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[G-Flex]

Man, this is the problem with DOS games. Everything is bizarre, incomprehensible, and proprietary/homebrewed. You seem to be making great effort, though!

[olemars]

Just thought of a way to get at the game's palette. It's m3g4 31337 and I wonder why I didn't think of it sooner. Won't be able to actually do it for another 6-7 hours though...

[G-Flex]

Speaking of the music: Whether you can grab the MIDI data or not (which should be trivial, or at least easy), it's my understanding that at least some of it is just common period pieces anyway. For instance, the overworld theme I can think of is at least partly an instrumental MIDI version of "L'homme armé", a secular piece of the time that was very often used in Catholic mass.

[Mahou Shoujo]

Darklands? Awesome. Even though there aren't a lot of quests and it can get repetitious, Darklands has a ton of content. A remake from scratch would be agonizing just to get it to it's original state. Having the cards, map, and sprites makes the task seem much less daunting, though.

I can't get too enthused about it myself, and I have plenty of other stuff vying for my attention (not to mention that I haven't done any programming in possibly over a year), but good luck to you guys. I definitely want to see whatever you come up with.

Probably the biggest thing that I would like to see in a remake would be more variability between the towns. After taking the time to reproduce a map of Germany, it turns out that all of those towns are almost exactly alike. I'd like to see events that are specific to certain towns. Maybe give various towns quest lines or stories. Or emphasize anything of historical note. Even if it's just playing up a certain industry, I think it would make the world come to life a bit.

[G-Flex]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I30dzwiNxLk

Anyone remotely interested in something like this should watch this interview with the game's designer. It's long, spread across three videos, but it's very, very informative.

[olemars]

Getting there.

[traz]

i think you have found the palette. grats!

[Sowelu]

You blow me away, olemars.  Let me have your babies.

I've been busy working late hours and running errands for friends lately, but I hope to work on the engine real soon.  They'll be walking around in no time.

[olemars]

Graphics hardware interaction is always tricky, VGA palette data is basically written to an internal hardware port as a serialized stream, one byte for each color channel. VGA uses a 256 color palette with 18 bits per color. Tracing this kind of thing is pretty difficult (ie nightmarish), unlike file IO which is comparatively trivial.

I had no idea how to figure out the palette, until I remembered that I'm not running the game on real hardware but through Dosbox. So I just found the function in the dosbox VGA emulation layer that deals with the palette stream, changed it so it outputs a nicely formatted line for each palette update from the game, and just played the game for a little bit. Now I have a text file with stuff like this:

Code: [Select]

mColorTable[79] = qRgb(134, 0, 186); // 21 0 2e
   mColorTable[80] = qRgb(255, 162, 101); // 3f 28 19
mColorTable[81] = qRgb(85, 85, 85); // 15 15 15
mColorTable[82] = qRgb(56, 56, 56); // e e e
mColorTable[83] = qRgb(36, 36, 36); // 9 9 9
mColorTable[84] = qRgb(0, 0, 0); // 0 0 0
mColorTable[85] = qRgb(138, 0, 0); // 22 0 0
mColorTable[86] = qRgb(162, 0, 0); // 28 0 0
mColorTable[87] = qRgb(186, 0, 0); // 2e 0 0
With a proper palette I've learned a bit of how the game deals with colors, at least for characters.
There are 3 custom blocks of 16 colors that are reserved for enemies/critters. These are index 32-47, 48-63 and 64-79. This puts a limit on how many different critters there can be in a single battle.

The file ENEMYPAL.DAT contains sets of custom colors that critters can use. Each entry is 53 bytes long, 71 entries in total. The first byte tells the first index of the 16 colors. It's either 0x60, 0x90 or 0xC0, divide by 3 and you get 32, 48 and 64 in base10. The next 48 bytes are byte triplets for 16 colors. The last 4 bytes I have no clue about, so they're probably vitally important.
The first 6 entries are for the city guard sargeants, the next 6 for the regular city guards. No idea about the rest. I guess trial and error is the only way unless someone else can find a pattern.

For player characters it's completely different. They have 8 customizable colors each, but their sprite files all use the same color indices for them, 235-242. Basically the game replaces occurences of these indices in the hero sprites with other indices "owned" by each character slot. Slot A gets index 80-87, slot B 88-95, slot C 96-103, slot D 104-111, slot E 112-119 (if used). Seems kind of silly they went to all this trouble just for a nearly useless feature.

[G-Flex]

The reverse-engineering is very interesting, but I have to wonder how necessary it is. If the goal is to reimplement the game, why does it matter how the game itself handles palette data? Although, for obvious reasons, being able to rip the graphics data itself is nice.

[Sowelu]

Well, reverse engineering is what got us the graphics data, yeah.  Also it's really cool to know how they implemented it for curiosity's sake.

[olemars]

In this case the palette tricks are needed to map the colors correctly. I need to do the same index remapping for player characters for instance, or they just show up as white. And I also need to import all the enemy color blocks to get those right.

Beyond that it's just a fun little puzzle though.

[G-Flex]

Getting back to content, that video interview I linked to gives some decent ideas for things that would make nice additions, such as more use for horses (e.g. mounted combat) and more varied/dynamic/intertwining quests (e.g. including a more robust political system and having organizations react to you and your reputation more).

[olemars]

New release with proper palette handling:
Download link.

I've made it remap character colors so those show up correctly according to the default party setup. For enemies/critters (anything in E00C.cat and M00C.cat), I've added dropdown boxes so you can choose between palette layouts for the custom blocks. The default is all white, so if a sprite has a lot of white in it, play around with the palettes until it looks right. The setting is applied individually to each IMC file. It's not saved in any way on application exit, so remember to note down which palette choices you think are correct for each critter.

[Sowelu]

Google Docs says the document is not available.