Delayed spiders...

Well, it took longer than I'd have thought (I don't have as much time to dedicate to this project as Scott does, ok?), but I finally got the spider door puzzle working. Turns out that the engine uses two surfaces, a foreground and a background, and the front one is partially transparent. Here's me thinking i wouldn't have to worry about sprites and the like. Still, done now. Probably not the most efficient way, but hey it works. Cake next? Nah, telescope I think :-)

Progress. Like *real* progress.

Wow. Given that this time last week we had absolutely no idea about the file formats of the .grv files, we have come a loooong way. Our opcode list is now more complete than not, and jvprat has implemented a skeleton script interpreter which we can now go about adding opcodes to one by one.

It's still going to be quite some time before anything is playable, but it's on its way! In the meantime, here's a photo of some of my working...

Text

It's been a while. A lot has been going on in RL, but little in t7gre world.

But things change. Yesterday I had a play with reversing some of the font code, and actually got somewhere. I now have a (very) basic idea what the format of the font file is. Here's a picture, which proves nothing (I could have figured this bit out just from looking at the file in a hex editor).

It's an "A", in case you can't quite figure it out.

It looks more impressive than it is...

OK, nobody get too excited (though I am, but I know what this is). At the moment, this is just reading the first frame of one of the animations. Don't get me wrong, this is a big step, but ... there is a whole 200 storey building to climb after this one :-). But still, yay!

And I'm spent

I managed it in the end. I figured out not only what the problem was, but why I had a problem with that frame in particular. The frame uses a particular opcode, 0x60, a lot, when others don't (at all? Not sure). That opcode gives very precise control over the image: where the previous frames have been slightly "rushed" as it were, to save space, this one is done very precisely. If you remember the intro to 7th guest, you'll know why: all the action for the next few scenes takes place on the pages of that book: it basically doesn't change for a minute or more.
But that's not important. The important thing is that it works. Now I've just got to try it on all the others and find the ones it doesn't work on...

Noooooooooooo!

It was all going so well! I'd finally got the palette completely sorted (how could it be so difficult?), the first 30 frames were perfect, then this! Where do I start trying to figure out what's wrong with this? I just don't know...

Still bad, but getting better

As you can see, I'm getting there...

Woo hoo!

Though barely recognizable, this is a breakthrough. This is the house, after we've pulled out to see it in the book (remember that bit?). It may seem like small comfort, but it pretty much just the palette that's screwed. Hopefully.

Progressing

Next stage. Still not really recognizable (I think it's just gonna be the mansion again, btw).

Not quite there yet

Was getting bored of writing, so thought I'd post some images. This could be an interesting transformation... I think I've screwed up the palette on this image. I'm gonna be putting it together a few pieces at a time, so we'll see!

Tada!

And it was just a comparatively small step from there to here!

The video frames (i.e. each one after this, the first one) are stored differently again, I think they're going to be even more tricky to pull out, but at least I know my BMP writer works!

Picture posting

So I figure, now would be a good time to start posting pictures. Here's the mansion, as my program outputs it atm. Clearly far from right, but it is there if you stand on your head and look hard...