[sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

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greatstone
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[sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by greatstone »

Delay between each release is longer each time, but that's life :)

So, a new release for the sck tool has been published today ( http://greatstone.free.fr/dm/index.html ).
There is a news on the web site explaining the stuff. So, to be short:
  • extractor supports animations files (the one beginning with "AN"): you can now see all the images, palettes, sounds, etc.

    Image
  • a standalone viewer engine has been created to play the animations on a standard/modern PC/Mac/Linux machine from the original files

    Image
  • animations played by the viewer have been recorded and published on YouTube Image ( http://www.youtube.com/user/GreatStoneEx )
  • IMG9, TXT3, ENT1 DM2 item formats are now supported to prepare the DM2 full support (mapfiles have not been updated accordingly yet, so extraction can be difficult)
The challenge was to handle every possible items supported by such animations and to test all animations of all DM/CSB/DM2 versions.
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Gambit37
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by Gambit37 »

Wow! Very cool! That's a lot of hard work you've put in there, I can't wait to try it out :)

EDIT: The link on the download page is wrong; it's pointing to a JAR file -- should be a ZIP.
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greatstone
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by greatstone »

Hello Gambit,

The link for the zip file has been fixed. Thanks for the short notice!
I will try now to update the mapfile inside the sck to "automatically" handle at least the DM2 PC graphics.dat.
Next, write extractor for the on-going hard work from Christophe about DM Nexus?
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Bit
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by Bit »

Love the tool, just helped me a lot!

One note about:
If you extract pictures 01...05 for DM it's fine, but in CSB another palette is used and so the result is wrong.
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greatstone
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by greatstone »

Hello Bit,

Can you precise me the file that you try to extract and the impacted items?
ex: CSB Amiga 3.5 (en) graphics.dat, items 0001 to 0005
The sck is able to extract many many versions/files, and such detail is necessary to understand the problem, if any.

Regards.
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Bit
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by Bit »

CSB for Atari ST, Version 2.0 (think en) - items 0001 to 0005 (it's intro graphic, entrance, both prisondoors and author's page, then another palette is activated, so the rest is okay)
It's included in my testclone: here

Btw: I still haven't read about all the features of sck, maybe it includes some sort of this - but I can tell you what I want to do now: create something that supports the creation of a wallset. As you know, a wallset is splitted in a lot of files, ugly to create such one manually.
But I bet there's a chance to create one wall picture, then calculate it that way, that the result can be stored in such a pack. If I finish it, would you be interested to include the function into your sck?
Even better than to start another one-function-tool.
That's for DM/CSB only I'd say - too less experience with DMII and the others.

Also - for my special purposes, I took sck, extracted graphics.dat, then had to resize the output-files x*3 y*3, converted all to truecolor, then save renamed as png again. Was no problem as batch conversion with the Irfan Viewer. But maybe for others this isn't that easy. Add such features too?
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ian_scho
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by ian_scho »

It was one thing to have an extractor to view an animation.... But another thing to be able to immediately jump into Google and search->find->play it! Thanks! Good job.
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by Adamo »

hey Greatstone! Amazing work! But I wonder if is possible you extract stuff (graphics) from other Amiga games, like Black Krypt, Evil`s Doom or EOB? There`s really a lot of stuff to rip and I din`t have idea how to do that.
Spoiler
(\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/) (\__/)
Spoiler
(@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@) (@.@)
Spoiler
(>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<) (>s<)
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greatstone
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by greatstone »

@Bit
For CSB palette issue, that's because the sck tries to extract also the palette directly from the original files and I don't know where it is in this version. Perhaps I can add some hard-coded palettes in the sck to deal with such situations and have correct colors. I will see what I can do.

wallset creation: I have still a lot to do to be able to extract all the remaining items/formats. I prefer to concentrate my efforts on the extraction feature, then perhaps add more later.

graphics conversion: again, extraction is my primary focus. I just have a converter inside the sck to generate png from bmp:

Code: Select all

  java -jar "<SCK_PATH>" convertMedia -dir "<directory_containing_bmps>" -src_ext "bmp" -dst_dir "<output_directory>" -dst_ext "png" -dst_type "png"
@ian_scho
It was a bit tedious to build all these videos but I know that dealing with command-line, dos, original files, etc. is also annoying from somebody, even if it is a pleasure for me :)

@Adamo
Extracting graphics from a game, like I do with the sck, is quite long as it is not a rip from the memory. We need to know how the graphics are stored in the original files and it can be different for each game.
Speaking about Black Crypt is a bit different because I have already started some research about this game :)
I have some mapfiles with a few images (and a wrong palette), txt and sounds. But there is still a lot to do, as you can see.
Image
Image
Image
Image

One day perhaps it will be better, or if I have some help on this topic?

G.
babebridou
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by babebridou »

Hello everyone, hi Greatstone and thanks for all the work you guys have put into keeping this game very alive :)

I'd like to get something straight - I've downloaded a couple CSBWin packages for both DM and CSB, and while data extraction is pretty straightforward with SCK & DM, I can't seem to be able to grab the main dungeon layout for CSB. Where can I find a proper dungeon.dat file for the main game of Chaos Strikes Back? I'm mainly looking for the dungeon definition right now (maps & items). The reason is, I'm currently having fun building a Unity3d game engine, and I'd very much like to use the same file format as CSBWin does for my level definition, I like the idea of bringing those legendary games up to speed with current technologies without altering the original gameplay & level design. More people need to taste the awesomeness :D

I'm so far in pre-pre-pre-alpha, walls, floors, roofs and stairs are generated straight from an SCK extraction of Dungeon Master's dungeon.dat file, and I can move around free-style from the hall of champions down to the dragon's lair (more or less, I haven't bothered actually going deeper than level 4-5, I expect the clockwise/turnback to be a showstopper anyway without actuators :P). I wanted to test the engine with another source file - and naturally wanted to try out CSB but couldn't perform a clean conversion to xml with map definitions, etc. If there's anything I missed, please let me know :)

Edit: apparently my tiny french brain forgot about the prison & stuff. Still, I get a java exception when I try to sckextract mini.dat (dowloaded from the encyclopedia over there).

Code: Select all

D:\sck>java -jar "D:\sck\sck.jar" extract mini.dat
INFO: Resource = mini.dat
INFO: Resource MD5 = 531EA104A2FBC2011EA73D11F274C57D
INFO: Detected format = DUNGEON
INFO: decoding header...
INFO: decoding maps definitions...
INFO: decoding 1st object on tiles...
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 42815
        at com.gse.lib.dm.data.DataDUNGEON.decode(DataDUNGEON.java:363)
        at com.gse.lib.dm.data.DataAdapter.decode(DataAdapter.java:533)
        at com.gse.lib.dm.MapItem.extractFromResource(MapItem.java:475)
        at com.gse.lib.dm.MapFile.extractItemsFromResource(MapFile.java:622)
        at com.gse.lib.dm.resource.MapableResource.readItemFromFile(MapableResou
rce.java:334)
        at com.gse.lib.dm.resource.MapableResource.decodeFromNative(MapableResou
rce.java:103)
        at com.gse.lib.dm.resource.MapableResource.extractFromNative(MapableReso
urce.java:170)
        at sck.Extract.run(Extract.java:244)
        at sck.Main.main(Main.java:200)

D:\sck>pause
Appuyez sur une touche pour continuer...
Anyway this is definitely not blocking to me at the moment so no need to be hasty. There's so much to be done elsewhere still :P Thanks again for your tool.
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ChristopheF
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by ChristopheF »

The CSB dungeon is not stored as a dungeon file but rather as a saved game file (mini.dat). This saved game file contains the dungeon data though, and my script here http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/1391 will extract the dungeon data from the mini.dat for you. Then you should be able to extract the dungeon with sck.
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Re: [sck] release 1.3 is out and handles animations

Post by babebridou »

Cheers Christophe, thanks, that was precisely what I needed.
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