Veyrdite

Here we go: this is SCENE01.DAT, with each byte of the file represented as a pixel. Each row is 256 bytes and the file should be about 1.5Kb. I manually drew on the index down the side so I apologise if it's off. I'll do the same for the remaining files of interest. Hopefully you (and others) will find this useful for tracking down areas of data to play with. Meanwhile I'll improve my tool and upload it somewhere.

Awesome work Komojo. As I'm a lazy Australian, do you mind sharing the addresses of data you have found in the files? You have motivated me to do something interesting, but whilst I'm getting carried away with this I should disclaim that my version of the game might be different: -MD5sum- -Filename- 395bb9e79ab949c627cc8f192ee8cc36 DATAA.DAT f10ac7b99768a8544401cf2f0026f60d TD3.EXE c0f1ec4e86c3b3cb8290f8506db4e2b9 SCENE01.DAT d214c20b2fa7638cb2fac8ab129e9c2d DATAB.DAT Additionally: what 3d format are you writing into? Something nice in ASCII or are you interfacing with some easy libraries?

I've played a few GD games now and found I sometimes have vastly different experiences to Ross. For Wolfenstein however I'd probably react the same after a while -- Doom 3 turned me off with similar issues. Sidenote: do not go looking for the sequel to Quarantine. It really sucks.

You're absolutely correct. lol ... XutYffQy4Ag The dumbell grunting in the first few seconds is eerily reminiscent of a Doom "hurt" sound effect.

You generally need to reverse engineer the save and/or game files. Some files are wonderful: zipped archives of organised files, some in plain text. Most however are piles of dumped memory, variables and machine code in a format you have to guess. With these it's best to fire up a hex editor and start looking for patterns in the data that make sense. Hex editing is simple and anyone can do it, but working things out by studying the files requires a knack for being able to guess how the game was coded and lots of patience for dead ends. Modding games is a great way to learn more about how they work behind the scenes, but it's much easier and more fun if you have proper utilities (ie map making software from the developers) than working with raw bytes in a hex editor. For example: this particular game would have each map divided into atleast these few things: "entity spawners", "zones" or "paths". Things that describe where objects such as pedestrians and cars can be randomly 'created' in the world. Interactive zones (shops, entrances, etc) A list of missions with details about how and when they work, text to show, etc Some basic level-wide stats such as sky colour, aggression of drivers, spawning rates, what dynamic objects are allowed to spawn Your details: car state, money, mission progression state (probably only whilst running) Dynamic objects such as cars and pedestrians World geometry Most of this would be permanently stored somewhere in the game data rather than in a save file, if nothing else because it saves space (and therefore save times). Things like the mission descriptions would be easy to find with a hex editor (they'll probably be in plain text ASCII which is easily searchable) whilst others can be in any format the designers dream of. Take for example the world geometry: the only thing I can derive is that the game only supports floors, ceilings and straight walls. There are no slants (probably to avoid having to do rendering calculations more costly than affine mapping) but apart from that they could encode the data any way they want, especially since this would use a software-renderer rather than a common API like OpenGL or DirectX. Did they separate the map into individual objects with coordinates for each vertex, or encoded it as squares with rotation and size? Were textures kept seperate or inlined with all of the geometry coordinates? How did they split large areas (like city blocks) up for fast navigation? I'm sure other members here with more reverse engineering knowledge will counter some of my assumptions here It's more fun than working with either the undocumented work of a programmer or interpreting data: you have guess your way through both and hope to find what you're after. EDIT: I should point out that Minecraft saves are much easier to reverse-engineer than the data of a game like Quarantine. Minecraft's blocks provide very repetitive data and they are/used to be separated into individual chunk files. There is still variety and guess-work, but not as much. Most of all you can build a unique shape in-game to look for when interpreting the code, ala a crib.

I'm still playing through it, but thanks for the advice. I had to consult a walkthrough to get the gist of how the game operates -- but now I'm happily running solo. *ducks*

I have a few stories from playing this game about a year ago The map designers were very heavy on making linear paths with little interconnectedness, if any at all. As much as I dislike this (only for having played too many games with this style) they experimented a little with it more than modern games do and made it tedious and very confusing. So much so I enjoyed it in retrospect. Before I get to this I need to talk about the saving system for the PC version I played. There was no auto-saving: if you didn't do it, no-one did, and often I would get myself stuck in a situation where I did not have enough health or ammunition to pass the next few enemies because I used the self-overwriting quick-save feature. But hey, if you died the game would present you with a restart button. How nice! IT WOULD RESTART YOU FROM THE VERY BEGINNING OF THE GAME A robot might be able to speedrun this game in a few hours but it took my quite a while. I suspect the PC version was a port of the console version that they decided not to test as much (hence the lack of autosaving?), also supported by the fact there are no multiplayer bots in the PC version (but a still alive online community last time I checked in 2014). Many of the early-game map paths would turn out to be complete dead ends with no hint that you had gone the wrong way. It might not sound like much, but the map design feels so linear in most parts that you're conditioned into thinking that this has to be the right way and nothing short of inspecting every corner for a secret will convince you otherwise. After a minute or so of backtracking you can commonly find the path you need to take to continue, which always tends to be an obvious 'other' choice somehow that you simply didn't see because of your tunnel-vision. My best memory was of the 'loops' in the map designs. I came across a particular small pit-room that you were supposed to cross in a vehicle, but the bridge was retracted and the controls were on the other side. Unable to remotely activate them, I jumped into the pit and had a look around. There was nothing more than a crack into some water which didn't look interesting enough to me, so I thought I needed to get across. By this point I had experienced the game glitching out in-map events and triggers many times, so I was firmly of the opinion I should have just been able to shoot the control panel (as you do in other parts of the game) to extend the bridge and cross. Because this wasn't working I made my own way up by cutting a path into the rock wall with explosives. It took several tries and a few reloads but I eventually got it. Going on by foot I came across a large entrance to an underwater section. OK, I'll dive in! After a few minutes of swimming (no air restrictions in this game) I came across a vertical shaft of water going down with an enemy submarine lurking at the bottom. It's AI had a poor sight angle so I could sneak up behind it, but attempting to damage it would immediately alert it and it would kill me in seconds. The only weapon that worked underwater for me was the standard pistol and this was not enough. This blocked my progress. Why the hell did the game designers put this here? What was with this really long, empty swimming section through tunnels before it? I couldn't kill it, I couldn't go past it (it was facing the way I wanted to go) and the submarine's driver certainly wasn't going to take a lunch break at any point. So I lured it. I lured it all the way back through the minutes of empty tunnels. The turns in the tunnels were enough to afford me missile-dodging powers sometimes, but not always. Eventually I had lead it all the way back to where I got into the water in the first place so I could use my arsenal of above-ground weapons (on dry land) to kill it. It took only a few short bursts of the assault rifle. Right! Back into the water. Swim through minutes of empty tunnels. Up and down over underwater mines. Finally I find a little opening in the water above me -- it's a SUBMARINE BAY where I can get my own SUBMARINE. That would have made this whole area make sense! But why only after the point I needed it for everything? About 100 meters after leaving the submarine bay I get to a crack in the ice. Above this crack in the ice is the room with the extending bridge I couldn't get across. Have a think about this for a moment. Yep. That bridge hadn't glitched out. I shouldn't have scaled the wall with explosives. When I did get to the other side to extend the bridge, all I needed to do was get the vehicle across the bridge and to where I first entered the water to end the mission. I had done everything backwards. Other memorable things: A cauldron you have to ride in a factory takes ages to arrive after pressing a button. If you don't get in within a few seconds (or fall out because it's so small) then you need to go get a coffee, because it takes ages to come back. Friendlies are useless and get themselves killed in moments. You're better off killing them and taking their ammo. There's a few stealth sections. In one you have to avoid the cameras and carry your bodies, and in the other you need to take out the guards one by one so further murdering can be achieved. This is a great breakup of the gameplay from the rest of the game. You get the first sniper rifle by killing an AI sniper atop a large, generic 'grinding' machine. As you enter his room he shreds through some friendlies as they cry for you to be wary of this all powerful sniper. How do you kill him? With less firepower than even one of your friends had: a couple of rounds from your weak little pistol, more than accurate enough considering he's no-where near a "sniper-rish" range. Anyway, the game in short: interesting design decisions and choices, but gameplay wise it's a mixed bag. The final boss character is uninteresting as is the final fight. The story is vaguely possibly interesting. The awesome wall-destruction engine is never really used in interesting ways. The characters are highly unbelievable. But there are very interesting and strange parts to the decisions and designs you come across that make it worth playing. I'd +1 this for the game dungeon, simply because it feels obscure to play. The sequel is more popular (not worth playing as much, except for the cheats) and I suspect very few people ever finished the first game because of its issues, but I'm probably wrong (the console version might have been much, much better).

Seems to be abandonware. Looking for it now

My avatar is a bit of a joke -- I need to give everyone here kudos for being the first community to question it. Eneeth could probably exist, but even without a grounding in calculating bond energies I can probably guess it would be ridiculously unstable. Hey, it might be even more fun than metal azides that stir themselves using explosions (good read, technical bits can be skipped). That and it looks like an ASCII crab. The SM-58 is a dynamic type microphone so it does not need phantom power and shouldn't gain anything from it. Welcome to the forums btw!

Ross, did you get permission from Valve before using Freeman's voice in this video? That's also been my mental image. "I need to make the movie" *spits cigar*

My eyes! http://neverhood.wikia.com/wiki/The_Neverhood

Most likely. I'm sure generic pop-filters are cheap anyway, so it's not too much of a vital choice.

If you want to go dynamic then this is a good choice. Go for the SM58, which is the same price but with a pop filter for vocal use. Be wary however: as the SM57/8 is very popular so are the fakes. Use your head when buying. @Vapymid: eneeth is the second molecule in the carbohydron group, preceded by enemeth and succeeded by eneprop. Chemistry students seem to find the similar alkene and alkane groups more popular for some reason

RE audio dynamic range compression mentioned in the video: this is actually what you want, but setup very differently. You should be able to get the compressor to do basically what you're doing by hand to the very loud parts -- if it's screwing up your voice then it's not setup to do what you want. You will want to try it out with: Cut-in threshold higher than an "ok" voice level, so nothing below a decent volume is even touched Really slow attack and release times, ie approximately from 0.1 seconds to a second Some form of look-ahead (time-travel) or the compressor will lag behind what your voice is actually doing. EDIT: this may be assumed by default without telling you, just try it out and see how well it works. If you can't do these three things with the compressor options your software provides, it's probably junk for your purposes and I don't blame you for giving up on it.

Well if I need to shout, my current mic is still pretty good, but for things like game dungeon and other videos, me having to shout is rarer, whereas it's practically a given for Freeman's Mind. Getting a more sensitive condenser for your non-shouting work is one possible route. You would have a choice between this and your current dynamic, so it avoids obsoleting your current equipment whilst also expanding what you can do. Cheap condensers can be had for less than 100 USD, but I can't pass opinion on them as I've only ever repaired (used) some more expensive models. If you want to spend some time reading there are some interesting stickies on the HomeRecording forums that might help. Be wary however: you'll most likely need a phantom power source if you go the condenser route. I'm not sure of your current equipment setup but you should be able to get little preamps that do it for less than 50 USD -- keep this in mind when considering cost. There are some condenser mics with built in power supplies and USB analog to digital converters, but there is no-where as much choice when it comes to these. Anyway, hopefully I won't become too much of an audiofool here. I'll pass comment on the curtains in the background of this video -- what do you have to hide Ross?!

OK, but just be wary that your experience can be explained by different things as well, not just being able to hear 96kHz. It's perfectly possible you can indeed do this, but it's much more likely you are listening to the differences between your equipments distortion ("colour") when it tries to reproduce higher frequency or bit-depth content. Ie the tone of everything changes unintentionally when playing things that are supposed to sound better, and you like that tone better. To you it sounds better but it's not necessarily for the reasons you think. There are other explanations too that match your results -- be wary, and be a skeptic until you can prove things scientifically Indeed a lot of us have not had the luck to use some nice speakers or headphones, so if there was a difference to hear this high up we wouldn't be able to anyway on most equipment. Sidenote: I don't believe adjusting an existing 44/48khz sound card to desample higher rates is a good idea. Commonly the outputs are low-pass filtered to aid stability of the amplifiers, so you would also need to modify the boards or else almost all of that higher freq content would roll off and never leave the card. If you did, then overall distortion would probably increase (mainly more high-freq content) as the amplifiers would oscillate more. YMMV, but it would be much more advantageous to get a card designed to do higher rates.

+1 Do what you enjoy. If you're not enjoying, we're probably not enjoying it. Judge yourself harshly!

Disclaimer: I used to do volunteer sound work for a couple of years. Nothing amazingly full on, but I love the electrical and acoustic theory side of things and I used to teach it to other people. The land of audio equipment is full of more tomfoolery and myths than any other dimension. It happens to the best of us: we take something we read or hear someone say and treat it as fact, when really they probably did the same themselves. The more someone swears blind by what they know the more you should question them. ... so please feel free to disagree and argue with me! I encourage it. I am no god of sound. Mics You gave yourself a couple of requirements in your video: Masochist to shouting Directional (does not pick up background junk) Your current mic already does that. What is it that you dislike about it? If you want to mount it I recommend gaffa tape and old books or bent fence wire. There's no point buying a new mic just for the stand. If you are comparing microphones Make sure they have: (1) A 'cardioid' pick-up pattern or similar, such as 'super-cardioid'. This means that it cancels out sound coming from directions other than the way it is facing, within reason. Hopefully everything you are looking at will be somewhat directional, but don't put it past any manufacturer to just not care. It's much simpler to not bother engineering the housing around the actual microphone capsule which by default generally lends the device to be omni-directional. (2) A pop filter (big foamy bit). Without it you will make massive amplitude spikes every time you blow on the mic when talking. The minimal distortion is more than worth it and if you really want to try without one: it generally only takes a few seconds to remove. (3) Stated specs. That preferably means a sensitivity spec (how much power is made per unit of sound pressure) for you to compare. Beware different units, dBV != dBa != dB.... Higher sensitivity -> the noise floor of your equipment is lower compared to your wanted sounds. ie it's less likely people can hear the hiss in the background AND you can use the mic from further away without issues. If no specs are given: try to find them from the manufacturer's site. If they don't exist then don't touch the mic with a stick -- no company would make a decent mic and then not bother writing about it IMHO. Me getting angry at other people @microphones that Youtubers recommend. This immediately scares the beans out of me -- does the youtuber appear to be a reliable source information about microphone choice? Have they compared their new, expensive mic against any other mic in the same price range? It's Dre Beats, BOSE and related companies all over again. On their own they are "ok", but compared to everything else in the same price bracket they're utter junk. Don't trust someone that cannot demonstrate they made an educated choice beyond the brand-name. Yes youtubers use microphones often, but that just makes them an expert in the mic they use. How can they recommend it over other things? How are they any different to any person recommending you a mic? EDIT: I just checked the price of the PR-40. Wow. You could get four SM58's for that I'm also a pessimist. Sometimes I think video makers are sponsored by the mic salesmen or via a youtube entity they run through. The flashier a mic looks the less likely the company is selling them to a professional crowd. This is unimportant to ross. (1) Humans cannot hear the difference in quality levels above redbook CD ( 44.1kHz 16-bit ). You're probably not claiming this (I don't know) so please forgive me if I'm being rude. (2) Ross's setup only analog to digital converts the sound once so you're not going to have quality loss through DtoAing and back again signals out of phase through several pieces of equipment. You would need a lot of equipment for it to start to matter. For digital formats: amplitude aliasing will not be audible or noticeable if Ross is only re-encoding his audio a few times over. Lossy audio compression will do more damage than this, and if it's done right you don't hear that either. (3) The most sad part: any company who knows (1) has no reason to use decent AtoD conversion above the human hearing threshold. Most of that is going to be utter junk, and even if it wasn't poorly converted your equipment setup may have feedback/interference at those frequencies that you simply don't hear and therefore don't notice to remove. Wait, you don't hear it? Oh yeah, (1) I'm an electronics hobbyist familiar with choosing parts, working with (commonly erroneous!) datasheets and designing circuits. I do not do this professionally but I am somewhat familiar with design processes through my own experience and talking to others. We have to deal with signals that we don't want and have to filter out all the time in circuit design, something like "above human hearing" is just another thing to add to the pile of "don't give a shit, low-pass filter it out to avoid other issues" we already design around. For bitdepths: if the sampling is not accurate, these extra bits are mostly generated noise. If you can't hear them it does not matter if you're using 16 bit recording or 24 bit with the last 8 bits made mostly of junk noise. I'm sure many products do higher frequencies and bitdepths perfectly well, but there's not much point except in a few rare situations. Most of all: you would have to verify this yourself with test equipment to even know. EDIT: I should reinforce that recording at higher qualities does not do any noticeable harm, it's just that it's not worth the money or space if more is needed than otherwise. ie don't judge recording equipment by its sampling rate unless you have a very good reason you know you have to. Tl;Dr; Humans lose all logic when it comes to judging audio, forget that "sounds good to me" is likely "I'm the only person that can profess to tell the difference".

I'm going to have to track down these other maps now.

The staff looked pretty healthy until Opposing force. Perhaps different staff are allocated different diets? You don't want any one catering service knowing too much about the whole facility. More TODO Particle bounces off a virtual floor If proper physics is not used for particle effects (likely for the original goldsrc, unknown how it may have been changed for the source version) then their paths are going to be pre-animated or pre-coded. Either way we can note two things: Particles travel through walls. Assuming nothing interesting happens in the room we saw the particle, it could have been created somewhere else The particle movement is setup as if it exploded on a flat surface, as it looks like it bounces off a virtual floor (the path abruptly starts moving up again for a second bounce, but with less energy). Its bounce point will be at the same Z height as where it started. Potential to be an artefact CPU/code phantasmal erroneous generation of particle entities or coordinate fumbling of existing particles: possible GPU fumbling: much less likely, considering how the particle kept a smooth velocity over a few dozen frames. Video capture/encoding: possible, given the 'follow movement' behaviour of modern encoders. It may have just happened to be a very lucky 'path' of small variations in the image over the given frames that appeared to be a sharp object moving to the encoder. I don't have hl source, but I'll try probing the same area with the original hl sometime. Who knows what we'll find?

Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening I've helped out a satellite group for their balloon-altitude launch. We basically went 'who cares' at this level (I presume the Earth still shields us) but it will be interesting to see how things change now the group is aiming higher.

One current idea: use the material in space rather than returning it to earth. In space, it's worth lots of equivalent 'get to space' fuel, but once you take it down it's lost that.

There's a definite turning point in the pat's path. Plotted frame-by-frame whilst the camera was mostly still, cropped version of above: In order to properly handle the future success of the particle bat we're going to have to emulate it's natural environment. I can set up the grinders, but does anyone know what vertebrate was being ground up for those meat chunks? I'm thinking it's not cows...

Always attribute to lack of thought to programmers, and you'll get a good picture of human history. Some of it, anyways. for (every entity in the game) open a new file of name "entity ID" dump info close file repeat I've just realised how completely inhuman my first posts have been here. Ross: I love the Game Dungeon. Keep it up . I'm not a robot.

Nice UI. I dumped a video frame just like VeryShyPerson did to check it out. I think the icons are from some variant of Tangerine. I can see why people think you're running a Nix environment. Back when XP was my main OS I took a similar route. BB4win (blackbox for Windows) was my cake and Asuite was my machete. Never eat cake unprepared. Now, as a guilty game game developer I think I know what's happening with the pink-backgrounded text. Before image formats supporting transparency were common, games used 'special' normal colours to indicate transparency. So enters supreme FF00FF pink , leader and most popular of the invisibles, probably because there were not many Barbie games (yet). Alas in this setup the transparency is 1-bit -- things were either entirely transparent or entirely visible, nothing inbetween. Mixing magic pink and normal colours would yield horrendous non-transparent results. If you scaled, blurred, rotated, texture-compressed or mutilated these images in any way that would try to 'blend' the colours, this mess would result. Any combination of driver shenanigans could be enforcing some form of texture compression or image-scaling -- does the game have any options to run at a lower screen resolution for example? Who knows, perhaps all of the testing was done at 640x480...