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Old 12-27-21, 06:47 AM   #1
Andreas86
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Default Aces of the Deep Modding tutorial and tools!

As promised, I have written a tutorial on modding AOTD, based on my findings so far.. I have also included all tools needed. If anything is unclear please ask me here and I will try to explain. Everything can be found in the download below.



https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Evc...ew?usp=sharing
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Old 12-27-21, 12:11 PM   #2
John Pancoast
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Thanks for these too. I plan on diving into them later today/tomorrow. The various new screens are outstanding too !
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Old 12-27-21, 01:26 PM   #3
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I notice the readme in this file is for AOTP. Am I correct in assuming the same info. in it would apply to AOD ?
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Old 12-27-21, 01:54 PM   #4
Andreas86
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Thank you, I am happy you like the mod!

Hmm, what readme are you referring to? The AOTD modding tutorial I have written myself for Aces of the Deep..

Yes, all info I have listed applies to AOTD.
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Old 12-27-21, 02:07 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Andreas86 View Post
Thank you, I am happy you like the mod!

Hmm, what readme are you referring to? The AOTD modding tutorial I have written myself for Aces of the Deep..

Yes, all info I have listed applies to AOTD.

Oops, sorry for not being clear. The UP2NOWAP.txt readme.
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Old 12-27-21, 02:37 PM   #6
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Disregard; I see what's up now after spending more than a glance at things.
Trying out the various tools a bit. Very handy !
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Old 12-27-21, 05:00 PM   #7
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Yes, especially Engie is really helpful in this regard. There are two problems I want to find a solution for, one is the LZW compression of BMPs which Engie cannot handle, and the second is that Engie hangs when you try to save over a certain amount of frames to a sprite BMP with internal type SCN/OFF.

Take the "TOWER" BMP files for example. There are four of them, that builds up the bridge views in 4 parts, covering 90 degrees each. They are all Dynamix BMP sprite files, 16 frames in each BMP. The internal palette is greyscale, type "SCN" with compression off. But when I try to save my own modified BMPs (I have tried many different approaches), Engie hangs when saving to SCN/OFF. I have yet to try to change all frames though, so I am not 100% if I am doing it right..

I would very much like this new bridge with lookout concept to work, and maybe improve the internal view of the tower a bit. This is frame 0 of TOWER1.BMP, with my own sprite added:


Last edited by Andreas86; 12-27-21 at 05:08 PM.
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Old 12-27-21, 07:09 PM   #8
John Pancoast
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Andreas86 View Post
Yes, especially Engie is really helpful in this regard. There are two problems I want to find a solution for, one is the LZW compression of BMPs which Engie cannot handle, and the second is that Engie hangs when you try to save over a certain amount of frames to a sprite BMP with internal type SCN/OFF.

Take the "TOWER" BMP files for example. There are four of them, that builds up the bridge views in 4 parts, covering 90 degrees each. They are all Dynamix BMP sprite files, 16 frames in each BMP. The internal palette is greyscale, type "SCN" with compression off. But when I try to save my own modified BMPs (I have tried many different approaches), Engie hangs when saving to SCN/OFF. I have yet to try to change all frames though, so I am not 100% if I am doing it right..

I would very much like this new bridge with lookout concept to work, and maybe improve the internal view of the tower a bit. This is frame 0 of TOWER1.BMP, with my own sprite added:


Good idea, very nice ! One really big plus about modding AOD is that unlike SH3, it doesn't need much if any gameplay modding so nice additions like this are able to be concentrated on.
I use a camera file in SH3 that allows me to move right up to the front of the bridge, "in front" of the watch crew, so the non-crew AOD bridge view never really bothered me as I couldn't see them in SH3 either.
But this addition would be great.
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Old 12-27-21, 07:46 PM   #9
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This would indeed be a great addition
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Old 12-28-21, 12:43 AM   #10
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So, I can see the file menu and folders but can't actually open or download anything?

Tried Internet Explorer, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox; All the same thing? Am I doing something wrong here?
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Old 12-28-21, 05:43 AM   #11
Andreas86
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Silent Otto View Post
So, I can see the file menu and folders but can't actually open or download anything?

Tried Internet Explorer, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox; All the same thing? Am I doing something wrong here?
Tim

That's weird.. You don't get any download option? I checked the link just now and it works fine.
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Old 12-28-21, 05:55 AM   #12
Andreas86
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Andreas86 View Post
The internal palette is greyscale, type "SCN" with compression off.
I was quite a bit wrong here regarding SCN\OFF. OFF does not mean compression is "off", but rather has something to do with offset for sub-images. I found a great source on the file formats here:

https://moddingwiki.shikadi.net/wiki...N.2FOFF_format

Quote:
SCN/OFF format

The majority of the image files in The Incredible Machine, including the graphics for puzzle parts, contain an SCN and an OFF chunk. The image data is stored in the SCN chunk, while the OFF chunk contains an index for each sub-image's data inside the SCN chunk. The SCN chunk has its own compression format, described in the next section.
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Old 12-28-21, 07:31 AM   #13
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Nice stuff Mate!


For extracting the DYN files Game Extractor works great!
You only need the FREE basic version.
http://www.watto.org/game_extractor.html
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Old 12-28-21, 07:44 AM   #14
John Pancoast
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Silent Otto View Post
So, I can see the file menu and folders but can't actually open or download anything?

Tried Internet Explorer, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox; All the same thing? Am I doing something wrong here?
Tim

I use Firefox. Click on the download icon in the upper right corner of the screen.
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Old 12-28-21, 04:14 PM   #15
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@Andreas86,

You mention you have some code you can't compile.
Would you mind sharing that code?
Being from the 80's maybe C code?
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