Here is Stormbringer & Premium^Paradise entry for the Halloween competition.
Some information:
- crunched with kkrunchy, it's not a virus!
- WARNING! takes a while to decrunch because of the heavy graphics, BE PATIENT PLEASE
- uses OpenGL
- requires that the VBL Sync is either turned on or application controlled in your graphics driver
- credits inside!
URL: ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/rebb/halloween_-/ugng.zip
hoi, it was a pleasure to work with my old amiga teammate ;)
expect more stuff from us. ;)
br
premium^paradise
That's pretty cool entry, well done to both of you !
There's only two downsides, first is that it take too much time to start, how about compressing it with upx since the difference is too small (I guess) ???
Second, I want to kill some zombies and some big bosses :clap:
hehe me too.. but I was pretty busy this week and obviously did not have all the time I wanted to make a fully playable game... I hope it's not too ugly as it is
sorry, for the decrunching time... but the graphics are really FAT
Classic spooky side-scrolling action :D nice to see that a game made it into this compo. You guys got a lot done here and just before the deadline too. The ghosts are a little transparent which is a great touch
I love it! :) I played this game to death on the c64, and arcade. I've never seen this version.
Great job.
Very professional looking. The ghost is a nasty piece of work indeed!
Chris
It is almost as though Capcom had made this one!
I like the retro feel. O0
There's a lot of great things in this to like :)
Those Capcom graphics really look great, so does the font! Tune rocks as well.
There must be MEGABYTEs of graphics in there! It looks great! Sadly the tune is broken I think. It plays at about 1/10th speed with gaps between each 1/5th second block :( Is this another Vista thing?
Jim
I think so Jim on my PC the music is runnin fine (under XP)
Cannot download it ???
try again.. download works fine...
Works now ... awesome release.
The music and graphics are just tremendous. Very well done and extremely well
designed !!! In my eyes it has the best design in this competition !!!
I would add some kind of "LOADING / DECRUNCHING" screen though. I waited
roughly about one minute until your production starts. Thats way too long without
being informed about this delay. It would be a shame if a user cancel the task
before the show actually begins !!!
Again -> Great Work !!!
Thanks benny!
I actually posted some information at the beginning of this thread to inform people about these issues...
but due to the lack of time, I could not finish this as I really wanted to...
but I'm actually planning to start a full game remake as my next spare-time activity...
Jop, i told Stormy to implement some loading bar after checking the last preview , but due lack of time it didnÃ,´t make it.
Well, expect some full playable version in the future ;) :updance:
Most of the gfx are taken from the capcom psp version, i fixed some small things and made the font.
Hi Stormbringer!
Wow....
I really like this nice production....
im olskool fan and this remembers me on good old C64 times....
The textroutine rulez....
Cheers
eNeRGy
and btw ... really looking forward to actually play this 8)
Super Ghouls n Ghost was one of my favaroutes, and i'm really looking forward to having a go on a playable version of yours 8)
p.s. that decrunch was mega :telloff:
All i can say is amazing this has got to win m8...
And i really hope you do finish the full game.. :inspired:
Found this today and it's sooo cool!
A classic - can it be beaten?
I really hope that Stormbringer will finish this remake one day :) He got quite a long way with it (further than you see here), I was lucky enough to watch a preview last year. I believe it's been put on the back burner for now.
What a fab first entry.
I've fond memories of the originals on C64, and I absolutely adore this tit bit!
That font rocks dudes, am loving your text effects.
All the very best to you,
Clyde.
I think this was entered a few years ago, but the thread has been revived. Worth a second viewing though.
Yes it was an entry to the halloween challenge a couple of years ago.
Im the same as HellFire, missed this the 1st time around.
For the latest comp look out for [SPOOKY]
beautiful!! oh why these games didnt stay forever
yes I'm working on the full game.. but I wish I had the amount of time required to finish this utopic project.
The problem is that I ripped the textures and 3D models from the PSP game by Capcom... I'm not sure I can release this so easily without having some unpleasant lawyers knocking at my door.
Anyway, testers are welcome.. need to find a way to publish a version with the 40MB zipped textures and objects... any idea?
Quote from: stormbringer on November 11, 2009
find a way to publish a version with the 40MB zipped textures and objects... any idea?
Yes, if you upload it to retro-remakes with your ftp account I'll password protect it and we can publish the password here somewhere to stop bots downloading it and eating the bandwidth.
Let us know when it's available for testing. This is some great work stormbringer.
Quote from: Shockwave on November 11, 2009
Yes, if you upload it to retro-remakes with your ftp account I'll password protect it and we can publish the password here somewhere to stop bots downloading it and eating the bandwidth.
If you want I could mirror it.
K+ Thats kind of you.
Thanks. Please PM me when it is ready, in case I don't spot it right away.
I am happy to help test it out m8.
Funnily enough it's Fri 13th and Mark Cooksey's version of Ghost N Goblins is playing on nectarine radio.
Im looking forward to seeing your remake dude.
Quote from: premium^prd on October 27, 2007
Jop, i told Stormy to implement some loading bar after checking the last preview , but due lack of time it didnÃ,´t make it.
Well, expect some full playable version in the future ;) :updance:
Most of the gfx are taken from the capcom psp version, i fixed some small things and made the font.
How do you rip gfx of PSP CSOs/ISOs?
Nice screenies BTW.
@relsoft: the ISO contains what is on the PSP game CD. Usually in there you have a couple of folders that are necessary to boot up the game and then a huge file, which is the game archive. Not all the games have the same structure though.
The game files can be compressed, although this does not always happen because there is enough room on the CD for the game. Most of the time, the game data is just aggregated with the code in the archive.
What I did for a start was to open the huge binary with a hex editor. I usually start with this method to detect visually the structure of the binary. In this case, one can quickly observe that the huge file is a id/chunk structured file. there are 4-bytes signatures for chuncks followed by what could be sizes for the chunks or offsets. Very similar to file formats derived from EA-IFF on the Amiga.
While looking further in the file, I observed portions that looked like a binary mess, usually where the game code is. Then large (even huge portions) with more regular patterns, usually where the graphics are... and suddenly I stopped in a region that looked like a knight's helmet! That was the first hint for a game like Ghosts'n Goblins, wasn't it?? I saved that part of the file as a RAW image and opened it in Photoshop. Indeed, it was a knight's helmet. I then continued in the binary file and found something that looked like a sword or a stick. This time it wasn't just luck. I was simply looking at some of the bitmaps in the file. I did the same thing with Photoshop, and yes, it was a sword. Colors were not right, but the shape was there.
Then I looked again a few bytes before the beginning of the portion where the helmet's data was and found a signature that said "PIC" => gotcha! Looked like I found the header of a bitmap file. I compared that with the data portion where the sword was, and found the same thing! Then I started to look at the bytes after the signature and found some classic numbers there: 32, 64, 128 etc... classic texture dimensions for a console game.
After this small success I wrote a small ripper that looked for the signature and extracted the RAW data using these magic numbers. I ran the small piece of code and my little exe started to spit dozens of files. Some worked, some not. I got helmets, potions, weapons, wall textures, etc.
The files that did not work, were of two kinds. Some were just a mess of pixels, others were almost ok, but not perfect. However these almost perfect bitmaps reminded me a lot of RGB16/RGB15 encoding used in the Targa file format. Again I tried to look at the bytes near the file header and yes, I found that there was an extra byte that was set on some specific value for the images that were ripped fine, another value for those that worked almost and a third value for those that did not work well.
Again I refined my code and tested the possible case of RGB16/RGB15 encoding. And... it worked... I was now getting over a thousand textures.
I then started to look on the net about PSP file formats and did not find much, except some hacked tools to change the PSP themes. There I got more information about the picture file formats. I improved my ripper and also observed that in the package, there were other file formats, like PNG, true TGA and the PSP format GIM (GIM... IMG.. IMaGe.. well intuition worked well).
I then searched over the internet and gamer forums about all this... very little information... but found a link on a chinese website. All was in chinese, but the re was a brief description of the GIM header. Byte offsets. But the description was in chinese. It was time to use some online translation to reveal some secrets. And secrets were revealed. The guy that posted that on the internet was apparently working for Sony in China. He must have been part of the team in the test dept of Sony's factory... That became really exciting. The translation was very poor of course, but the website mentioned a zip archive that was part of the SDK for the PSP, where the format was described! Of course no link of that SDK.
I then searched for that zip archive and found two interesting links. One on the Sony's PSP website that was talking about the SDK for game developers and briefly described the contents of it. One could request to become an official PSP developer to obtain the SDK, but besides the fact that you had to pay for it, Sony does not guarantee you that you will become an authorized developer. Their decison is really up to them and they could simply refuse your request because they do not see a fit between you and their goals! Great, forget about Sony!
The second link was leading me to a russian website! Ahaaaa... That was easier to translate! The website mentioned that someone, somewhere had the zip archive I was looking for... because he was part of a team that worked on a game for the PSP! Classic thing... it happened during the Amiga day... game developers were former hackers and often the information got out of secrecy through these obscure pipelines.
I then started to seach for the zip archive, the handle/nickname of the "famous" source and a few porn sites later found a hidden page with the zip archive! Bingo! I opened the zip file and heard the heaven's bells ringing! It was the actual C headers that described the file format!
Back to my little ripper, I started to improve it and found that the bitmap files were using the texture format required by the graphics pipeline on the PSP. Several references in the header files gave me links on the Homebrew PSP websites. There I found about the PSP internals and data formats. That helped me a lot and I perfected my ripper. I learned that there was a 3D object file format, the GMO. But that is another story...
That's a scary amount of determination right there, but it's nothing more than I have come to expect from you.
It's really great to have the story of how you unfolded the information you needed and made your own ripper to grab it all.
This is the best post I've read for a long time K++
@Shockwave: thanks mate! GnG is my favourite game ever. Determination in this case was easy to have for me and the actual search for information was really exciting.
After this success, I went to a game shop and bought a PSP and Ultimate GnG, the PSP version of the game. It was important for me to understand the game visually in order to have a better understanding of the data I was getting out of the archive.
While I started to get the textures out of the game archive I also noticed that the textures were duplicated in a lot of places. That seemed weird because I did not understand first why they were not just stored once. I also read a bit more about how Capcom worked on the game. This helped me a lot. Capcom split the game in levels. Each level was given to a specific team that had the responsability to develop it. It made then a lot of sense. When you play the game, the game loads the levels one after another. Sometimes the same objects/characters appear again in different levels but with different colors/textures. Looking again in the binary, I observed then that the levels were stored as entities in the final package. Each one had its textures and 3D objects, even if they were duplicates.
The real challenge was for the 3D objects.. I naively started to reproduce the 3D objects manually.. some simple ones.. like a bridge element and used the freshly ripped textures. After a few funny hours I understood that it was not realistic to rebuild the game that way. While I clearly dropped the possibility of reusing the code (after all it was all compiled for the PSP, how could I reused it??), I felt that it was mandatory to get the specs for the famous GMO objects (the actual 3D objects).
During my research, I also understood a lot about the PSP graphics pipeline. Through the Homebrew PSP SDK, I learned that PSP graphics pipeline was similar to OpenGL, not to say that it was highly inspirated from it.
Exactly what Shockwave said :)
A true hacker (the good one) among us :clap:
@rbz: I wish I was a good hacker.. but actually I was just curious and well motivated for this investigation.
Now for all of you who want to get into this, I will not spread any code that does not belong to me here, especially when the source belongs to a company with an army of lawyers... but if you still want to open the gates of hell, just google for this:
pspdevsrc1.zip
You will get the SDK ;)
The SDK is written in C but it heavily relies on the PSP internals. So it won't compile in a snap of fingers on your PC. Now if C and OpenGL are familiar to you, it should be fairly easy to understand what's in there and rebuild something similar for PC.
Once I got the SDK, it became an "easy" task to extract the textures and 3D objects. It will still take you hours (if not a few days) not only to adapt the core of the SDK but also to understand how to use it.
During the 2007-2008 winter holidays I spend 10 days trying to rebuilt this and finally made it. I managed to get the objects displayed through OpenGL with textures and lighting and also understood the difficult part: how animation works.
Once I had all this, I started on the most exciting part: rewriting the game.... and ohh man! that's the biggest challenge.
The first step was to rewrite the SDK portions with my own code just for the sake of being able to develop properly. Why? well because on the PSP lots of things are stored in a PSP friendly format (vector arrays, coordinate textures, etc). The PSP being limited in resources, some things are packed/compressed, rearranged to use the PSP hardware. These things do not exist on PC.
After this huge amount of work, I realised that I could not rewrite the game without writing some more tools to build the game levels. As a matter of fact, the game levels are made of various 3D objects, not just simple bitmap tiles. So it was obvious that an editor was needed. I'm still working on this as I write. But how exciting.
Here is a preview that Shockwave was talking about:
http://rapidshare.com/files/316528325/media.zip.html
As Rapidshare is limited in terms of download and since the archive will be removed after 90 days, it would be great if one of you could mirror this in a place that is more reliable.
Comments awaited!
Why don't you just upload it to your webspace (retro-remakes) mate?
WOW ... that looks very impressive. I am a sucker for easy
controllable jump and runs with offers 2D gameplay but show
the scenery in 3D.
It would be cool to see this project being finished! Good work,
Stormbringer!
it would be nice to put this into debug and testing, as i keep thinking were still in Haloween mode ;)
Fuck rapidshare. I tried a zillion times to dl it and it always tells me that all download slots are already taken and I should either wait another 2 minutes and try again or become a premium user.
Edit: Yay the dl finally worked. Great stuff!
Quote from: Clyde Radcliffe on December 06, 2009
it would be nice to put this into debug and testing, as i keep thinking were still in Haloween mode ;)
This post is in it's correct forum.