GarouX.net > Page: 1 2
07/15/2009 18:31 posted by Steven
SimTown Resource File

SimTown was supposed to be a lighter version of SimCity for younger kids. It has fairly decent graphics considering it uses only 16 colors. I have figured out some of the format of the SIMPICT.RHF file that comes with the game.

Header
--------------------
0x00 - 0x03 contains characters RHVT, magic number
0x04 - 0x15 my copy contains the characters compiled and some extraneous bytes, not sure what they are for
0x16 - 0x17 number of file index records in the header
0x18 - 0x1F unknown
0x20 - 0x3F first 32 byte file index record
0x40 - 0x5F next record
etc...

File Index Record
--------------------
0x00 - 0x0B name of file, DOS format
0x0C - 0x0F offset in data from beginning of file
0x10 - 0x13 length of data in bytes
0x14 - 0x1F unknown, used by game internally?


The last file name should be <EOF>. You can also use the count in the header.

The files contained in this archive appear to be all the images and sprites for the game, however I have no idea how to read these files. They are identified by the characters rBmq at the start of each file. I haven't been able to find any information on this file type (it's probably unique). The game uses isometric graphics, so the image is most likely not stored as a raw bitmap.

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Tagsresource hacking, simtown
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04/22/2009 08:06 posted by Steven
Running Apache FOP Headless

At work I am looking into using Apache FOP to make my life much easier when it comes to generating reports for clients. Currently I have to programmatically build them using PDFLib, which is a royal pain. The actual development of code to generate the numbers is nothing compared to the time it takes to layout and flow the pages.

I downloaded FOP version 0.95 and I was having some issues running the fop script that comes with the binaries. I kept getting the gtk-warning regardless of what options I passed to the script. Adding in the awt.headless option recommended on other sites and the FOP FAQ did nothing either. I'm not a Java programmer, so this was all a bit frustrating.

It turns out I just needed a newer version of Java. I'm using CentOS 5.3 on my test machine, which unfortunately does not contain an RPM that works for me in the standard repositories. So the easiest way to solve my problem was to download the JRE RPM from the Sun website. Then I set the JAVA_HOME variable near the top of the fop script with the path of the JRE that I installed. Hope this helps out anyone who is having issues with that gtk-warning!

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Tagsapache fop, java, linux
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03/31/2009 13:42 posted by Steven
Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Palette

Terry Butler has written a program to extract the files from the large data file that Heroes of Might & Magic 2 uses. On Terry Butler's site you can see that he's made some progress figuring out the image format. I haven't been able to crack it myself, and I haven't been able to get a hold of him either. I figured I would at least make the palette available for anyone who wants it.

I'm providing it in two formats. First is a text-based file that can be loaded with Paint Shop Pro. Second is a 16x16 RGB image where each pixel represents a palette entry.

Attachments

Image
iconhomm2.pal
iconpal.png
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Tagsheroes of might and magic, resource hacking
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03/31/2009 13:30 posted by Steven
More Site Changes

I finally got around to adding the ability for people to leave comments. I'm going to put any future images on my Facebook page. I will leave this for other stuff.

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Tagsgaroux.net
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