Tantalizing.

But it sounds like all of the non-compressed stuff is static animations that don't affect gameplay (I.E. by reading or altering the larger game's variables) in any way. Is it possible that the thing thwarting your efforts to read those files is not compression after all, but some non-standard mechanism they hacked into the SWF format to cause it to talk to the game? For instance, maybe the reason you can't access the carnival game is because there's some bytecode (not ActionScript) in there that alters your number of tokens when you win? Likewise, maybe you can't access the dialogue SWFs because there's non-AS bytecode hacked into 'em to read the player's clothing variables from the larger game and use them? This is the most rampant and silly speculation; I have no idea if it's desirable or even possible to mutilate SWFs in this manner, but given how non-standard everything else in Precipice seems to be, I wouldn't put anything past 'em at this point.

(11.swf being incompatible with the standard Flash Player seems to add weight to this theory... and by the way, how did you manage to take a screenshot of it, without Flash Player?)

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 06/06/2008 08:36:40

Soultaker, thanks for the heads-up about the different kinds of compression. That'll save mathboobs some time later, probably. If you learn anything else, or if you get bored and crack Type 1 or Type 2 compression on your own, please do post your findings here. Maybe write a recompiler app if you really want to kill some time.

Sol, yep, Plan A is still to decompile the SWFs. The hard part is finding a SWF that's uncompressed that communicates with the game, OR figuring out how to decompress Type 2 Compression.

Keep an eye on this thread. As soon as we have access to any of the SWFs of the mini-games, we'll let you know so you can work your magic. Probably it won't happen until mathboobs gets back from vacation.

Thanks to both of you for posting. Every precious scrap of information is helpful. (Even if it's just publicly announcing stuff that's obvious to everyone but me. )

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 06/08/2008 09:52:23

Actually, I already figured out type 1 compression (which is just a Deflate stream) so only type 2 remains. Unfortunately, most files are compressed with type 2. Also, I noticed that you don't need to repack the files into an .hha-file in order for the game to use them. They only need to be removed from the archive, and then the unpacked files (in the file system) are used.

So I wrote a tool to extract files from the archive. Get 'em here:
hha-0.1-linux32.gz (For 32-bit Linux)
hha-0.1-win32.zip (For 32-bit Windows)

To test, I replaced the texture for Anne's lamp with the texture on the floor:

It isn't much, but is shows that editing the files does work in-game.

Important note:
Extracting files removes them from the archive! (This is because if you keep the files in the archive, then the game will use those instead of the uncompressed files that you want to edit, and you can't throw the archives away, because they still contain unextractable files.) Therefore, before you do anything, make a copy of your "common.hha" and"parpg.hha" files. (Alternatively you can restore these files by reinstalling the game, but that's annoying.)

For Linux users:
File names are case insenstive in the archive, but case senstive in the Linux filesystem! The game does not refer to files using the same capitalization that is used in the archive, so on Linux files may need to be renamed after extracting them, or the game cannot find them and crashes. To detect when this happens, try running the game as follows:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=linux_libs/ strace ./RainSlickEp1_bin | grep open | grep parpg/data
And look for misspelled filenames. I noticed only two or three filenames that have this problem, but there may be more. (Maybe we can compile a list.)

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 06/08/2008 15:35:00

Sweet.

That's awesome work, Soultaker! I'm gonna have to go through the files exposed in this manner and see if there's enough exposed content here to make an interesting mod.

I guess this means that, once someone cracks Type 3 compression, the ideal situation will be for everyone to extract and delete their HHA files first thing, then overwrite the extracted files with the mod content. Maybe someone could even create a mod tool that backs up and extracts the HHAs when you first run it, and thereafter lets you "activate" your various mods one by one, by choosing which mod archives to extract, and in which order...

Once again, excellent work.

Is there a mac-user in the house who's willing to collaborate with Soultaker to make a mac version of the app?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 06/09/2008 11:45:15

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 06/09/2008 22:52:47

Sweet! Thanks for making it Open-Source, SoulTaker.

Your tool needs a proper name... how about the Hardcore Hothead Archive Hack? It's a little brazen, but the acronym amuses me...

HAHAHA.

Whatever you decide to call it, this is a tremendous step. You've each done great things, these past few days. But working together? Shit, Type 2 Compression doesn't stand a chance!

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 06/09/2008 23:23:32

Soultaker, your code seems well written and is nicely laid out. Especially with C, it's easy to write code that becomes hard to read or follow, but I had no such problem with yours. Also, you use Git, which is awesome, making you awesome by proxy.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 06/10/2008 01:09:16