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A look at our data storage methods
Hey there, Daniel here. Among other things, I help out with some of the sysadmin type stuff around here.
This article is a bit different to what we usually post - its a behind-the-scenes look at how we handle our data storage needs, ensuring our collection is backed up and nothing is ever lost or corrupted.
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Small Furry Creatures
Or more widely known as Creatures - if you’re not familiar with it (and unfortunately I’d take a bet you’re not), it’s a 2D simulation “artificial-life” game featuring rather odd beings known as Norns and Grendels. I don’t believe it is the first, but it is likely one of the first games to utilize neural networks for simulating some surprisingly complex beings.
Before you read too far into this article, I’d very highly recommend purchasing a copy of Creatures and taking a look at it yourself, as otherwise you’ll be missing a lot of important context!
In late October, I was given permission by EemFoo from Eem Foo’s Archive to take a look at a prototype of Creatures (referred to as Creatures 0 by the community) from March 1994 (it should’ve since been made available for everyone). This is back when the game was called Small Furry Creatures - hence the title of this article - and, at the time, was targeting ol’ MS-DOS as opposed to Microsoft Windows.
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Fable Source Tree
At the end of last month I remembered that there was a build of Fable that’d been dropped a while back which included PDBs, which is of course super exciting from a reverse engineering standpoint. You can find it here. I’ve been slowly digging away at it and taking notes.
That said, just as I’d done with Final Fantasy XV before, I’d decided to generate a copy of the source tree so that I could see how it was possibly laid out when originally compiled.
You can find the results here.
Again, there’s no actual source code here. It’s just an interesting glimpse as to how their project was set up when it was compiled.
The bulk of the project exists under the
devdirectory, under both theaudioandbbbprojects/releasebranchsub-directories. You’ll notice there’s a few third-party libraries they were using at the time which existed under thedevdirectory too.On another note, there didn’t seem to be an application to quickly generate a tree of files from a list so I ended up quickly writing an application to do so “creatively” called gentree. It’s open-source but I haven’t bothered putting it under a specific license as it seemed a little too trivial to bother doing so, so consider it public domain. Do let me know if you find it useful however!
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A Quick Look at the Shadow Man '97 Prototype
Wait, what prototype? This one here.
I came across this a while back and was surprised to see it. I was quite excited in what would be there to see given the age of the prototype and was sad to see very little discussion about it online.
If you’ve never even heard of Shadow Man yourself, I might suggest picking it up digitally somewhere such as on Steam or GOG (or buy yourself a physical copy on eBay) - it’s a good ol’ third-person game based on a comic-book of the same name.
Otherwise if you’re like me and have tried playing the game a number of times in the past but just haven’t had the time, perhaps take an opportunity to watch this pretty decent playthrough of the game.
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Red Faction II Bounty Completion!
Just a heads up, but Zidane has completed a bounty provided on the bounty board and this time it’s a bounty to get Red Faction II’s level format reversed.
While Zidane was unable to reverse the entirety of the level format, he’s reversed enough of it that the levels can now be converted to OBJ, fully textured and with entity meshes converted too. Great work!
This should be incredibly interesting/useful for anyone looking to convert the models or levels to take a closer look at them.
If you want to check it out for yourself, you can find it on GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket.