Nyerguds

TD Freeware announcement: On the official site: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316220242/http://www.commandandconquer.com/intel/default.aspx#NewsMain (somewhere in the sidebar; you have to manipulate its size and scroll position to actually get to it. [screenshot]) On the official boards: [screenshot] (actual page not found on archive.org) RA1 freeware announcement: On the official site: http://web.archive.org/web/20080913232303/http://www.ea.com/redalert/news-detail.jsp?id=62 TS freeware announcement: On the official site: https://web.archive.org/web/20100221042726/http://www.commandandconquer.com/ (bottom of the page. This links to the freeware classics page I linked to below) Here's the archived official EA downloads page of the freeware C&C games: https://web.archive.org/web/20100214144634/http://www.commandandconquer.com/classic (oh wow, I'm thanked at the bottom of that page! Never noticed :laugh:)

Maybe you looked for the wrong thing; it's technically called "Flame Dancers: Genesis", and it's the only Flame Dancers campaign for RA1; the first one was for C&C1. Here's a dump of all the old Planet C&C RA1 content; the file in there for the Flame Dancers campaign is "genesis.zip". https://www.quaddicted.com/files/mirrors/ftp.planetquake.com/planetcnc/ra/

Uh, I messed with that code in C&C95, so I more or less know how it works... but given the fact I never actually worked with RA95, that doesn't magically give me any idea where that code is located in there. Though CCHyper might now. Also, I read everything. My portal to this site is the "unread posts" list

Hey, Making a translation is mostly a matter of finding the right text encoding. The fonts themselves are no issue - I made a font editor for that a while ago, but I'd have to research which text encoding is generally used for Ukranian. An easy way to do that is to get the font editor, open some font (any font, really) in it, go down to the characters after index 127. and then just change the text encodings dropdown at the bottom until you get all the characters you need in the "Char" column of the symbols list. (Note that I prefer using DOS encodings since everything else in C&C uses those, so check these first) I've attached a font you can use to test (the font doesn't really matter; you don't need to look at the font data but at the characters corresponding with the encoding). The font itself is meant for the encoding "DOS-850" in the dropdown, which is "Central European"; select that and you'll see all the characters line up. Could be that font contains everything you need, but I have no idea to be honest. Do note this isn't the only font that needs to be adapted to make the translation - there are a couple more. But I'm not asking you to adapt the font; I'm just asking to look through the text encoding to find one that contains the characters you need. I can take care of most of the rest (well, for the fonts. Not the translation itself, obviously). For your information, I got a full guide to translating C&C1: http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/cnc95upd/cc95p106/language/ I suggest you read through that; it'll tell you exactly what needs to be translated. I haven't updated it since I made my font editor, though. I should really do that

I just went over the list that maps the N64 tile IDs to their PC equivalents, and found exactly which tilesets are missing in it. Note that this does not mean my mapping is incomplete; a tileset being missing from the mapping means it was not found in any of the maps in the ROM, since I scanned them all to build these mappings, and from our tests, this seems to mean these tiles are simply not in the N64 ROM at all, and thus, they can't be used. Temperate: BRIDGE1D (bridge NE -> SW, destroyed) BRIDGE2D (bridge NW -> SE, destroyed) D30 (road 'Y', SE -> N+W ) D40 (road 'Y', SW -> N+E ) D43 (road 'Y', NE -> S+W ) Desert: B4 (small rocks) B5 (small rocks) B6 (small rocks) BR5 (purple square; some debug tile) BR10 (2 purple square; some debug tile) D19 (road '+' crossroads) D33 (road 'Y', NW -> S+E ) D43 (road 'Y', NE -> S+W )

It's technically possible to edit the files table (shown at the end of the tutorial) to clear up space by 'removing' files, by making the game think they're 0 bytes long and moving their address to the same address of some other file. The format of the entries in that index is: offset length function 00 12 filename 12 4 offset to data 16 4 decompressed size 20 1 compression format {0x00: uncompressed, 0x11: 8bit LZ, 0x22: 16bit LZ} 21 3 compressed size (all values not prefixed with 0x are decimal) So if you change the compressed and decompressed size to 0, the compression format to 'uncompressed', and the offset to the same as some other existing file, it'll be seen as a 0-byte file put just before that other file in the listing, meaning you effectively removed the object from the files table, and can combine the space it used with that of the other files near it to insert larger files. Note that I haven't tested this yet; this is purely theoretical. I'm not sure how the extractor will react to 0-byte files in the listing. If this doesn't work, you can also just reserve a small section of freed up space and give all such 'deleted' entries a single byte there. but then you'll need to figure out the actual offsets to change, of course. It's also possible you'll have to actually change the size of the larger entry you're trying to create too to make the extractor accept it as larger available space. If you do that, it's best to change both the compressed and decompressed size of that expanded entry to the new larger available space, and put the compression to "uncompressed" so the extraction process doesn't fail on the decompression step (since the data in there will obviously be corrupted if it tried to decompress it all as one file).

Well it's a game port, so that's not too surprising. It's basically the same engine adapted and converted to work on the N64 hardware. Graphics and sounds are all system-specific, so all of that changed, but anything purely for internal use can usually stay the same. In this game, that's the mission .ini scripts and the .eng strings files. The missions' terrain maps were redone to better suit the optimized graphics storage they use for the map tiles. I did find some files in the PC C&C terrain tile format, but I'm not sure if they're used because there were far too few of them to be the full terrain, and they only seemed to be clear terrain.

Please edit your topic and mention which game you are talking about.

Eh, the ingame objects that don't exist will simply not appear. The game's ini reader will ignore them. However, when talking about tiles on maps... the problem happens way before the actual game gets involved. These maps need to be converted to N64 format, so it's the converter that has a problem, since it finds tiles on the map that it doesn't have a N64 equivalent for. The converter will always tell you which tiles couldn't be converted. Tiles will be in hexadecimal format, like, "BA04". The first part of that, BA, is the tileset ID. Convert it back to decimal with the windows calculator and you can look it up in the index of tilesets.ini, to see which tileset file it actually is. You can check these tilesets in XCC Editor; it'll give a name in the status bar when hovering over a tile in the sidebar. (though a quick way to see what kind of tile it is is to use XCC Mixer to look up the graphics file of that name in the theater mix files of the game.) http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/junk/tutorials/xcc_editor-tileset-name.png The tile shown on that image (d30) is the one we found missing on N64. Note that I configured the tool now to just substitute unknown tiles with clear terrain. To quickly see which tiles are missing, just convert the map back to .bin and, as the image I linked shows you, you'll see what's gone.

That's a lot more than half of the screen. In fact you're missing barely half of the sidebar Might be due to display scaling? That messes up stuff like that from time to time.

Same process on map NES: Vengeance from the Extended Operations pack: -> Unlike the GDI 6 test, which was started with making and filling enclosed areas, this one was just painted over with the paintbrush, so it has less accents on the cliffs. I had to fix this map because it seems a certain road tileset that splits a road from south-east to north and west simply does not exist in the N64 version, because none of the official maps contain it... I really want to see this... the first custom mission actually played in 3D

Right, I've been experimenting with .img files a bit, and I made a little program that can convert a .bin map to a 64x64 representation of its bare terrain. From that, I attempted to make my own height map. Here are the steps: The original (65x65) height map of GDI mission 6. We want to approach that, somewhat. Conversion of map to terrain types image (64x64) The code that does this is currently dumped into my N64 .IMG viewer. I haven't released anything that can do this conversion yet. But, yeah, basically it uses the information from tilesets.ini to identify all cell contents on the map as their terrain type (clear, rock, water and beach), and then writes that as image. (I took GDI 6 because I knew it has beach on it ) Of course, you can do pretty much the same thing just by opening the map in XCC Editor, disabling all overlays except Template, exporting that as BMP, and then resizing the resulting image to 64x64. Only difference is that using raw terrain types also gets rid of roads. Painting heights on terrain types image (64x64) This is all manual work. I didn't really use the original height map as guide for the colours; some missions just have overall higher height maps than others, and I wanted to do this from scratch. Note that I never used height 0 (black), because it would interfere with the way I was planning to manually convert it later Resize the image to twice the size, in pure pixel resize (128x128) Center the image in twice the dimensions of the final 65x65 (130x130), leaving a 1-pixel border around it. I then painted the 1-pixel border to continue the terrain as it was around it. I also cleaned up the rocks in the sea a bit; they're mostly there for making the scripting work well, and can normally not be seen anyway. Resize to final size, using smooth resize (65x65) This will give a slightly blurrier image, but that's okay. Terrain changes should be gradual. Now... we got our final image. I'll probably make some kind of converter for converting that to img format, but for now, I cheated and did it the manual way. Which means, saving as bare bitmap and just pulling out the raw bytes Flip the image. I'm going to save as bmp, and it saves the data differently than the .img format. So flip it. Convert to pure greyscale, and remove the alpha channel. Save as raw BMP. In Gimp, I had to disable the option to save it as "Run-length encoded", and I enabled the compatibility mode to not write color space information because that's less to clean up. Open the image in a hex editor. You should see the file header, followed by the easily identified greyscale palette data; they're triplets of the same value followed by a zero. Find the end of the palette data (should be FF FF FF 00) and delete everything from the start of the file to that point, so only the raw image data remains. Now, images have something called a "stride". Basically this means a line of 65 pixels isn't written as 65 bytes, but as the next multiple of four bytes. So each line in the file is currently 68 bytes instead of 65. If you didn't use any black in the image, you should clearly see triplets of zero bytes (00 00 00) occurring throughout the file at equal intervals, and it should be easy to use Search and Replace to remove then. You should now have a 1081 byte file. The header of an img file is 16 bytes. The type and dimensions of all the N64 height maps are exactly the same, so just copy that 16-byte header from another height map img file and paste it before these 1081 bytes. And boom, that's it. All done. Kamuix, I included the final height map in the attached zip file. Could you try out what the effect is in the mission (SCG06EA)? I want to know whether it's OK or if it totally sucks

Yeah, Kamuix and I figured that out together on the Discussion page of my YouTube channel. Well, mostly Kamuix. I told him the theory, and updated the map converter to convert both ways, but he actually got the guy who wrote the N64 extractor to update it to support inserting files in C&C64, and actually managed to get it all working :heady:

More or less the only difference between Skirmish and online play is, y'know, that it goes over network. So I'd say it's either your connection, or that of the people you play against

Or, y'know, just ask me

Updated the tool with a fix for XCC-saved maps. You can get the new version here: http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/project_stuff/2013/CnC64MapConverter/release/ Fixes XCC maps so the blank terrain doesn't corrupt Supports loading the .nms file by drag & drop, and from command line (meaning you can drop a .nms file onto the program icon to launch with it loaded right away) Shows which .nms file is currently loaded

By the way, that strange pattern you see on the default terrain is probably XCC Mixer's fault; it saves blank terrain incorrectly (it uses actual specific tile IDs for clear terrain instead of using the "default terrain" indicator, like the game does), and the converter's database does not contain the necessary values to fix that. I think setting the default terrain low byte and high byte to "FF" and "00" should fix it, though at the moment these fields default to the defaults for converting maps from N64, not to N64.

I split off Kamuix's reply into a new topic - it was interesting enough to warrant one, and pretty off-topic here. Inserting missions into C&C64 (showcased with Extended Operations mission)

Please do! I definitely want to mess around with that Not really a thing to post in the Extended Operations thread, mind you. I'm splitting this off. Do note, only missions with pure Goodguy, Badguy and Neutral houses will work, and quite some other stuff is missing too (the ARCO civilian 'building', the dinosaurs, the visceroid, the SSM launcher, and the chem warrior's weapon), so it's best to go over that in the guide so people can determine in advance if the mission can be played on N64 in the first place.

Back? There have never been rankings for RA2 on cncnet, as far as I know.

if it's map scanning / thumbnail generation... show a progress bar for that, people. Sheesh.

Sounds like some kind of timeout in an update check or something?

Huh, odd to see Nod 13C but with bridges instead of chinooks xD Of course, knowing the original, I knew exactly where all enemy bases would be.

lol. Do crashes in the YR client give a log file? You kinda need a full stack trace to know what messed up there.

tomsons26 wanted me to inform the world that "format80" is actually called "LCW"; Lempel-Castle-Welch compression (Louis Castle's own tweaked LZW compression) https://forums.cncnet.org/index.php?topic=4403.0