Wing Commander Toolbox

I had a go at the Live Viewer for WC1 (KS), using the WCDX patch, and it doesn't find the game running. I can't run WC1 without the patch, so assuming not compatible with WCDX?
 
Doing some research into the Armada files and so far the tool works great for cockpit stuff.. The parts I'm having trouble with are the VGA files within the gameflow directory. The files seem to be the exact same format as the WC2 *VGA files... it's primitive video format with all the animation frames saved as individual files. The problem I'm running into is that there's not a specific function in the Armada command tool for VGA files. You can make the WC2 extract function extract all the images but there's zero option (that I see) to tell it to use the armada palette files so you end up with funky colored frames.

It's interesting how it's built though with specific key frames for the background and then the rest with transparency overlayed for the actual animated parts. (Interestingly HCl at one point had a proof of concept where you could convert actual FMV to this format with some success). Anyway, I either need a way to apply a new palette to these and I'm not smart enough to figure it out or it just needs the function added to the armada command tool with the option to specify a palette when extracting from the VGA file
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AD said:
Doing some research into the Armada files and so far the tool works great for cockpit stuff.. The parts I'm having trouble with are the VGA files within the gameflow directory. The files seem to be the exact same format as the WC2 *VGA files... it's primitive video format with all the animation frames saved as individual files. The problem I'm running into is that there's not a specific function in the Armada command tool for VGA files. You can make the WC2 extract function extract all the images but there's zero option (that I see) to tell it to use the armada palette files so you end up with funky colored frames.

It's interesting how it's built though with specific key frames for the background and then the rest with transparency overlayed for the actual animated parts. (Interestingly HCl at one point had a proof of concept where you could convert actual FMV to this format with some success). Anyway, I either need a way to apply a new palette to these and I'm not smart enough to figure it out or it just needs the function added to the armada command tool with the option to specify a palette when extracting from the VGA file
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Just a quick follow up. I had managed to not realized I had copied the WC2 palette file to the folder with the VGA files... with that in mind I did some experimenting and I'm able to rename the Armada palette files to "WC2PAL" and the extractor will use that, but it still looks funky either way without a proper mapping of the Armada palette files. Anyway, the issue still remains that the order of the WC2 palette files doesn't really match whatever Armada does.
 
Teste wing commander 1 traduction en Français, manque les accents, reste quelques fautes a corriger.

 
Fantastique! Is that all your own effort? Aside from the review it looks like it's mostly done.

I imagine the original developers didn't expect to support characters not used in English. I wonder if it'd be possible to hack accented characters into the game or if it uses hard-coded glyphs to map to ASCII characters.
 
Greg14 said:
oui, je travail en solo. je cale sur les accents aucune idée pour en ajouter.
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There's a few posts back a number of pages in this thread about the changes you need to make in your script to allow for the accents. This one and the posts surrrounding it are part of a discussion about doing exactly this.
 
Combat alert! Poking around Super Wing Commander's BRIEF.000 file I discovered that there is added rec room and briefing text for a third Enyo mission. I'm curious if any of you much smarter people are able to read SWC's Vega Sector campaign file and see if there's an extra mission hiding in there?
 
I'm working on a project. Can anyone explain the meanings of the code in the WC2 SHIP.V00 file:

Name: Ferret; obviously the ships name
Class: 12; unknown
Index: 0; unknown
Type: 48; unknown
Radius: 120; I assume the size of the hitbox
Mass: 125; self explanitory
Max Scale: 768; unknown
Power Plant: 1; unknown
Fuel: 200000; I assume afterburner fuel
Damage: 5; hitpoints I assume?
Explosive Force: 4000; unknown
Max Speed: 500; afterburner speed
Cruise Speed: 360; non afterburner speed
Max Acceleration: 870; what units?
Max Yaw/Pitch/Roll: 8/ 9/ 8; degrees per second I assume?
Angular Inertia: 900 unknown

And the MODULE.000 file:

S01M0 Mission designation (not sure what the S stands for)

Sphere 0: Name: Caernavron; Waypoint name?
Wave: 1; Center: 0, 0, 0; Waypoint coordinates?
Radius: 20000; Size of area?
Unkn1: 0; ?
Unkn2: 0; ?
Triggers: [-1,-1|-1,-1|-1,-1|-1,-1]; ?
Unkns: [ -1, 0, 0, -1, 0, 0, -1, 0]; ?
Indexes: [23,-1,-1]; ?
Classes: [14, 0, 0]; ?
Types: [59, 0, 0]; ?
Ships: [ 0,11,12,13,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1,-1] Ships present? (how are numbers indicated?)

Thanks in advance!
 
UnnamedCharacter said:
I do not have an update for the toolbox, but instead a utility program for viewing a snapshot of in-memory game data. It is an outgrowth of the WC1LiveViewer program, except not live anymore and with much more data. It is a bit slow, but it works for my needs.

View attachment 10835

The Data tab provides a fairly extensive hierarchical view of the game data set and can be filtered using keywords. The InFlight and Mission tabs provide a specialized view of a subset of the data.

See the first post of this thread for the download.


Support is limited to the Kilrathi Saga version of the game (WC1.EXE). To use the inspector, start the game, then the inspector program. If it recognizes the running process, it will populate the program with a snapshot of game data. Since the game data is continuously updating you can refresh (F5) the program to update the snapshot.

As an example, let us enter an asteroid field. Using the data tab and filtering on hazards, we can see the values for the asteroid field. The game has populated in-flight object slots 13 to 20 as asteroids and from the in-flight tab we can see related values grouped together. If the object has an image block associated with it, a preview will be shown.

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In light of playing around with WCLoader I tried to use the Inspectors tool in the first post today, it seems that it doesn't like loading with the Wing1_wcdx.exe or with the un-patched Wing1 from KilrathiSaga - is there something I'm doing wrong?
 
great tools!

is the source code hosted somewhere? i guess having it open source would benefit those kind of efforts. or is there already a link i missed somewhere?
 
I have a few questions regarding the WCToolsCmd console program. BTW, I did read the readme file. I just have the brain of a potato right now.

I was able to unpack SHIP.V08 but I've been unable to repack it with the updated bengal files.

The new images don't follow the same file naming format that the unpacked files do. Do I need to rename them all to match the unpacked XML file? I can batch rename them with an incremental increase in the file name number, but all instances of this that I see expect the number to be at the end of the file name. For these images, the originals have the increment in the middle.

Also, do I need to put the last 3 original images into the same folder with the new bengal? The ones you see on your ships dashboard. I have the same question for the unpacked XML file.

Also, the bengal files are in png format where as the original are gifs. Do I need to convert them all to gifs first?

For repacking the file, I get an error if I use the folder (due to it having many images) and it won't accept the original XML file as the source due to the difference in file format and naming convention.

The -textencoding tag description is jibberish to my potato brain, so I haven't been using it.

When my long haul covid brain fog gets better, I need to learn more about scripting and coding.

Thanks
 
Darkmatter said:
I have a few questions regarding the WCToolsCmd console program.
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I posted on Discord but I'm not sure if you saw it - you shouldn't need to repack anything, but those updated files only work with Kilrathi Saga WC1, not the DOS version (Kilrathi Saga uses a modified engine, runs on Windows etc.).

WingLoader I believe can turn a DOS copy of WC1 into the Kilrathi Saga version, but I'm not sure of the specifics. Once you have Kilrathi Saga up and running (e.g. via WingLoader) you should be able to just drop the files into GAMEDAT and they should work.
 
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