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Post by Perfect Grunt on Sept 22, 2012 0:03:06 GMT -8
Reverse Engineering? Nooooooo... Even with the sources it would be tough. I do not know how it is written (and if it follows any design patterns), what we want to do is not just a few changes but also the DirectX-dependent part of the game core and if we are really good the whole networking modules. And to speak about those having the idea of many, many, Gruntz while playing Battlez with many, many people: For that being able to work we would have to reorganize the complete game core. Is there anybody here who can do that with the reverse-engineered assembler code?
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Post by Blaze The Movie Fan on Sept 22, 2012 15:45:23 GMT -8
Honestly, I'm starting to lose hope. The fact that the game can't be played on Windows 7 is another reason why the game will soon die and be forgotten in a few years.
I don't wanna see this community dying, but if most of the fans of Gruntz can't play it on a new computer, what can we do?
I am starting to give up. Wanting to get the game more popular is a dream that can't happen.
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GooRoo
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Post by GooRoo on Sept 22, 2012 20:11:13 GMT -8
Honestly, I'm starting to lose hope. The fact that the game can't be played on Windows 7 is another reason why the game will soon die and be forgotten in a few years. I don't wanna see this community dying, but if most of the fans of Gruntz can't play it on a new computer, what can we do? I am starting to give up. Wanting to get the game more popular is a dream that can't happen. What makez you think that Gruntz cannot be played on Windoze 7 machinez? There have been several postz regarding difficulty in installing Gruntz on 7, because the installer does not work ... but manual installation workz! Also, there is far too much emphasis placed upon 'the newest technology'. My wife still has a Windoze 98 computer she keepz around just to play older gamez. Why get rid of your Millenium/Vista/98/95 computer? If it still workz, put it in a corner and bring it out when you want to play that older game you love.
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Zu
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Post by Zu on Sept 22, 2012 20:18:29 GMT -8
Honestly, I'm starting to lose hope. The fact that the game can't be played on Windows 7 is another reason why the game will soon die and be forgotten in a few years. The only people to blame here are guys at Microsoft and everyone who for some reason thought that replacing WinXP with this awful Win7 will be a good idea. Because in my opinion, the ONLY reason Vista and 7 exist is that Micro$oft has to keep making muneys from selling new systems, whether they're good or not. Because really, replacing XP with 7 is just a waste of resources (notice how 7 requires more RAM than XP to work properly) and tons of incompatibilities with older programs, and the only advantage of having it is DX10, and to actually see how it differs from DX9, you have to compare screenshots from both with a magnifying glass. I keep having XP on my system and it's more likely that I'll die than replace it with this completely unnecessary, inferior 7. So I for one won't loose the ability to play Gruntz.
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Post by Perfect Grunt on Sept 23, 2012 0:41:23 GMT -8
Hey guys, Gruntz works fine with Windows 7! It even works better with Windows 7 than with Windows XP (there is a malfunction causing the game to freeze if you do not turn off all sounds, which has only occurred under XP for me). Anyway: Gruntz is still on my big ToDo list...
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Post by hugheth2 on Sept 24, 2012 9:17:45 GMT -8
Pretty sure something fairly major has changed within the community in the last 2 years! I got pretty far down the line of making a sequel: lifeordeath.org/gruntz/ The latest release includes a playable level that takes about 1 hour, though I didn't get round to adding saving and loading when the program is shut down which put a lot of people off. I've taken a break from making this sequel to focus on improving my game engine, which is going to be used to improve the speed / network-ability and savability of the game. The main problem I found was the animation information of sprites is stored in the .ANI files, which I have yet to work out how they work. This stores offset and time duration of each frame, meaning the animations play VERY badly if they're not extracted from the ANI files. The reason this project hasn't taken off is because there aren't any coders left in the community If any of you are ever interested in helping out with the sequel, do contact me at thehugheth[at]gmail.com The project is open source, though there are a lot of new features and changes to my engine that could be incorperated to the game if I had the time (perhaps Christmas holidays?) and the engine is a bit more stable.
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Post by Perfect Grunt on Sept 24, 2012 11:18:25 GMT -8
I wouldn't call myself a coder, but I can have a look at it and then tell you how far above my knowledge it is.
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Tomalla
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Post by Tomalla on Sept 25, 2012 5:11:40 GMT -8
I am a coder, though I'm not familiar with Java. I use C++ for all my projects. Sure, I think I could just take a look at the source code and try to do something with it, but we all know you will do everything better anyway If emails sent to Monolith are left with no response, why can't someone just pay a visit to the Monolith headquarters and have a look around? Or get a telephone number which could help us reach someone working there. By the way Hugh, what happened to your former account and website?
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Post by hugheth2 on Sept 25, 2012 7:28:48 GMT -8
I'm glad that you're interested in programming! It is very fun I would love to say that you should go right ahead and play with it, but as I said I've made a lot of changes that I'll likely refactor into game, there's probably not much point at the moment. What I'd really love is to get to a point where you and other coders and even non-coders could help me with developing the tools & toys for grunts, things like working out when & how much damage they do etc. Then everyone could code up their favourite tool into the game The fact you're interested though is very cool. Java is much easier than C++. In fact, I might try and make the changes in the next month or so to get Alpha 3 out and a much more rigid source. My old website expired and I couldn't be bothered to pay the excess to have it transferred to my new account. I have a new business now called PointCliki so I decided to buy that domain instead. My old account I typed the password in wrong so reset my password to save time, forgetting that the email went to my old hugheth.com email address! So I can't retrieve my password ever
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GooRoo
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Post by GooRoo on Sept 25, 2012 7:31:59 GMT -8
I may be the one living closest to the Monolith headquarterz, but I have never made an effort to contact them via telephone. For me, even 'information' is a chargeable call, which stickz in my craw. But I will make a trip to the local library and see if I can locate a current Seattle area telephone directory and get the number.
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Post by hugheth2 on Sept 26, 2012 1:42:51 GMT -8
To reflect what Zu said earlier, I'm going to continue playing with the concept of Gruntz 2 until a receive my cease and desist letter, at which point I'll be replacing all the graphics and renaming the game Monkz. I believe the greatest gift that we can give to Monolith is continuing their dream of the game from all those years ago.
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Post by Tomalla on Sept 26, 2012 10:56:35 GMT -8
If we were forced to actually change the name, I wouldn't choose "Monkz". I'd prefer something more ... gruntzy. For instance, anything with "goo" in it would be better Hugh, when it comes to images and animations: I've decoded tonight the most important data from ANI files, which includes: reading a sequence of particular frames, their timing and the timing of the sound effects played in game. Now I need to check if this pattern is uniform in all ANI files and compare the differences. After that ... well, I suppose writing a little test app rendering all of these animations shouldn't do any harm Cheers
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GooRoo
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Post by GooRoo on Sept 26, 2012 12:14:38 GMT -8
If we were forced to actually change the name, I wouldn't choose "Monkz". I'd prefer something more ... gruntzy. For instance, anything with "goo" in it would be better Hugh, when it comes to images and animations: I've decoded tonight the most important data from ANI files, which includes: reading a sequence of particular frames, their timing and the timing of the sound effects played in game. Now I need to check if this pattern is uniform in all ANI files and compare the differences. After that ... well, I suppose writing a little test app rendering all of these animations shouldn't do any harm Cheers I would be interested in such a program to directly interface with Gruntz ANIz. Everything I have done has been painstakingly manual ... and time-consuming. There are still Gruntz animationz that I have not made available for use in the Gruntz Level Editor Manual ... but the recent inactivity has greatly reduced my incentive ... I am feeling (these dayz) like I am beating a dead horse.
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Post by hugheth2 on Sept 28, 2012 5:20:48 GMT -8
Tomalla this is VERY, VERY good news looks like giving gruntz tools and toys in Gruntz 2 just got a lot easier by saving hundreds of hours of time! The remaining problem seems to be working out the offset of each frame from a particular point. I'd be intruiged to know if you've worked this out, and how you managed to extract the timing data, as it doesn't sound like it's going to be as much of a problem as I originally thought it would.. It's a shame about the inactivity. I hope that when Dizgruntled starts being more playable I will be able to attract more people back to the forums, which if you don't mind I'd like to use as support / conversation for the sequel. I also plan at some stage to try and work out how the wap world files work, and make a converter to convert them into new levels. GooRoo, is there a link to download the original levels as wap world files? I seem to remember finding this a few years back..
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Tomalla
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Post by Tomalla on Sept 28, 2012 6:50:44 GMT -8
Decoding Wap files? It's not that easy, really. I've been working with two people already who wanted to decrypt WWD files, one of which was willing to publish a library designated just for that. Might be helpful in your case. Here are stock levels I've just packed: dl.dropbox.com/u/18806920/Levels.rarAnd back to ANI files: I've successfully decoded all of the essential data ( there are few fields that are yet to be decoded but it's not a priority right now ). I've even run a little test: I've edited the raw REZ file and replaced the sounds of one animation and changed its timing. The results? When a Grunt breakes his Moster Wheel, instead of blinking sound the game uses the sound of falling into a hole ( whoosh sound! ) and one of his blinks lasts for 15 seconds It looks ridiculously ... awesome! However, there's still a problem: all of the animation files are being ... shared. For instance there's only one animation file designated for rising a pyramid - it's just a list of frames' IDs which are stored in a folder. The game chooses what folder should be the source for animation frames. The point is in order to play an animation in my viewer, you'd have to point a finger at a correct folder which contains your PID frames ( which normally would be the job of the game, right? ). That makes the tool less user-friendly, but what can I do? If you want me to extract some data out of these animations for use in Gruntz 2, just tell me what form do you want them in. It'll be a matter of seconds for my test program to spit out the data in a form you want. ==EDIT: Right, about "aligning" the frames. Each frame has its "hotspot" which is the anchor point for the game to render them properly. It's a part of data stored in every PID file iirc. I'll look into that. ( Another EDIT ): Yup, it's in a header of every PID file. Heh, I completely forgot about that. Well, I'd recall it fast enough when I rendered my first animation Cheers
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Post by hugheth2 on Sept 28, 2012 7:49:08 GMT -8
Sweet news about the ANI files and PID files Do you have any handy way of extracting the hotspot data from the PID files? This is wonderful! I'd really like to get the data into configuration files in JSON format, if you know how to output that. I guess what I'd need is for each ANI file, an equivalent json file that lists the properties of each frame / sounds in a subsection. And then for each folder of PID files, a json file that lists the offsets of each frame Early days though, I think there's a lot of optimization that can be done i.e. in most cases a single ANI file can be associated with a set of images. Can you tell me: - whether you can work out how export into JSON format, else tell me how you're reading the ANI and PID files - whether you think it would be practical to have a configuration file for each ANI file, associating sound timing with pictures, their offsets and their animation delay, so that I could eventually bake this information into a single config file for each tool / toy? I'm looking at a timeline of weeks / a number of months for getting it all working, so really no pressure
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Tomalla
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Post by Tomalla on Sept 28, 2012 8:13:45 GMT -8
Hugh, I feel like it's going a little off the topic here Maybe we should carry on with our discussion in one of the old threads about Gruntz 2? I'll answer your questions there Just let me know which thread you will pick 'cause there was a few of them.
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GooRoo
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Post by GooRoo on Sept 28, 2012 8:21:07 GMT -8
GooRoo, is there a link to download the original levels as wap world files? I seem to remember finding this a few years back.. Each of the threadz for the 'Standard Levelz' containz a link to download the map for the stage. I have never archived them all into one place, though, so it requirez 32 downloadz.
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Zu
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Post by Zu on Sept 28, 2012 10:52:00 GMT -8
Each of the threadz for the 'Standard Levelz' containz a link to download the map for the stage. I have never archived them all into one place, though, so it requirez 32 downloadz. Most of them has a map, but not all of them: 3 out of 4 levels from Gruntz In Space still lack a full map. If in any case it's too time consuming for you to do it yourself, then maybe I should try? I was thinking about it previously, so I guess I could do that.
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GooRoo
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Post by GooRoo on Sept 28, 2012 13:08:51 GMT -8
Each of the threadz for the 'Standard Levelz' containz a link to download the map for the stage. I have never archived them all into one place, though, so it requirez 32 downloadz. Most of them has a map, but not all of them: 3 out of 4 levels from Gruntz In Space still lack a full map. If in any case it's too time consuming for you to do it yourself, then maybe I should try? I was thinking about it previously, so I guess I could do that. I just checked, and all four stagez of "Gruntz In Space" have downloadable mapz. Designerz: Stage 1 the map. Designerz: Stage 2 the map. Designerz: the ( Stage 3 viewable) map. Designerz: Stage 4 the map.
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