Looking for file format information

Started by zennehoy, February 03, 2008, 03:31:47 PM

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EricLang

Ok. It's about a few days work. And I will make some notes about the structure. I'll post a message here when it's uploaded (probably the lemmingarchive of mindless)

zennehoy

Left to do: Miner, Basher, Exploder, GUI... and trigger offsets. That last one is driving me nuts, my Lemmings keep walking just under or just over certain triggers, depending on the y coordinate of the trigger object, the type of trigger object, the Lemming's current action, etc. Most susceptible are the pillar squishing traps in the squasher graphics set, but I can't seem to get the y position of my blockers to be 100% accurate either.

Does anyone know what coordinate offset the lemmings use to index the "trigger field" (i.e. the 4x4 pixel resolution field used to store trigger information?) How about the offsets written by blockers? Finally, is the "top=trigger_top * 4 - 4" equation in ccexplore's GROUND file format description accurate?

Actually, I know that at least one person here knows ;)
Thanks!
Zen

EricLang

Give me one more week. I almost got all info.

zennehoy

Np, I'll just keep hacking away at it. Of course that means I may not even look at your code in the end... ;)
As for a status update: the main menu GUI (including DHTML Lemmings-like level selection) is almost complete, miners, bashers and exploders are still missing though.

Btw I figured out the trigger field offset: ccexplore's format description (top=trigger_top*4-4) is correct, but lemmings actually check the trigger point one pixel below their current position, i.e. (x,y+1).
Blockers insert two columns of three pixels each, (x-1,y-1), (x-1,y), (x-1,y+1) and (x+1,...), the first indicating for lemmings to turn left, the other to turn right. Just as a note for anyone else who's interested. (At least that's how I think it works, please correct me if I'm wrong.)

On a different note, how many people here actually have a PDA with WM5.0 or above that could help me beta test? Should I try to compile a regular windows executable as well?
Cheers,
Zen

EricLang

Do not despair...
I have all files now (i hope) to make a complete recompilation. Now I need a few days to write a readme.txt. So I guess I will upload all source code of the lemming-clones in the weekend.

zennehoy

Awesome, thank you for all your work!
Zen


zennehoy

Great, thank you! Finally no more staring at pixels to figure out if lemmings can drop by 65 or 66 without splatting! I hope so at least, I'll have to see if I can understand your code first :)

On a completely different note: are the "We all fall down" levels truly trivial? Or is it a bug that affects only the DOS version?
Thanks again!
Zen

zennehoy

*weeps at the sight of the "Mechanics" subdirectory*
So sorry to make you go through all the trouble of posting your code when it turns out that that one directory is all that I'll likely be using. Oh how I wish I'd known about this beforehand! Still, open-sourcing something is imho always a good step to take, and I'm sure your code will be useful as well.
Now to see how close my own approximations of lemming movement rules are...
Zen

EricLang

No problem. I was planning to make it open source anyway, so this was a good opportunity.
Have fun with it.

zennehoy

Does anyone have a list of what levels correspond to what DAT file and index within that DAT file? How about the indexes of ODDTABLE.DAT? I'm just adding the ODDTABLE levels to Pocket Lemmings, and it's a lot of busy work...
Thanks!
Zen

EricLang

There is some info in my LemDosStyle.pas. And also a thread on this or an older forum.
Unfortunately no time coming days to help you further.