TFX Animations
Posted: 2022-Jan-31, 21:26
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, these types of files are used are lot. That indicates that they are also used for TFX, as the 'anim' folder and '.256' extensions are present in TFX's 'did.dat'...but I haven't identified any file names. This is probably how the TFX 'Angry Guy' is described.
For Inferno, I've got filenames for a couple of dozen of these and extracted them from Inferno's 'did.dat.
I got these filenames after running Inferno for a couple of minutes, where these files appear in a folder called 'BUFFER'.
While these files have the same names as those from 'did.dat', they are larger.
So far, so good, but understanding the file content isn't so straightforward. The first two bytes are always 00 01, ie 256 in Intel format, so that's just a marker for the file. The next two bytes vary, but is always 2 for the files extracted from 'did.dat' but a larger value in the files obtained by running the game. My conjecture is that this is the number of animation frames.
Then comes the palette I think. There are 768 bytes with maximum value of 0x3F.
For the rest of the file there are a number of blocks, the amount of which seems to correspond to the number of frames from the second word.
These blocks come in 2 types, either the byte sequence '05 00 00 00 E0 4D 00 00 00' or a chunk of data which varies in size.
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'.
To be continued...
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, these types of files are used are lot. That indicates that they are also used for TFX, as the 'anim' folder and '.256' extensions are present in TFX's 'did.dat'...but I haven't identified any file names. This is probably how the TFX 'Angry Guy' is described.
For Inferno, I've got filenames for a couple of dozen of these and extracted them from Inferno's 'did.dat.
I got these filenames after running Inferno for a couple of minutes, where these files appear in a folder called 'BUFFER'.
While these files have the same names as those from 'did.dat', they are larger.
So far, so good, but understanding the file content isn't so straightforward. The first two bytes are always 00 01, ie 256 in Intel format, so that's just a marker for the file. The next two bytes vary, but is always 2 for the files extracted from 'did.dat' but a larger value in the files obtained by running the game. My conjecture is that this is the number of animation frames.
Then comes the palette I think. There are 768 bytes with maximum value of 0x3F.
For the rest of the file there are a number of blocks, the amount of which seems to correspond to the number of frames from the second word.
These blocks come in 2 types, either the byte sequence '05 00 00 00 E0 4D 00 00 00' or a chunk of data which varies in size.
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'.
To be continued...