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Originally Posted by jotd
I'm not sure about the "monster location and animation" part. IMHO it's only an animation block.
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I think you're right, some more of the fields in that table have become clear with that in mind!
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Furtermore, I believe that the structures are not read only but read/write (once loaded in memory of course), hence a lot of zeroes to store information during the game.
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Yes. I notice that in at least the first two maps, there are exactly 2 sets of 9 zero integers; exactly enough to store two tilemaps.
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If we write a functional editor, it could be possible to "import" original game data, and then add missing stuff that could not be found or which is in the code.
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Yeah if all else fails that's an option. I don't think keeping the level format in it's original form is right for a remake anyway.
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- the RJP format has no replayer for windows.
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There is XMPlay with the DeliX plugin (and Deliplayer itself), which can at least play back the music. We can always just rip the music as audio and compress as OGG\MP3.
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- the AI for the second computer player is not a piece of cake. I remind that the game release was delayed because of the AI. Well, maybe we could start with 1 player mode with all bonuses divided by 2 (money/powerups/health) so it's fair.
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Personally I think this isn't terribly difficult. Back then they had to write AI that ran acceptably fast on an A500. Today we have hundreds of times more processing power available even on low-end machines.
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- AGA GFX are a bitch to rip. I have written a tool to convert some AGA .BIN files to png, and then I recolor files by hand using screenshots. GFXRip is no use since bitplanes are not ordered properly, and the palette is weird (AGA shit): each monster must be recognized (I've done most of the recognition) and recolored (means that the game must be played with winuae and a lot of screenshots are required) => takes a lot of time. And it would not look very good in ECS 16 color mode.
- ECS GFX are not that easy to rip either.
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I have a mixture of AGA and ECS version graphics now. This is indeed a real pain.
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- SFX must be ripped without the music on (WinUAE can disable channels). Let's hope that the sound system does not have a channel allocation mode...
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WinUAE also has a nice sample ripper. I already have most of the vocal sounds ("Party Power!", "Node Activated!", etc.) ripped.
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- The game is complex, a lot more complex than Gods.
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our experience with Gods should help a lot though, you may have better insight into the Bitmap Brothers' minds
Here's how far I got;
http://www.dvdflick.net/storage/disarraydevice.zip
The level viewer is in the chaosspy directory.