06-14-2021, 12:35 AM
Since I'm dumping a bunch of sheets onto the site, I figured I might as well make a thread for my work.
I'm currently working on ripping all the sprites and tiles for the game Caveland. I was trying to reverse engineer the game and since I was working on that, I figured I might as well take a crack at extracting the graphics it uses and put them online, since they're quite fun.
I've uploaded around 60 sheets already and will continue posting more over the coming days, so I don't think I should show off each and every sheet individually (that'd be a bit much) but I can include some of the more fun ones.
The woodworks sneezes sawdust! Meanwhile, the pub is shaped like a glass of beer with a bunch of foam on top, and just look at the way the little rollercoaster cart just tumbles through the air in the funpark! It's all so full of character, which is one of the reasons I wanted to rip this game.
So far ripping has been pretty smooth--I've automated the extraction of the files (they're all stored sequentially in 8bbp format so they're not that hard to work with) but pretty soon I fear I'll be faced with at least a bit of a conundrum. Two of them, actually.
First: there are a lot of sprites and tiles. The amount of sprite sheets numbers 1305, and while that's big, it's a manageable number. I'm trying to group together as many sprite sheets as possible to decrease the sheer number of files Caveland would otherwise have, but it's already quite a task. The number of tiles, however, is worse. Are you strapped in? Good. The amount of tiles in the game is 107896. This number is positively overwhelming, and while I think I have an approach that at least largely works, managing these numbers remains a challenge.
It appears that there are a relatively small amount of what I'll call tile "components". There are a bunch of backgrounds, and then stuff like walls and other decorations that are put together to create something like a "gold brick wall + plaque with arrow pointing down + bottom-right corner wall" tile. I think the most logical decision is not to burden tsr with hosting a hundred thousand tiles, and just extract the components into separate sheets that can be overlaid to create all the tiles in the game, and more.
Second: not all sprites and tiles that should logically exist, do in fact exist. For sprites, this merely concerns a small handful of dwarf animations that are only available for a certain colour of dwarf. I've been thinking about whether I should add the rest manually by changing the palette to match the other colours. All in all, this doesn't seem like it'll be too time-consuming. As for the tiles though, hoo boy.
These "tile components" are not stored separately and later combined in-game. Instead, they've been pre-combined, and it seems like a lot of logically possible combinations have simply gone unused by the designers and have thus been left out. So... there's a lot of missing data that I'd have to make up for, and they'd, in many cases, at best be an approximation of the tile component would have looked like if it were present in the game. I can do this, but it's also a question of how much custom/extrapolated content is admissible in an otherwise canonical sheet, and how acceptable mistakes in the sheets are (for example, in a case where I believe that a tile component is missing while it is in fact present, and I've made some small errors in reconstructing it from the otherwise available data).
It could well be that I'm overthinking all of this, but I want to do the best job I can.
In the meantime though, here are some more sheets.
I don't know whether I'll be ripping more games after Caveland, but I do have to say there's a certain amount of satisfaction to be found in doing this.
I'm currently working on ripping all the sprites and tiles for the game Caveland. I was trying to reverse engineer the game and since I was working on that, I figured I might as well take a crack at extracting the graphics it uses and put them online, since they're quite fun.
I've uploaded around 60 sheets already and will continue posting more over the coming days, so I don't think I should show off each and every sheet individually (that'd be a bit much) but I can include some of the more fun ones.
Woodworks
Pub
Funpark
The woodworks sneezes sawdust! Meanwhile, the pub is shaped like a glass of beer with a bunch of foam on top, and just look at the way the little rollercoaster cart just tumbles through the air in the funpark! It's all so full of character, which is one of the reasons I wanted to rip this game.
So far ripping has been pretty smooth--I've automated the extraction of the files (they're all stored sequentially in 8bbp format so they're not that hard to work with) but pretty soon I fear I'll be faced with at least a bit of a conundrum. Two of them, actually.
First: there are a lot of sprites and tiles. The amount of sprite sheets numbers 1305, and while that's big, it's a manageable number. I'm trying to group together as many sprite sheets as possible to decrease the sheer number of files Caveland would otherwise have, but it's already quite a task. The number of tiles, however, is worse. Are you strapped in? Good. The amount of tiles in the game is 107896. This number is positively overwhelming, and while I think I have an approach that at least largely works, managing these numbers remains a challenge.
It appears that there are a relatively small amount of what I'll call tile "components". There are a bunch of backgrounds, and then stuff like walls and other decorations that are put together to create something like a "gold brick wall + plaque with arrow pointing down + bottom-right corner wall" tile. I think the most logical decision is not to burden tsr with hosting a hundred thousand tiles, and just extract the components into separate sheets that can be overlaid to create all the tiles in the game, and more.
Second: not all sprites and tiles that should logically exist, do in fact exist. For sprites, this merely concerns a small handful of dwarf animations that are only available for a certain colour of dwarf. I've been thinking about whether I should add the rest manually by changing the palette to match the other colours. All in all, this doesn't seem like it'll be too time-consuming. As for the tiles though, hoo boy.
These "tile components" are not stored separately and later combined in-game. Instead, they've been pre-combined, and it seems like a lot of logically possible combinations have simply gone unused by the designers and have thus been left out. So... there's a lot of missing data that I'd have to make up for, and they'd, in many cases, at best be an approximation of the tile component would have looked like if it were present in the game. I can do this, but it's also a question of how much custom/extrapolated content is admissible in an otherwise canonical sheet, and how acceptable mistakes in the sheets are (for example, in a case where I believe that a tile component is missing while it is in fact present, and I've made some small errors in reconstructing it from the otherwise available data).
It could well be that I'm overthinking all of this, but I want to do the best job I can.
In the meantime though, here are some more sheets.
Hauling Stones
Carrying Pizza
Resource Piles
Construction & Infrastructure
I don't know whether I'll be ripping more games after Caveland, but I do have to say there's a certain amount of satisfaction to be found in doing this.