Preparatory Support for WC3 Added to WC Toolbox Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Update ID

The WC Toolbox has grown once again, and the latest expansion adds the very first preliminary support for Wing Commander 3! WC3 is a drastically different animal than the earlier WC games, which presents some major challenges. As a hardcore dedicated Wingnut, UnnamedCharacter is of course excited by these challenges and jumped right in despite also recently introducing support for Wing Commander Armada. There's still tons to learn about Heart of the Tiger, which will be gradually discovered and dissected in the months and years to come. The first feature now available is a tree archive extractor for the game. This is an early step to make manipulation of the complex data files more accessible. You can read up on exactly what this means and how to go about tinkering yourself here. You can grab the new WC3ToolsCmd package here.

Although there is still work to be done for Armada, I have decided to skip ahead to WC3. I have been looking forward for a while now to start picking this game apart and it will probably involve plenty of work since everything changed in WC3: the tree archive format is different and so is the pack file format; a new compression scheme was introduced (big thanks to @Pedro for pointing me to functioning code); the shapes use a new image encoding and even the palettes are also encoded differently; and of course the addition of video. ...

For a little while now, I have been hacking away at these hashes to reverse them to their original file names. I have managed to reverse all of them and I am 98-99% confident on the names. Although in some cases I may not be able to determine the original name, the name that I use is correct in that it will produce the same hash value. Included in the download is a directory (.\external\wc3-hashes\) with text files containing a mapping of hashes to file names. So this update to the toolbox is small: tree archive extraction with reversed file names; but one that will greatly facilitate working with the large amount of data.


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