Alien Trilogy Resurrection

[Thor110]

Alien Trilogy Resurrection

I recently ( 11 days ago ) began work on a project aimed at making a toolkit for extracting the files from Alien Trilogy into a usable format. Thought I would post it here as well.

My end-goal is to make a fully fledged modding toolkit for the game, level editor and all, however I am making no promises that I will actually get that far.

Currently the toolkit can do nothing more than read the raw audio data or raw text data, as well as export to .wav or import to replace from .wav, it can export and replace textures, it also has a colour palette editor and can view many of the compressed images.

You can find the project at : https://github.com/Thor110/AlienTrilogyResurrection

Currently there isn't an actual release for it, but the readme contains a road map and some preview images.

I was honestly super surprised that the game had not been ported to GZDoom or something similar yet!

I am also working on a similar toolkit for another game ( Jeff Waynes The War of The Worlds, an old RTS PC game ) https://github.com/Thor110/WoWRevived

Hopefully any progress I make in either project will aid the other, as they have some similarities and I have already been able to repurpose code from both for the other.

I also made a refined cleanup script that deletes all the unused files from the game, of which there are quite a lot and some documented research in that regard. https://github.com/Thor110/AlienTrilogy ... comparison

I may or may not work on a GZDoom port in the future.

Sort of a preservation, restoration, enhancement type project.

My main aim is to get the toolkit fully functional, then hopefully build a level editor and fix an inaccessible secret area mentioned here : https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=67544.0

Thanks for stopping by

I guess Off-Topic is the only place I am allowed to post this, I wanted to notify users who were working on Alien Trilogy Doom mods, but every post I made was rejected for being "off topic" so I guess this will have to do.

Thor110

[Enjay]

One of the reasons that there has never been an Alien Trilogy TC/Port/Whatever has been the difficulty in extracting the resources. For example, Csabo, author of the Doom WAD tool XWE made several attempts to try and add the ability to read the files and extract the sprites from AT to XWE. Partial progress was made, but not enough to get meaningful sprites out. I'm not sure if any other tool has managed to get much further.

So, if this tool is able to do that, it would be very cool.

[Thor110]

It is currently capable of extracting all the non compressed images from the games files and as of today it can now extract the compressed images, at least for those that I have determined the correct width and height values for.

There is an "Export Everything" button which will export every single texture from the game at once, but until I work out the correct resolution values for all of the compressed image frames it will throw a few errors, but it still works.

Though I haven't actually issued a release of the tool yet, but it is pretty much one click publish with VS2022.

Currently I have 745 frames left to figure out the dimensions for, which is far too many for me to continue doing it manually, from what I was told the dimensions for each frame are hard coded in the executable, so I will have to do some digging and try to automate the process.

Decided to go with just adding some testing controls instead which allow me to adjust the width in multiples of 2 using this method, I have quickly tracked down all the correct width values for all of the BAMBI frames in a matter of minutes.

I also added a button which then detects the correct height for me using the Width once I have determined it by ensuring that width * height = data length.

Will remove these controls once I have recorded all the correct dimensions for each frame.

Update : It is now possible to successfully extract all 1091 image files from the game.

[Enjay]

This is very cool news. Thanks for working on it.

I have tried it but it seems that my copy of the game is not compatible. I have two copies (I have no idea where from or what format (I thought one was from GoG, but that doesn't seem to be correct) - it's been a very long time) and I also probably still have my OG PSX CD somewhere.

However, with the two copies on my PC I get:



Obviously, that's an expected problem with the versions that I have. It's still great news though.

[Thor110]

Enjay wrote:
> This is very cool news. Thanks for working on it.
>
> I have tried it but it seems that my copy of the game is not compatible. I
> have two copies (I have no idea where from or what format (I thought one
> was from GoG, but that doesn't seem to be correct) - it's been a very long
> time) and I also probably still have my OG PSX CD somewhere.
>
> However, with the two copies on my PC I get:
>
> [img]https://i.imgur.com/7mEAeNQ.png[/img]
>
> Obviously, that's an expected problem with the versions that I have. It's
> still great news though.

I have updated the tool to support the original version of the game, refer to the readme for installation instructions.

[Enjay]

Thank you. I can now get the program to run and it can read some of the files. However, I keep getting unhandled exception errors - for about half of the graphics, all of the sprites and all of the levels:



I don't know if that's expected with this version of the game at this stage.

I can play most (perhaps even all) of the sounds.

I tried an "export everything" but it only got as far as the first file that causes an exception and stopped.