Ducktales Remastered

[TheShyGuy]

You can probably write a small program to "solve the puzzle". Start with one piece and check for the piece that has the same adjacent pixels. It should work for most pieces, except where there is a borderline of nonmatching pixels. It would also require manual placement of things like the number label.

Editorry, i didn't realize that pieces weren't aligned. The problem is a bit more complicated now, but I'm sure there's a way to automate the task.

[redblueyellow]

I'm used to working with the puzzle piece-esque sprites, especially with WayForward games (they use them a lot). I'd be up to working with piecing together the sprites, I would just need the files to work with.

EDIT: Although referring to my previous post, it would have to be a bit later.

[redblueyellow]

Was browsing around a bit and stumbled across some links that are worth a read:

http://files.wayforward.com/shane/rgbv/ (texture format used in DuckTales: Remastered)

https://code.google.com/p/wflz/

[puggsoy]

Wow, that looks interesting! It's not talking about any file formats in particular but looks like a good place to start figuring them out.

Unfortunately as much as I'd like to investigate I'm in a bit of a pickle time-wise. This seems helpful though, so perhaps someone else can find something with it.

EDIT: Yes yes, I know what I said, but I couldn't resist. It appears that the .anb files contain a number of files compressed using wfLZ. That is, there are multiple points at which the wfLZ header is present.

EDIT2 (I won't make a new post until I get something concrete): I'm liking where this is going. I got a friend to whip up a wfLZ decompressor (and compressor) using the library, and the result I got from one chunk of compressed bytes looked promising. More than half of them are empty (no idea what's up with that), but the rest look like ARGB (or some other 32-bit colour format). I'm super busy today but I'll see what I can do with them tonight or tomorrow, this is exciting!

[puggsoy]

I think I might be getting somewhere. I'd like to ask though, can someone upload Scrooge's .anb file? We know he's in one piece (at least in the dumps) so it'll be good to test with.
If possible I'd also like an image of one of Scrooge's frames (the first, if they have some sort of order), and in its original dimensions. That way I can compare results, and figure out where the data for image dimensions is.

EDIT: DinnerSonic has been kind enough to give me both of these things. He can't post in the Requests forum and PM'd me, so I'm just saying it so you know.

[Random Talking Bush]

I call dibs on Scrooge and the nephews! Mainly because I've got work-in-progress sheets for 'em.

[Carpaccio]

Heh heh, if possible I'll call Flintheart, Magica, and maybe Dracula Duck...depends how in depth this goes.

[Dazz]

How's the progress going with this?

[puggsoy]

In terms of ripping directly from files; since I can't code in C, a friend has been making a simple command-line decompresser for me. We've been working out some wrinkles and he was a bit busy, but with luck a working version should be done by tomorrow or the day after.

Once the decompresser's working, I can take a better look at the decompressed files and see what I can make of them. Unfortunately, school has started to get rather hefty as of late, and I can't invest as much time in this as I'd like to. I will however spend my free time on this, and hopefully have some results soon enough.

[Ton]

So now that this game is on its way to being cracked, will we be able to use what we've learned here and apply it to other Wayforward games? Cause Wayforward has some beautiful games.

[puggsoy]

From what I can tell, this specific format (both the compression and the texture encoding) was introduced specifically for Ducktales. It's possible that later games will use the same or similar techniques, but chances are that past games are still stored differently.

EDIT:


Looks like we're getting somewhere! Still a bit of a way off though. Firstly, the alpha images don't seem to be located in the same ANBs. Would anybody happen to know where they might be (and if so upload a file)?
Secondly, just like with the dumps, Scrooge is in one piece but:



Others are not (to be fair Glomgold has 6 frames in one piece but the rest are like this).

So yeah, while this is an awesome breakthrough, to actually make it any more useful than dumping we need to be able to organise these bits into their proper place. So that's the next step, hopefully it isn't hard-coded! If anybody knows of any other kinds of files that might have this information in them, please say so.

[puggsoy]

(I feel that this warrants a double post.)

So apparently I was wrong.



The alpha image is in the same ANB.

As you can see, the artefacts round the edges, near his hat and so on, are still present. These are actually there in the image data, and are removed by the game's code, although I'm not sure if it's possible to do programmatically outside of the game; it might just be something that needs to be removed by hand.
The chopped up images are also still chopped up, although apparently it is possible to put them together automatically.

You can download the program here. It's a command line program, so here's the usage:

Code:

wfLZEx.exe [file1.anb] [file2.anb] ... [filen.anb]

Something I should say is that I haven't personally really done much on this, technical-wise. My friend, Daxar, has done all the coding on this, and although I just started by asking for a wfLZ decompresser, he managed to add the entire ANB opening and texture extraction.
I wasn't really expecting that, I was planning to have to do most of the actual texture work myself, so kudos to him for that

What I do intend to do is add a GUI for this, similar to how I wrapped vgmstream to make VGSC. Basically it'll be just so you don't have to work with the command line, but maybe it can also let you preview images or something. I can't really think of anything you'd want to do other than extracting images.

By the way, he made an account and wanted to post in this thread, but since it's in the Requests forum he can't. Would it be possible to move the thread to Ripping Projects, since it's more of a project than a request now? Or just make a new thread?

In any case this is how far we are now. It's essentially the same as using dumps, but quicker since you don't have to merge the alpha yourself.
Unfortunately, both Daxar and I are strapped for time. He said that he'll be too busy for the next couple of weeks, and the same goes for me. Ducktales chose a bad time to come out Hopefully this should make things somewhat easier for now, and hopefully it won't be too long before we can continue working on this.

[Carpaccio]

The only thing is it doesn't seem capable of extracting certain ANB files from Ducktales Remastered, such as 'magica_laugh.anb' and 'magica_blast.anb'...'misc.anb' doesn't seem to work either. Everything else I've been interested in thus far has though. I'm already working on Flintheart and Dracula Duck since they extracted properly. I really must say thank you, to both you and your friend. This is a real grand thing you two have done for the community.

[Random Talking Bush]

Boop, this is now moved to Ripping Projects.

And I'll get workin' on my sheets some more now, using that program.

[Daxar]

Oh, yay, I can post here, now that I'm done.

I'm calling this program done, since I've spent too long on it already.

Download: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3181...essANB.zip
Source: https://github.com/meh2481/wfLZEx

The program now uses FreeImage (hence the DLL), and reconstructs images from pieces. I've tried it on the example ANB files that were uploaded on this thread*, and fiddled with some rounding errors until I found settings that look good and seem to output something reasonable. It may crash on certain ANB files; not my problem. It may not reconstruct images with 100% accuracy; again not my problem. Before, it seemed to be able to decompress magica_blast.anb fine (Or maybe that was just at some midway point), now it outputs blank PNGs from that file. Not sure what caused that; don't particularly care. If you're worried about accuracy, use the old version that didn't attempt to piece images together (as that version will always output images exactly as they are stored in memory; this version may have slight glitches in reconstruction due to rounding errors).

Usage is the same as before.

If you have any special requests or such, I can make small tweaks so you can make some kind of managing program or whatever. But I'm basically done.

* Seems to work fine with dracula_duck.anb, dracula_duck_giant.anb, glomgold.anb, and scrooge.anb. Does not work with magica_blast.anb or magica_laugh.anb.