nancygold's Journal

Decompilation Progress
Finally I managed to solve the last bit of palette twiddling. The game has
a base palette, but each biome gets 48 personal colors.
These get loaded when the viewport's cell get a new biome's cell.
So to decode skyline images, one first recovers the biome's palette.
Then applies writes biome palette at over the colors at index 160 and up.

The game features a ton of such crazy twiddling, all done manually, during
the asset init stage. Many thousands lines of error prone C code, packed into
3 huge routines, which require minutes to decompile - that is what one has to
go through to recover the original files information.

I'm still astonished by the core architecture, which is competent at times.
The game's design is solid, and was later ripped off in Dungeon Keeper and
Majesty. But then architecture devolves into a crazy mess of hardcoded asset ids
with handling routines.

And that it is not the workings of the compiler or the macro expander, but
the original source code had all that. I.e. the Cathryn surely knew it is
bad design, but still did it, likely due to deadlines, which in fact prevented
all the debug code being stripped, despite the memory limitations. And the game
itself suffers from the difficulty being too easy, which all reviewers noticed.

I personally believe that asset system is the main part of the game.
If it fails, then everything else fails, since everything else builds upon
the assets system, directed by it and is constrained by it.

The next steps are recovering names for the audio files, audio drivers, unit
animations, the text messages, the *.FLC movies and demo savegame.

After that it will be possible to recreate the grab process, which is mandatory
part of decompiling the asset initialization routines. But it requires the input
files which I'm recreating now, and it is the hardest part of the project.
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: George Oldizey - Ambrosia