Albion graphics (PC/DOS)

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 8:17 pm

Ok I found it, now to check how it looks ingame compared to the palletized image you submitted, it is monster graphic #36, I was using Game Extractor at the time. I will check.

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Sat Aug 11, 2007 10:59 pm

Great news!

Dare to compare!

Deniz Oezmen · Post by **Deniz Oezmen** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 1:34 am

Looks fine to me.

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 1:46 am

Thats an ingame screenshot of the graphic. A bit zoomed but you can tell that you were on the money with the palette.

Deniz Oezmen · Post by **Deniz Oezmen** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 7:13 pm

You'd like to have a converter now, wouldn't you?

(Until now, I have constructed the images by hand. Will see if I can whip something up.)

Edit: Try this here, example syntax:

Code: Select all

ALB2BMP *.img special.pal shared.pal

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:23 am

Works great so far, looks like you even included converting animation frames in separate BMPs from the # part, I'll have to try out an animated monster and see how that goes.

Edit: Another success!

Edit 2: Also I found the shared palette is I believe the one that isn't in a library but is an external one called "Palette.000" and it seems to be working just fine.

Deniz Oezmen · Post by **Deniz Oezmen** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 12:54 am

Nice to hear that it works.

Darkfox wrote:Also I found the shared palette is I believe the one that isn't in a library but is an external one called "Palette.000" and it seems to be working just fine.

Yes, I think that's the one I used for constructing the "manual" sample earlier.

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 1:03 am

Without any hitch it has successfully converted a monster graphic and all party full body graphics. Next is to try out 3D textures and objects which are done much like early FPS.

Excellent work!

Still I am confused why a tool to handle XLDs was made but nothing to handle sound or graphics. Well at least now there is something for graphics thanks to you and sound is no big problem.

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 5:22 am

Strangely they changed something for the 3D Objects. They are 2D images as well but for some odd reason will not convert them. Do they work for you or did they change something for these?

Edit: Backgrounds work but a similar problem is with tactical icons. I think these images lack certain... data O_o

Edit 2: So far what doesn't work is textures, "3D" objects, "3D" overlays, tactical icons. Still testing more. They seem to be raw images without any width data or anything in that manner. Floor graphics seem to be 64*64 block textures while wall textures are oddly variable. Perhaps the width of these would have been told by the 3D maps, which would be a bummer.

Edit 3: Overview character graphics like for walking around party members and NPC are handled differently but DO contain data at the beginning thankfully. Some examples can be seen here: http://download.yousendit.com/77BA5F2019E56B9C

I'd like to apologize for this, I had figured that it would keep this pattern... apparently there were exceptions. I don't exactly see how changing the method would help them any but ah well... converter still worked flawlessly on the things that use method 1.

Deniz Oezmen · Post by **Deniz Oezmen** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 9:29 am

You're right. There are those files without any header and those where the header exists, but is not repeated with each frame.

Strange unstructured formats are no fun.

Anyway, I've updated the converter to try and compensate for this. For the files which only contain one header, call

Code: Select all

ALB2BMP *.img special.pal shared.pal /noheadrepeat

For those without any header at all, try

Code: Select all

ALB2BMP *.img special.pal shared.pal /nohead:width,height

Obviously, you have to specify the dimensions yourself, unless we can be sure that only one frame is contained in every file. In that case just the width or height might be enough.

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 10:36 am

I'll try it out now, though one question...

For those like data099.dat (the animated torch, a 3D Object) how would it be handled? One image very long or is there a way the file tells where to cut the frames? Neither way bothers me but just curious.

Strange unstructured formats are no fun.

No argument here.

Hit me off guard. Didn't notice it until it crashed.

Deniz Oezmen · Post by **Deniz Oezmen** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 10:53 am

Darkfox wrote:For those like data099.dat (the animated torch, a 3D Object) how would it be handled?

It would produce seperate images for each frame, if I hadn't programmed a buggy piece of software.

Updated version available.

(That's why the program asks for the image height as well; if it didn't, it could just generate one large strip containing all frames.)

In that particular case, the image dimensions are 24x78.

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 11:01 am

I see, I believe that makes sense. And determining the width is no problem and I suppose a height wouldn't be difficult either using Texture Finder to figure out a fitting one. Again much appreciation.

Deniz Oezmen · Post by **Deniz Oezmen** » Thu Aug 16, 2007 11:19 am

You're welcome. See if you can find any other bugs.

Darkfox · Post by **Darkfox** » Sun Sep 02, 2007 5:20 am

No bugs so far but I did put together a small frontend for the program, it's not much but it handles each image and then when all information is filled out one just has to push a button and call up the program. I did it to pick up on things for my programming class but at the same time it streamlines the usage of ALB2BMP and I threw in some tooltips. It would have been done earlier today but I took effort to pretty it up with a custom cursor and icons and such which wasn't covered in class. All in all it was a learning experience to get my feet wet with.

Again thanks for the program.

XeNTaX

XeNTaX

Albion graphics (PC/DOS)