I can't extract the sprites from the .exe

[Singularity24601]

FrankTrollman said:

I second in saying that this would be the coolest thing ever.

-Frank

Indeed! The great majority of my modding time is currently spent on extracting exact sprites - and I've only completed a handful.

[DrPraetorious]

Maybe I'm just being dense, but I'm posting this so that no-one else has to duplicate my wasted effort . The long story short - the dom3 executable is only 5 MB, so they obviously aren't using .tga or .rgb to store O(2000) sprites.

Has anyone else had any success *finding* all the unit sprites buried in the executable itself?

I started on the assumption that all the unit sprites would have little .rgb or .tga headers.

So, I find specifications, here they are:
http://www.fileformat.info/format/sgiimage/
http://www.fileformat.info/format/tga/egff.htm

rgb file headers are supposed to start with the "magic number", 474. That'd be 0x01DA - and yes, the .rgb map files generated by the random map generator start with 01DA. Unfortunately 01DA only appears twice in the executable.

So, either the internal sprites aren't in rgb format, or they are, but part of the header is stripped off. Don't these guys know that programmer time is far more valuable than incremental performance improvements!?!?

TGA file headers don't have any magic numbers in them - so I'll try to find some headers in some custom sprites that Frank drew, and hope they're the same.

The header of a .tga file is 18 bytes long. I figure if any of this header info is retained, it'll be the size of the sprite, which is bytes 13-16 of the header.

This is 0x00800018 from Frank's .tga sprites.

Unfortunately, 00800018 doesn't appear at all in the executable .

The actual begining of Frank's .tga sprites is:
00 00 02 00

So, I counted those occurences - 1,478. That sounds (about) right, there are O(1000) units, 2 sprites each but many of them share sprites, so I tried splitting on 00 00 02 00.

I get 1,478 "tga" files but I can't actually open any of them. On examination I notice they're much too small.

This is when I did the math - Frank's .tga sprites are 50K each. 1000 such sprites would be 50MB. The dom3 executable is 5MB. Boy do I feel stupid.

trees.r3f is about the right size, though.

It has only 523 "00 00 02 00" in it (and no 01 DA) and I'm pretty sure this file is full of background wireframes for the tactical maps.

Ah well.

[paradoxharbinger]

if the sprites are being stored in the exe, they probably know exactly where the are and what format they are in so they would have no need for headers, just the raw data and the dimensions

[Gandalf Parker]

They arent in the exe.
Mostly its the files that start with 'army' which if you are lucky might be the same format

[Kristoffer O]

They are army.trs etc. It is no conventional format and is only used in JK's own program spooky sprites. I don't know anything about formats, but I suspect it might be difficult to extract them. It is possible to make tga's from the sprites in spooky, but I'm not sure if you can extract a whole bunch at a time. If so I could probably make a library of tga's for modders.

[Agrajag]

Kristoffer O said:
If so I could probably make a library of tga's for modders.

If you would do so you will be worshipped as a god even more than you were before

[FrankTrollman]

If so I could probably make a library of tga's for modders.

I second in saying that this would be the coolest thing ever.

-Frank

[DrPraetorious]

http://groups.google.com/group/comp....2?dmode=source

Whoah, an Atari Falcon. That takes me back. My parents wouldn't buy me one, but a couple of my friends had those.

If I can find an Atari Falcon emulator (check) and one that supports scripted input (not bloody likely) and then get a copy of JK's old freeware version of Spooky Sprites then, assuming the binary format he uses is the same, and assuming the old version supports extracting files into any sort of bitmap.... hmm....

[Nerfix]

It's a holy relic from a bygone age! :O

[Endoperez]

Nerfix said:
It's a holy relic from a bygone age! :O

Indeed! Praetarius, that was a great find!