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| | Making TIC a Better Forum... | |
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McStudz Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 43 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : Residential Area, LEGO Island
| Subject: Making TIC a Better Forum... Fri Jan 20, 2012 12:25 am | |
| Well, here we are again. After a long haitus (*COUGHSCHOOLCOUGH*) and a LOT of nothing going on at The Infomaniac's Classroom, we (Segadony and I) have decided to take steps to make TIC better. Segadony has given us an affiliate, and I'll try to get back in contact with Wes Jenkins (The Creative Director of the original LEGO Island). Maybe we can get a Q&A section. In the meantime, I've got a couple of pictures that Wes sent me a while back, and they're pictures of the original Island that was built out of REAL LEGO. From what Wes told me, the original model was made from two ping pong tables and a bunch of foam, as well as the LEGO. Unfortunately, the model was trashed shortly after the game was done (and the development team fired the day before release. True story, bro). So, here's some pics of the development team and the Island model. Enjoy! FYI, Whenever you read "I" and "Me", that's meaning Wes. |
| | | Mys Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 129 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : At a computer in the Infomaniac's Classroom.
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Fri Jan 20, 2012 1:17 am | |
| Pics of the real island and giant Infomaniac, cool. You spelled my username wrong by the way, it's Segendony, not Segadony. |
| | | LegoEssence Roamer
Bricks Placed : 4 Join date : 2012-01-21
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sat Jan 21, 2012 8:06 pm | |
| Signed up just to post how awesome that picture is! Hopefully you can get into contact with Wes. :) |
| | | Teawater Roamer
Bricks Placed : 31 Join date : 2012-01-18
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sun Jan 22, 2012 8:03 am | |
| - Segendony wrote:
- You spelled my username wrong by the way, it's Segendony, not Segadony.
Maybe I should start calling you Seg. Interesting pictures. So there's only one girl? I wonder how she felt about that in a group of eight. Edit: What does the yellow diamond shape sign say? Something zone written backwards. con?????tion? |
| | | Mys Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 129 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : At a computer in the Infomaniac's Classroom.
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:46 pm | |
| - charleysdrpepper wrote:
- Segendony wrote:
- You spelled my username wrong by the way, it's Segendony, not Segadony.
Maybe I should start calling you Seg.
Edit: What does the yellow diamond shape sign say?
Something zone written backwards.
con?????tion? You can call me Sega for short, like some people do. I'm not sure what it says actually, I was kind of wondering myself. If it is con?????tion, it might say construction zone. |
| | | Teawater Roamer
Bricks Placed : 31 Join date : 2012-01-18
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sun Jan 22, 2012 4:43 pm | |
| - Segendony wrote:
- charleysdrpepper wrote:
- Segendony wrote:
- You spelled my username wrong by the way, it's Segendony, not Segadony.
Maybe I should start calling you Seg.
Edit: What does the yellow diamond shape sign say?
Something zone written backwards.
con?????tion? You can call me Sega for short, like some people do.
I'm not sure what it says actually, I was kind of wondering myself. If it is con?????tion, it might say construction zone. Yes, I think you are correct, I take another look. It seems perfect! Thank you very much. |
| | | McStudz Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 43 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : Residential Area, LEGO Island
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Tue Jan 24, 2012 9:41 pm | |
| To be honest, I've never really noticed that sign until now! I was too busy checking out the pic of the Island. |
| | | McStudz Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 43 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : Residential Area, LEGO Island
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sat Feb 04, 2012 4:36 pm | |
| I've finally sent an Email to Wes, so hopefully we'll get him back on board.
We need more members though, so please spread the word! If you know a LEGO Island fan (either in real life or on another forum), please tell them about this site. I refuse to let TIC fall into one of those sites that never had much activity... |
| | | Mys Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 129 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : At a computer in the Infomaniac's Classroom.
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sat Feb 04, 2012 5:51 pm | |
| Unfortunately I don't know any LEGO Island fans. The only LEGO fans I know are the guys at RRU, and most of them know about this site already. |
| | | Teawater Roamer
Bricks Placed : 31 Join date : 2012-01-18
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sat Feb 04, 2012 9:07 pm | |
| You could try searching "LEGO" on youtube and message people who have videos about the LEGO games. (And/Or simply make LEGO videos advertising this place.)
However, I think the best approach is to give this site a potential goal. Like an editor project, or Community Project or something, in my opinion. |
| | | Mys Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 129 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : At a computer in the Infomaniac's Classroom.
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sat Feb 04, 2012 9:54 pm | |
| - charleysdrpepper wrote:
- You could try searching "LEGO" on youtube and message people who have videos about the LEGO games. (And/Or simply make LEGO videos advertising this place.)
However, I think the best approach is to give this site a potential goal. Like an editor project, or Community Project or something, in my opinion. I prefer not to both people in a way that would be 'you should totally see this!' or be annoying, so I don't message. As for a video.. well, there isn't much to show atm, but I do leave a link on my profile page, as well as do that on the all other sites I'm on. Yeah, an editor project would really do it. Unfortunately McStudz and I don't really know anything about looking at the structures of files, so we would need some help on that. :/ |
| | | Teawater Roamer
Bricks Placed : 31 Join date : 2012-01-18
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sat Feb 04, 2012 11:52 pm | |
| - Quote :
- I prefer not to both people in a way that would be 'you should totally see this!' or be annoying, so I don't message. As for a video.. well, there isn't much to show atm, but I do leave a link on my profile page, as well as do that on the all other sites I'm on.
Then again, it might be better advertising at LEGO-related forums/Getting more affiliates, in my opinion. - Quote :
- Yeah, an editor project would really do it. Unfortunately McStudz and I don't really know anything about looking at the structures of files, so we would need some help on that. :/
Well, the only way to make progress is to start. The first step can sometimes be the hardest in most things you do. (I think.) I recommend labeling offsets of where things you know are. For example, you could open up the EXE file in a Hex Editor and begin searching for text found in the game. When you find something you can record the address of the text and what text you found. Finding text is usually quite easy when it is not compressed. And usually games have a lot of text. I have not studied EXE files very much, but I'm assuming they can look at external files somehow... So if you cannot find Text in the EXE, then there could also be a chance that the program is reading a file that contains text instead. Anyway, I can already say there are already image files here just straight in the folder. ( \LEGO Island 2 Demo\_Data\Load.bmp ) If that example should help. Anyway, some of the .str files contain text. Like: \LEGO Island 2 Demo\_Data\messages\FE\Data\Browser.str All it contains is this: - Quote :
- BROWSE01:-1 Install
BROWSE02:-1 Uninstall BROWSE03:-1 Play BROWSE04:-1 Exit BROWSE05:-1 Readme BROWSE06:-1 Register BROWSE07:-1 Browse Anyway, looking at the EXE of the demo.. 000CE820 has file locations.. interesting enough. 000DF2D0 is a list of .wav files. 000F0740 = API? Basically, I'm seeing usage of windows related files. KERNEL32.dll, USER32.dll, GDI32.dll, COMCTL32.dll, etc. DDRAW.dll = Direct Draw? I might should look into that sometime. 000F2510 = Interesting error message. - Quote :
- This is a error message, i am just going on and on about what is needed to put in here just as a test. why this is a new line. how many lines do we need?
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| | | Mys Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 129 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : At a computer in the Infomaniac's Classroom.
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sun Feb 05, 2012 1:01 am | |
| I'm not on any other LEGO forums besides RRU (Rock Raiders United). I only join forums unless I have/want to. :/ Though I think Studz might be on a few other LEGO sites. I hate advertising as an admin to be honest, it feels like it bring the reputation down. :|
True, true.
I haven't either, but I think they can.
We're not looking to mod the exe, as distributing the exe (even modded) would be illegal, of course (though posting vids of hacks is okay). We're looking more into modding the files of the game.
Load.bmp doesn't exist for me, it must be a demo file. And there is only 1 image file in the folder charley not multiple, I checked the demo folder. :P The the bob/bod files obviously do contain the textures in simple .tga format.
Messages is a bod/bob file in the full game. Though its contents are the same (except the demo doesn't have multiple languages).
I'm guessing big time that fe means Front End. So those files probably contain the text of all the inagame menus, except for browser which seems to be the menu that pops up before starting the game.
LOL at the left behind message!
P.S. Thanks for looking into something. |
| | | Teawater Roamer
Bricks Placed : 31 Join date : 2012-01-18
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sun Feb 05, 2012 1:15 am | |
| - Quote :
- We're not looking to mod the exe, as distributing the exe (even modded) would be illegal, of course (though posting vids of hacks is okay). We're looking more into modding the files of the game.
Yeah, a copyrighted EXE modded or not would be illegal, but you can patch anything... (Patches only contain what edits you make, so...) Unless I am somehow mistaken. *~* But either way, studying the EXE is nice to learn on an educational point of view. - Quote :
- Load.bmp doesn't exist for me, it must be a demo file. And there is only 1 image file in the folder charley not multiple, I checked the demo folder. :P
The the bob/bod files obviously do contain the textures in simple .tga format. I implied multiple because I didn't feel like checking all the folders. |
| | | Mys Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 129 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : At a computer in the Infomaniac's Classroom.
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sun Feb 05, 2012 1:22 am | |
| - charleysdrpepper wrote:
- I said multiple because I didn't feel like checking all the folders.
Oh okay. Well here is some info I got from a guy I sent a pm to on RRU (I actually sent it to another, but he hasn't responded yet). - Spoiler:
- Segendony wrote:
- What kind of info does one look for..
in unknown file formats? (and when reverse engineering) - JrMasterModelBuilder wrote:
That's a really broad question, and I'm not sure I'm the best person to answer it, but I'll try (for what I know):
Always look at them with a hex editor. You will be able to see binary data and strings.
First, it's always good to Google the header of the file (usually the first 3-4 bytes) and see if it's already a known format. If not, you have to figure it out yourself.
It's important to be able to convert hex to decimal, unsigned integers, and any other likely structures to try to figure out what stuff represents as computers do a much better job of reading data in binary format than as text.
Any useful file stores some kind of data. Knowing what kind of data your looking for will help. In the case of a file archive like the JAM file format, you would expect to find some kind of index of all the files (most likely by names you can read as ascii strings) with some extra data around them to describe at what offset in the file those files are stored latter on (or, in some format, in another file altogether) and how big that file is in the archive.
For other, more complex files like those commonly stored within the archive, you have to figure out what the files bytes represent. For example, most of the files in the LEGO Racers JAM file origamiguy has been doing an amazing job reverse engineering, is very raw data that must be figured out. Things like powerup locations, you would know that your looking for what color and XYZ positions they are at (things that would be stored in binary numbers). Perhaps origamiguy could provide more insight as to his methods used there, but I imagine it involves a lot of educated guesses and trial and error.
... *goes and changes quote box colour* |
| | | McStudz Infomaniac
Bricks Placed : 43 Join date : 2011-04-10 Location : Residential Area, LEGO Island
| Subject: Re: Making TIC a Better Forum... Sun Feb 05, 2012 5:15 pm | |
| Well, I do have an account on BZPower (as does jamesster and brikman), so I could probably try and post more there (so people could see my sig; it has a link to TIC on it).
Let's cross our fingers, people! |
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