User talk:MoffD

Can someone please check the fatal racing formats (other than me) to be sure I'm not making stuff up. Also: the BM files appear to be used for multiple things. I'm thinking they are some form of archive, but I have no idea how to tell - MoffD (talk) 17:41, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

There aren't any pages on the wiki documenting the Fatal Racing formats? If you're unsure about something just put a note with the TODO template, e.g. {{TODO|Confirm this}} or {{TODO|Not sure what this does}}, which will clearly mark it as a work-in-progress -- Malvineous (talk) 09:34, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Malvineus! The main problem is I'm new to this in general and I can't spot specific formats from their data. I'll post as much as I can though, I was just hoping someone else could look at it in time. Cheers! - MoffD (talk) 13:03, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

I've had a quick look at the game's formats and many of them look like they are custom, so you'll probably have to start down the reverse-engineering path. Here are some quick tips: try swapping filenames if you're unsure what files do (e.g. swap names of track1.* and track2.* and presumably two game levels will be swapped.) Once you know what files are for what (and you can document those on the wiki) try randomly changing bytes in the files and see what happens when you load the game. By experimenting a lot you might be able to work out which bytes change what and figure out the file format that way. This is how I reverse-engineered the CDFM Format, for example. -- Malvineous (talk) 09:49, 11 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips, I'll see what I can turn up. Did you notice anything about the *.bm files? I think it's a blanket file extension that's for several things, or possibly a container of some sort? - MoffD (talk) 13:18, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

It's too hard to tell. It looks like the .bm files are compressed, with the first four bytes being a UINT32LE holding the decompressed size. This is mostly based on round*.bm which are different sizes yet the first four bytes are all the same. With all the files the first four bytes are a value that is reasonable as a decompressed file size (i.e. it suggests a realistic compression ratio, for the files I looked at anyway.) You'd need to figure out how to decompress the files first before you could investigate any further. -- Malvineous (talk) 10:53, 17 December 2014 (UTC)