Krishty’s Sim Forums

Seems Windows (like any big codebase developed over decades) is totally out of control.

Back to typhoon.exe, and surfing for strings, we see a lot of things like this: Those names don't look very Icelandic.

I was led to believe that Typhoon was based on the amazing 3dream engine, but maybe it's just a re-skinned TAW but a bit dumbed down.

I suspect the hash algorithm will be something similar to TAW's... Well, I don't suspect that anymore. The hashes are arranged in the dat file in a similar order, ie those starting with 0x80 first, but for EF/ADF/TAW the first 4 bits gives the length of the filename being hashed. So, in practice, t...

'typhoon.dat' has certain similarities to the 'did.dat' of earlier games, but a couple of notable differences. The file can be considered to contain a 'header', the 'payload' files, then 3 blocks of data with each one starting at an address given by 3 pointers in the 'header'. The first block is jus...

So, leaving the exe for a moment to look at the big data archive 'typhoon.dat'... The files from the Steam release and original are exactly the same size, and while I haven't done a byte comparison, I expect them to be identical. Some time ago, there was a discussion on Discord about this file, and ...

Aha, so what I thought was some smart 'steamification tool' is likely an ugly 'warez hack'. If I do a quick search for 31313931, it's mentioned a couple of times as being in the header of 'Heroes of Might and Magic' and 'Command & Conquer', so maybe the same operator. I don't really want to look...

Going off topic on the very first post... For a change of scenery, I thought I'd take a another look at Typhoon. Last time the game was <10 years old, so felt a bit guilty trying to take it apart to see if it contains any F22 heritage. While the game has been available on Steam since 2014, nothing h...

There's also the diagnostic system which seems to use its own variables.
...but maybe it works better that way.

Any air war has been pretty much one way due to overwhelming superiority in numbers on one side. From a simulation point of view, I'm not sure has any attempt been made to model the civilian population in such a scenario. That's a fairly complex ejection system on the Ka-50/52. I had to read up on t...

Amazing!

I found those debug menus in TAW, but could only enable them one at a time by hex editing the exe.
Presumably, the other stuff is there as well. I'll try it out when I get time...

I forget what TFXplorer uses for collision detection for terrain, buildings and mobile objects.
Is it the same as TAW, ie using the COLLISION BOX and COLLISION TRIANGLE information from the ssd file, or have you rationalized it with some DirectX feature?

Ah, I remember now. It must be over 5 years since we reversed the F22 flight model of TAW and I've just stopped having nightmares about it. Are you suggesting we do the same for EF2000 V2.0, and incorporate it into TFXplorer?

Ah not even text, just a block of binary data put into a specific place by the build system?
I'm sure you can inspect the disassembled code to find out which data is used in a particular calculations, but sounds like a lot of work.

Are the tables commented by IDA to help us guess what each entry does?
I assume these tables are all in the source as we've never found anything flight model related in the extracted files.

By the way, I think EF2000 uses this system exclusively for the 'Intel inside' thing described in spir.256. That's lucky, as I'd have to use the Dosbox debugger to do the same for TFX. My interpretation of spir.256 is not quite how it looks at the start of EF2000 though... _spir.gif Not exactly a pr...

This line: "Each chunk of data is made up of a single 2 byte word, then a 4 byte pointer to the next block, then some 'payload'." ...is not quite correct. After the palette comes 2 bytes, giving the 'type' mentioned earlier, then for each frame, there's a 4 byte number giving the size of d...

'Type 0' have more complete frames... 'inft' describes 40 frames which I've just stuck together with Imagemagick.

The way these animations are directed is yet to be found, but there are some parser files with extension .par which may hold the key.

There is still plenty to understand about this process, but there are 2 types of file with a flag in the .256 showing how it should be handled. 'Type 1' files look like they have one base frames, then subsequent frames provide some delta. noname3382_0.png This an example where most of the animation ...

Here's part of the first post of a thread I started over at Combatsim. The rest of that thread is largely irrelevant now, so I'll start again here: In the extracted set of TFX2 files, there's a strange beast called 'anim\spir.256' which, as far as I know, we haven't looked at before. For Inferno, th...

Yes, something that needs to be investigated. As I understand it, OSL1 is a common format, but different files are produced depending on whether it was aimed at Adlib, Soundblaster or Roland. The paths and extensions visible in the TFX did.dat hint at this, but I haven't proved it yet.