Talk:Commander Keen 4-6

Can we get the save game format up here? Lemm 08:09, 21 October 2010 (GMT)

How would that be done? I know the format of Keen 4-6 roughly, as well as several games related to it (Keen Dreams, Dangerous Dave 3/4, Biomenace, Catacomb 3D...) what would we title the page, would every game have a different format though they're broadly similar? --Endian? What are you on about? 05:17, 9 November 2010 (GMT)

Does the Keen engine have a name? Otherwise you could just call the page Keen 4-6 Savegame Format and link to it from the other game pages, a bit like how some Xargon and Jill of the Jungle pages link to each other because of shared formats. At any rate if you have the info it'd be better to document it anywhere here and we can clean it up later! -- Malvineous 23:12, 14 November 2010 (GMT)

So I've got offsets for most of the exe data - map, audio, etc - in Wombat, under scripts/games/commander keen 4-6.script.txt. I know mine are correct, because I've tested to make sure maps etc work across all the versions I support. Looking at the exe table, the values filled out (Keen 4 1.4, Keen 5 1.4) are different to mine for the maphead, which makes me reluctant to fill the rest out. I suspect what's going on is that Wombat decompresses lzexe compressed exes differently to whatever was used to get the offsets in the table...are the ones in there after putting them through unzlexe, or something else? Szevvy (talk) 00:54, 12 March 2021 (GMT)

The offsets currently on the page are not absolute file positions, they are relative to the start of the executable "image". These numbers would be for use with CKPATCH for patching the mapheads directly, for example. To get an absolute file position, you would need to calculate the size of the EXE header and add that size value to the offset. See also this thread at keenmodding. --K1n9 Duk3 (talk) 02:18, 12 March 2021 (GMT)

I grabbed those values from GameMaps Format#Location of internal files since it said they are relative to the start of the decompressed .exe but perhaps they are wrong and need fixing also? I would favour offsets relative to the beginning of the .exe after decompression with UNLZEXE since it's the most common utility for this game. -- Malvineous (talk) 09:46, 12 March 2021 (GMT)