[Warhammer Dark Omen Forum]

Warhammer Dark Omen Forum

It would be possible to hook "the call" in the executable and simply supply a custom bitmap. (If we really wanted to. )

A quick peek at MAPS.PBD
It seems to my eyes to be... bitmaps compressed with Rob Northen Computing compression v2

Have any of the modders here toyed with that?
I noticed the "RNC" magic signature in a couple files in SOTHR as well.

Dark Omen only allows the camera to get a distance of 80 from the ground
To change that distance limit to 800 ...

( assuming the English version of the executable )
write the hex values "48 44" with a hex-edit at the following file offsets:
00030128
0003029A
000304AE

  That is exactly what it was, Thanks!

+8,000 images dumped...

[attachment=1]

it's 4am here ... so here is where I'm at.

:-)

so here is a WIP

it only does sprites type 1 & 2
which covers some ( ~740 ) images...

it doesn't handle any units yet...
I think type 4 is packed... something to do with the 'f' index.

[attachment=1]

have fun

FOL files entries are header info for each image in the BOP file ( width, height, offset, etc. )
An 8-bit entry in a BOP file is an index to a 16-bit entry in the PAL file.
A 16-bit entry in the PAL file is TWO 8-bit indices into the palette.

So each 8-bit BOP entry eventually becomes two pixels.
 
Where the real palette comes from is unknown. ( I just dumped it from ram to a file... )
Some PAL files have more than one palette...
Some FOL files are not multiples of 16?

[attachment=1]
so someday... I might create a tool to convert BOP/FOL/PAL triples to bitmaps.

*Only works with NVidia graphics card so far..*

Something seems to be wrong with the flipping chain...

In 3D mode every other frame is blank.
On win8 it looks like every other frame has the wrong color-depth.
Alt+Tab'ing away and coming back ( on the main menu ) causes Flip() to start failing with a "ran out of memory" result.

I assume the back buffer has a z-buffer attached, is set as the rendering target of d3d, etc.

To get 3D-mode working we can just change the Flip() call to a Blt()
Which costs vsync and still has issues when alt+tabbing away

The lazy man's way of not having a flipping chain is to enable the "debug" windowed mode.
Windowed mode can not have the primary surface as part of a flipping chain.
( so it will use Blt instead of Flip )

To play 3D-mode on Win7 in windowed mode... ( with no ForceDirectDrawEmulation of course )
hex-edit the english version of EngRel.Exe, write 0x00 at file offset: 0x000BD0A8
Set the desktop to 16-bit color.

Enable the "Run in 640 x 480 Screen Resolution" on the compatibility tab to have a fullscreen window.


On Win8:
Windowed mode fixes CPU-mode for me ( if it isn't run as admin )
Win8 also has an option to reduce the display to 16-bit color on the compatibility tab

on win7 I've noticed that Chaos Gate isn't working when I install the 1.2 patch
perhaps it is just the copy I'm using now as I can't find my CD...
It does work without the patch and with Win98 Compatibility set < installed anywhere >

For future reference,
when installing from the English v1.1 cd see here
( obviously for plain old x86 you would just use cmd.exe and not sysWOW64/cmd.exe )

the elven forest and... the game repeated the same mission over and over again

I've seen this as well, but it is passable.  
IIRC you need to kill all the units quicker or
not let one of the enemy units flee off the board or
not having some unit of yours wiped out or
something like that.

I think the dwarfs need to survive for the cutscene ? It has been a long time since I've played

So for all those who want to know how it works just post down here and when i get some form of feedback ill release the secret

Here is some feedback: don't be a jackass.

the "secret" is to install to a path of 8 characters or less
example: C:\cgate

which is all over the internet and takes less than 5 minutes to find...

hf

I wrote a patch to add the Dark Omen mouse cursors to SOTHR
http://users.cjb.net/aqrit/sothr_cursors.zip