Traduzione avventura Heart of China/Rise of the dragon, by Dynamix Opzioni

[Nyerguds]

The Stellar fonts are in "stellar.res". I just copied out the FNT chunks and saved them as separate files. They're in the simpler font format we found in these adventure games.

[Nyerguds]

I just got a very interesting email from Vasco Costa, one of the people working on this engine in ScummVM.

In his efforts to support all possible versions of these games, he discovered that the Macintosh version of HoC and RotD don't use the problematic VQT format, but instead use the BIN/VGA format, and a new format in an MA8 chunk, which is simply 8-bit data without the BIN/VGA split.

Now, he probably sent me this information (plus some sample files) hoping that with more comparison material I might be able to figure this out, but for you guys, this presents an immediate and complete solution: this means that even if we can't read the VQT chunks, we now have access to all the data in them in formats that we can read.

I already went through the rather annoying part of finding and extracting the macintosh versions (the archives used some weird .sit compression, which I managed to extract with the tool ExtractNow) and unpacking the VOLUME.### files (using my own quickly programmed extractor), so, here they are, for anyone to use: all the HoC and RotD resources, in viewable formats.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/h5ddznzocy7g...a+files+Mac.rar
http://www.mediafire.com/file/t2urjo66oowj...n+files+Mac.rar

You will of course need the new release of my file converter tool to read the new MA8 chunk format.

Messaggio modificato da Nyerguds il 16 Nov 2017, 00:32

[TheRuler]

That's a GREAT NEWS Maarten!
Thanks for the information and the material. From now on we'll be able to read all the graphics, edit and put it back in the same format? The engine should read the assets.

Downloading right now. Pleasant surprise!

[Nyerguds]

Well, I don't think the PC version can read the MA8 format, so anything you convert from MA8 will of course have to be saved back to BIN/VGA.

Messaggio modificato da Nyerguds il 16 Nov 2017, 08:01

[TheRuler]

Just curious to try! :P

[Nyerguds]

I just looked through the exe file, and the string "MA8" doesn't appear in it, so the game's reading logics have no MA8 support.

[TheRuler]

I just looked through the exe file, and the string "MA8" doesn't appear in it, so the game's reading logics have no MA8 support.

waaaah
You should have used SPOILER tags!

just kiddin', thanks for the check!
Happy to see you here again, Maarten.

[Nyerguds]

I'm just glad I finally managed to do something about this. It's not the breakthrough I'd hoped for, to actually figure out the VQT format, but still, it's good enough for the translation project.

Oh, I added MA8 save support to both the SCR and the BMP formats, but I believe in reality there aren't actually any BMP files that use it, heh.

On a related note, check out the dynamix.bmp. Seems they didn't save the whole star; they just saved the top and left line of it, and probably just mirror and flip it for the other half

[edit]

And here we got the stuff that we needed this for



A note on modding: I'm not sure if any of the images can be changed in dimensions, but if you do want/need to do that (the credits titles come to mind), keep in mind that the Dynamix image formats can only support pixel widths divisible by 8.

Messaggio modificato da Nyerguds il 16 Nov 2017, 00:08

[Nyerguds]

It seems that the image data in the MA8 chunks consistently has its 00 and FF indices switched for some bizarre reason. I suspected it from opening a number of scr files, and finally confirmed it on both FTANK3S.SCR and FSEWER3.SCR, the only BIN/VGA-format .scr files in the PC versions. Judging from the data in the bmp files, and in the bin/vga scr files in Rise of the Dragon (which doesn't use MA8) this is not some difference in image handling on the mac version, either. The change only appears in the files using an MA8 chunk.

So I released a new update of the file converter which simply does a small extra processing to switch the 00 and FF values in the image data of MA8 chunks.

Messaggio modificato da Nyerguds il 16 Nov 2017, 09:07

[Nyerguds]

So, did this project ever continue?

[rolloLG]

I hope so...

[Nyerguds]

Thanks to someone digging into The Incredible Machine on the Shikadi modding wiki, I've been researching another type of the Dynamix .BMP format, namely, a 4-bit format with an "SCN" chunk inside.

And it just so happens that Heart of China uses a few files in that format, for displaying text...



I'm still testing the compression algorithm at the moment; it's a pretty complex one. But the results looks promising so far.

Messaggio modificato da Nyerguds il 30 Jan 2021, 02:06

[Ragfox]

I'm still testing the compression algorithm at the moment; it's a pretty complex one. But the results looks promising so far.

Amazing!

[Nyerguds]

It works!

Original:


Translated to French as showcase. I don't really know Italian, lol

In Engie:


In-game:


NOTE THAT IMAGES OF THIS FORMAT WILL REFUSE TO SAVE IF THE IMAGE DATA CONTAINS PIXEL VALUES THAT ARE FURTHER APART THAN 16 IN VALUE.

They are essentially 4-bit images that can be 'pushed up' to higher indices on the palette. The nice part is that this ignores transparency, so in 8-bit games, you have 16 values for colours, and a transparency value.

Messaggio modificato da Nyerguds il 31 Jan 2021, 00:49

[TheRuler]

Glad to see you, Maarten, hope you were ok.
Downloaded right now the new engie version, hoping to put the hands on this long waited translation again soon. It's now almost two year straight that I stopped translating oldgames. No good. ;-)

[Nyerguds]

Ah, then I hope this can get you some motivation to look into it again

I also fixed a bug in Engie that made colour palettes not save 100% correctly when converting them from 8-bit to 6-bit and then back to 8-bit. I should really just switch all internal palette handling to 8-bit, honestly :-\


For the palette on these SCN-BMP images , the best way is to take a screenshot of the scene, see what index-range is used by the image, save the palette to file using Engie; and then just use a hex editor to clear all unused colours to a colour not used on the image (like the red here).

The palette are just triplets of bytes, so it's not really hard; I just changed the first triplet to magenta (in 6-bit, that's [3F 00 3F]; on 8-bit it'd be [FF 00 FF]), and all the others to red (6-bit: [3F 00 00], 8-bit: [FF 00 00]) except for that 16 colour range in the middle.

This way, you can edit the image without worries that it will save other colours. I know Gimp is really bad with this.

The images that use this system are the newspaper fragments (in volume.001), the credits (in volume.002), and all animations of Chinese text morphing into English text (in volume.006).

VOLUME.001: NPHKHERL.BMP
VOLUME.001: NPKATLED.BMP
VOLUME.002: TITLCRED.BMP
VOLUME.006: LATERDAY.BMP
VOLUME.006: MEANWHIL.BMP
VOLUME.006: NISHNGH2.BMP
VOLUME.006: THEEND.BMP

Some of them seem to be accompanied by a colour palette, meaning Engie will automatically load that palette when opening the file, but the palette doesn't actually seem to match the image. I'm not sure what's up with that. You can prevent that automatic palette loading by just opening the file somewhere where the palette file isn't with it. As I said, just use screenshots to get the palettes.

I only tested this on the newspaper intro so far; I haven't dug deep enough into the game to figure out how to progress to the points where I can see the other animations.

[edit]

Saving you some work: the palettes.

 HOC_16_colour_palettes.zip ( 670byte ) Numero di download: 2


Messaggio modificato da Nyerguds il 26 Feb 2021, 21:02

[rolloLG]

In trepidante attesa da 31 anni...