Help with Xenon 2

[jotd]

sprites are on my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gt9affswpw...rites.zip?dl=0

no tilemaps though.

CTDV version probably is the easiest since it has files. I'd check files "LEVEL1 -> LEVEL5". The end of the files seem to contain maps (small values, repeated)

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by jotd

sprites are on my dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gt9affswpw...rites.zip?dl=0

no tilemaps though.

CTDV version probably is the easiest since it has files. I'd check files "LEVEL1 -> LEVEL5". The end of the files seem to contain maps (small values, repeated)

Looks like your files are gone on you drop box.

Will check out the CDTV version.

[jotd]

link https://www.dropbox.com/s/bznxk6p146...rites.zip?dl=0

[iamseph]

Originally Posted by Total Eclipse

This is my first post here (but hopefully the first of many )

I've been wanting to get hold of the sprites and tiles from Xenon2 for ages, to use in a GBA project (I'm teaching myself programming on the GBA).

I've tried extracting images using GfxRip, but I'm not getting anywhere - I can see a few images in the 2 colour mode, but can't figure out how to get a 4 bitplane sprite - there's loads of garbage over the graphics.

I've tried ripping from a UAE snapshot, and also a WHDLoad disk image. In both cases I can see stuff, but don't know how to get a clean image.

So far, I've been having to take screen grabs, then clean up the image (remove ships, bullets, backgrounds etc) in PSP

Originally Posted by maVado

im almost through it, i have 4 levels ripped, and i also seperated the spritesheets and build the bosses, also i did a sorting on the tiles, see attached level 1 and 2 fully ripped

Edit: Level 3 added

Edit: Level 4 added

Originally Posted by jotd

link https://www.dropbox.com/s/bznxk6p146...rites.zip?dl=0

I played Xenon 2 in the last century on the SMS and I have to say, I had some rose-tinting which was destroyed when I got a DOS copy recently to play it again.

As I got into building games in Unity recently I'd like to rebuild Xenon 2 with a few changes here and there.

I came across this forum looking for how to get the graphics and you guys have done an awesome job extracting them! I just wanted to ask if anyone had actually already done a re-imagining of Xenon 2 there isn't much point doing it again.



Also (and I realise this thread has been on-and-off active for 2 decades here so don't know if anyone will even read this) for anyone else interested in seeing Xenon 2 rebuilt, does anyone have any change/feature requests?


Current feature plans:

* Better hit detection
* Smarter bosses (getting rid of any "blind spots" where you can hurt them but they can't hurt you)

* Fixing the standard fire rate so you don't need to button mash
* Make the shop and upgrade system more intuitive (even after playing the game for hundreds of hours I never worked out what everything did)
* Add a few extra options for how to equip your ship (like being able to drag-and-drop your weapon pods so you can change the positions)
* Replace laser projectiles with proper laser beams
* Add lighting effects and normal maps, I think the graphics will work well with a lot of light and shadow use
* Add an ending

[DisasterIncarna]

placeable weapon pods? sounds a lot like X-Out, which is no bad thing. all this sounds damn good tbh, hope you get somewhere and some responses from the big brains.

[iamseph]

I've started building the first level. Just placing tiles at the moment painstakingly one at a time.

Bit of a slog, but doesn't take a whole lot of effort. Though I'm glad that there are only five levels to rebuild like this XD

Once I've got the level tiles set up I'll start working on implementing the player and enemy behaviour.

[jotd]

from level map there are tools to compute tiles and map them for you. I think I even wrote one. Of course the rips don't contain the full tilemap...

[iamseph]

Originally Posted by jotd

from level map there are tools to compute tiles and map them for you. I think I even wrote one. Of course the rips don't contain the full tilemap...

Uh, I don't think I know what level map or tools you're referring to. Can you point me in the right direction?


If it's something to do with those CDTV files, I have no idea what those are.

[jotd]

I mean: if you have the ripped PNGs of the background, some tools can detect the tiles and extract them. It's easy, specially if you know it's 16x16. Extract the first one, move x+16 extract the second one, see if it's the same as the first one, repeat...

In the end you get a list of tile indexes and tile images, that can rebuild the whole level.

Useful when the levels are ripped as PNG but you don't know how it was done

[iamseph]

Oh, no I don't have images of the level background. I don't know how I'd even get that cleanly, trying to cap it from the game and join the caps together would have a lot of issues with enemies and projectiles overlapping tiles.

Rebuilding it tile by tile doesn't seem so slow that doing that would be faster anyway. I I've almost finished level 1.

[jotd]

it's been done for a lot of games, by people who used custom tools and rebuilt images but didn't share how they did (a recent example here: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...scramble+level). There a tile mapper is useful.

But yes, sometimes a tedious work that you can do in hours is better than looking for a smart solution for days and not finding it

[Retro1234]

I created a program to do this and turning the pictures of Maps in HOL back into real Maps was fun. You can even use a paint package like Paintshop as a map editor. Turn on the Grid 16x16 and edit then run the finished picture back through the program.

[iamseph]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I created a program to do this and turning the pictures of Maps in HOL back into real Maps was fun. You can even use a paint package like Paintshop as a map editor. Turn on the Grid 16x16 and edit then run the finished picture back through the program.

That's awesome! If you wouldn't mind sharing that with me, I'd certainly be interested in giving it a try so I can see whether it's more or less time consuming than doing it manually.

[iamseph]

I've noticed in the files people have been able to rip there appears to be no sign of the player status bar (with health rating, # of lives left, etc). Have I missed something? Or are people able to find the artwork for that? It's not so complicated that I couldn't put something together myself (or even just screen cap it from the game) but if the images are already out there somewhere not much point.

Progress so far:
Level 1 mapping complete
Player ship moves and shoots (with animation and manoeuvre jets)
The level scrolls (with a cool parallax starfield moving below you that I built from scratch)

The first static shooter enemy is working, shoots, can be shot or collided with (including damage flashes and animation), I think it's complete


https://www.dropbox.com/s/8aahzw6dl5..._gif1.gif?dl=0


I'm going to continue doing all the static enemies first as they're much simpler and don't have to move. I'm drawing diagrams of the other enemy move patterns as I go and have started thinking about how to code in their movement.

[Retro1234]

It's horrible mess all command line etc - If you link me the pictures.

[Retro1234]

I uploaded a map created from the picture in the first post of this thread to the zone.
90 Tiles were created. Probably not right some look way too similar.
The map is 16px tiles 20x75 Word. - You can view it in Maptapper or whatever.

[hajodick]

This post started back in 2005 and - as far as I understand it - no one ever extracted full tilesets and built the levelmaps. Even HOL doesn't have them.

With Xenon2, everything works "a little bit" different. So let's start with some technical stuff - what I found out only from work with the savestates of all 5 levels:

• Xenon2 - the game of course / intro may be different but it doesn't seem so - work in 4 bitplanes using all 16 colors.
• The background image that is scrolling at the half speed of the foreground is done in 2 bitplanes and uses the first 4 colors (COLOR00 - COLOR03).
• The game screen has a size of 320x192 pixels - double buffering is used.
• There seems to be no copper trickery with the modulo registers to do the vertical scroll as it is done e.g. in Leander.
• The whole screen seems to be created at every frame. This means: Background setup, tile insert and any kind of animation in the foreground graphics and the game objects itself. Maybe 99% of the available frame time has been used in this game.
• The graphics - besides the background - are stored with masks BEFORE the image data. The game objects vary in size in width and height.
• The tiles directly follow the moving game objects and have a common size of 16x16 pixels. When all pixels in a tile are set somewhere in the 4 bitplanes, NO mask is stored - The raw tile size is 128 bytes.
• All other tiles have a mask BEFORE the image data and therefore have a size of 160 pixels each.
• So the tileset consists of tiles with varying size. A special peace of code and some maptapper work was necessary to write out the bitmap data itself. Therefore I identified each consecutive set of tiles with or without a mask and stored data pairs (0=Plain ILBM or 1=Masked ILBM) and the amount of tiles. The rip routine only needed the start address of the tiles in a savestate and the color palette and saved to tileset in IFF-ILBM and ILBM-BLIT without any masks.

Now let's finish part I with the tilesets in PNG. With the level maps - and in the near future on my website - an archive will be available in the zone with all relevant data (IFF Files !!!) that I used for the rip and created.

[hajodick]

The levelmaps are the most difficult rip I've done so far. Even more difficult than Z-Out.

• All 5 levels have a common size of 320x4800 pixels or 20x300 tiles each. This makes up 12000 bytes for the map data.
• They are not encoded with small numeric values as known from so may maps, but it seems that they have pointers to a data structure that defines the outcome of each tile. I was not able to locate and interpret such a structure so there had to be another way.
• I used some excel sheets and transferred the map data into it. On the other hand I generated an address table while ripping the tiles, that were put in that excel file too. With some trickery, I could get a self-made structure for the tiles.
• The result of this work gave me the tile number in the tile sets (the ILBM-BLIT files) for each encoding in the original map data (the 12000 byte files).
• The map was then encoded in that new way and the rest was simple cookie-cut-blitting the tiles - no distinction of masked and unmasked tiles here - over the background, that has been repeated 25 times before.

The Archive in the Zone: https://eab.abime.net/zone/hajodick_xenon2_hol.zip

Now I'll do something else... Work on my Stamp Collection or rip some maps from arcades... No idea so far.

At least I can say, that I'm very proud of this rip. Tried several times but never got a grip on it - as many others before. Finally it has been done - Yeah

[kamelito]

Kudos

[Total Eclipse]

Wow, incredible work.

Does this mean I need to try and work on my GBA code again?

Seriously though, that's some excellent work. I tried using maptapper about a year ago to see if I could rip anything of interest, and all the graphics seemed to have some weird offsets.