User talk:Levellass

Hi Levellass - not sure if you've seen the question on Talk:Softdisk Library Format but since you wrote it you're probably best placed to answer! -- Malvineous 02:26, 6 January 2012 (GMT)

Hi Levellass - I reverted your change to IMF Format (removing Category:File Formats) because I am trying to remove all the pages from that category, instead putting them into more specific ones. So in this case IMF Format will appear in Category:All file formats as well as Category:All music formats. And these categories should apply automatically when an infobox is added to the article page, so hopefully there will be no need to add categories manually! So if you spot any pages missing categories, please add infoboxes to them instead of just the bare categories. Thanks! -- Malvineous 09:03, 8 March 2013 (GMT)

Nifty, that should certainly simplify things. -Endian? What are you on about?

Hey, LL! Your new example/explanation of Huffman helped a lot in writing a decompressor, but I'm having an issue using it on EGAGRAPH. I verified that it is identical to the EGADICT created by KG and that I am reading it correctly. I get a tree full of reversed bit sequences, just like you said. However, the EGAGRAPH does not appear to use reversed bit sequences; it is completely uncompressed. (It does still have the UInt32LE at the front of the appropriate chunks specifying decompressed length.) Keen can read it and KeenGraph can read it, but using the provided dictionary, I can't. Can you help me? Fleexy (talk) 17:32, 3 January 2014 (GMT)

Titlebuild: black stripe

Hey! I used your Keen Dreams title builder, but when I used it in my mod, black stripe appeared at the right corner of the title screen that doesn't and never wanna disappear at all. Fix it please! Szemigi (talk) 00:57, 8 September 2021 (GMT)

Odd sprite files in Executioners

I've been digging into the Executioners stuff you added, and while most sprites decode perfectly fine, I found a few really peculiar entries I can't figure out. The problem are the two files called GWORDS.VOL and RWORDS.VOL, from inside the INTRO.VOL archive.

They seem to be just more RLE-masked sprite files, but when decoding, things start looking... weird. According to their headers, the dimensions of the two files are respectively 218×72 and 162×82 but this gives weird corrupted output. instead, the RLE data, which specifically can't cross line width boundaries, seem to act as if their widths are, respectively, 55 and 41, as can be seen by full-line skip commands that are chopped off at these as maximum length. But when forcing the files to decode with those widths, the output barely looks any less distorted. In fact, the second halves of both files seem to align to widths that are one pixel less than the top halves, without any visible separation between the two blocks.

Do you have any idea what those files are, and how to decode them? -Nyerguds (talk) 21:39, 29 April 2022 (GMT)

Hey there. Yeah, some images in the archive have an odd format. They are composed of several smaller images arranged in a grid, but the game samples pixels from each image in sequence to build up the final picture. A good example of this is REAPBIO.VOL, consisting of a 4x4 grid of images with the complete image coming out like 0123456789aABCDEF0123...

As another note, I have written a utility in BASIC that can extract most of the game's files, including levels. I'm only having trouble with the cinematics since my Dosbox setup cannot display them so I can't test by altering their data. I've been meaning to add more to the executioner's page but if you want my notes on stuff I can put them somewhere. -Endian? What are you on about? (talk) 08:34, 19 June 2022 (GMT)

Ah, don't worry too much about the article's formatting; a lot of articles started as pretty bare bones infodumps and only got refined later. That's what the todo tag is for. I've often taken incomplete articles in the wiki, researched the formats, added code for them in my conversion tool, and in the process, reformatted and rewritten the articles. Any specific info on how exactly these grid-images work would be welcome.

The cinematics seem to play fine for be, btw, but I haven't dug into what files they use. The first cinematic (the bloody TV room) seems to use these odd grid images, though.

File extraction is no issue for me; I already implemented that in my own archive handling tool. I haven't encountered anything I can't extract with that. But since I hit that roadblock, I kind of stopped working on it, and haven't gotten around to releasing a new version with that update. -Nyerguds (talk) 09:45, 19 June 2022 (GMT)

Nifty. Well I'll try and get the other file formats up here, some are quite curious. There's a difference between animating images and movies proper, which seem to be able to place sounds, sprites and images onscreen. If you've looked through the level format you'll know how convoluted this game's files can get. I'll try and look into whether the game has any sort of hard coding for those odd images. It's nice to know I won't need to code up an import tool. -Endian? What are you on about? (talk) 10:40, 20 June 2022 (GMT)