Shandalar - Feature Requests

[Korath]

The artwork is in the individual files in SPR1024/ (and SPR800/ for the 800x600 resolution versions, and SPR/ for the 640x480 versions). The other djinns, specifically, are in BK_DJN.spr, G_DJN.spr, R_DJN.spr, and BU_DJN.spr; all four also use SDJN.spr. Each of those spr files (or, at least, each of the ones representing enemies) contains up to 45 separate images; and the first four bytes of each of those images is a length.

Beyond that, the functions reading and using the imagery are quite opaque. They don't appear to be any standard image file format, nor MicroProse's .pic format.

I'm attaching the 41 separate images contained in SPR1024/BK_DJN.spr; if anyone has any interest in puzzling the file format out, let me know and I'll clean up the quick-and-dirty program I made to extract them, and make one to put them back together again into a .spr file.

That aside, there's a zillion and one things that'll need to be done to add another enemy. And those are just the obvious ones; there's no doubt another zillion and one that won't show up until I actually try it. This won't be happening anytime soon.

Thank you, I'll ask around the internet and see if I can crack the file format at least. Doesn't have to lead anywhere, I'm just really curious.

Could this actually be a GEM Paint file somehow? It would be very weird, and I've no clue how to open one of those (I suppose one might try with FreeGEM or something but I'm not sure how to even get that running or on what).

Ok, a buddy who's busy with RL atm checked it out and said it's something simple and simmilar to a BMP, so that writing a converter should be easy.

He said "there is no such (standard) signature here, so I think it's custom simple format made for this game or family of games", and and "maybe there is some more popular game on the same engine with modding tools for it".

He also said "Looks to me it's simple 256-color, one byte per pixel format",
"looks simple, so is BMP. Should be straightforward to write converter", "most likely it uses indexed color, so in order to extract graphics you need palette so basically you need converter to and from BMP format" and "(you) just need to figure out the header and then the palette"

Is this all known info or did we get something new. Me being a noob, got something new, any of this mean anything to you guys?

This guy I know said he managed to open it in photoshop, is this what we're looking for?

I don't have photoshop on any machine right now and the method doesn't work with what I do have, but I'll check if and how it works later.

EDIT: Had a buddy check it out, it works! A single file gets a small square of graphics, not sure how they all fit togather or what happens with them.

[Korath]

A success report is all well and good, but doesn't accomplish anything unless you say what you actually did to do it.

And no, Photoshop won't just open the raw file. Give me some credit here.

It worked for 2 people over here who don't know about each other. One said it seemed too stupid to work so he tried after everything else failed, and the other guy I just sent one of those IMG files with the extension changed to .raw to open in photoshop and he sent this back.

Apparently it's just changing the extention into raw and then photoshop opens it. Whether this produces what we're looking for though - god knows, i've only seen this one so far, maybe they're all just jumbles (is that what you mean by "photoshop won't open raw"?)