, I think that is the only one that fails though :(
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Man I can't imagine how long it wouldve taken you to reverse engineer all the code and files from the games and write this decoder program but it's really brilliant. OWI would be proud. Good work man.
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Thanks, I fixed the issue with the broken cam file, turns it out its just black anyway so I won't bother releasing a fix for it just yet.
In the next version I'll hopefully have FG1/Font or Anim added in! This could take any amount of time though ;) |
Great, Paul! I'll keep an eye on this thread!
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I'm making a vid for youtube that has all the cam files for each game, in the order that they should go. (Level order: e.g. R1, E1, L1, F1, F2, F4) Each cam is shown for .10 seconds. Ill post a link in the fan corner when done. Thanks again Paul EDIT: here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1taUnL5iu0 |
Here is the next release of the decoder app, the one cam that didn't convert properly has been fixed. And it will now attempt to convert all AO sprites (yes it really should be *all* of them).
Edit: Forgot to mention, it requires the DLL's from the previous version. Double edit: Also forgot to say that AE sprites are in the works for the next version, hopefully to the same level of completeness as AO ;) |
Great job on all the sprites! I found a *bug* with your Decoder V0.2, in which when you choose the output folder using the programs 'choose' a folder feature, e.g. C:\~\ODD CAM\converted the program renames each new folder to:
convertedABEBLOW.BAN in the ODD CAM\ folder, instead of ODD CAM\converted\ I can get around this by just adding a \ to the end of the line, but maybe you could update it in V0.3. :) |
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I made A nice little Animation viewer for all!
Can anyone find the easter egg? :P Oh and paul, are you willing to give me the source code just for ban and bnd files. I just want to implement it into my program. :) |
I'm not sharing my code at the moment ;( Besides its C++ so you can't use it directly in a vb/c# app.
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