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.

[Thor110]

The details from the exception would be useful in debugging the issue you are experiencing.

Please attach a text file that contains the details.

[Enjay]

No problem. Zip attached with 3 text files (not sure if that's important). There is one from Graphics, one from Enemies and one from Levels. The files are named after the lumps that were selected to cause the exception.

Edit: the Levels and Graphics text files are identical. The Enemies file is slightly different.

[Thor110]

The errors say that something is wrong with your files.

1 : System.Exception: Invalid BND file: missing FORM header.
2 : System.Exception: Section not found in file.

The first error is thrown when the FORM header is missing from a file and the second error is thrown when Sections are not found in a compressed B16 files.

Might I ask where your copy of the game comes from?

Because it clearly differs wildly from mine.

I can state that another user I am in contact with has verified that this tool works with an original copy of the game.

While I suspect it still won't work for you, I have just published a slightly updated version with some fixed logic.

But I cannot address the problem you are experiencing because there appears to be something wrong with your files.

What installation process or steps did you go through when installing the game?

[Enjay]

I honestly have no idea where my copy of the game came from. It's been on my HD for years - like 20 years or more. I think I installed it from a CD that I no longer have, but I really can't be sure. It may not even be a legit copy but, again, I can't be sure. I know that I have the PSX version somewhere too.

However, I have dug into a pile of old Archive CDs that I have and found a different version - a much bigger files size. That one actually seems to work.


Edit: trawling around a few of the seamier pages on teh intarwebs, there seems to be a common download on certain sites that is about 19MB in zip form and expands to about 47MB. That looks similar to the one that I was trying first. I tried a couple of downloads and none of them worked. So, I'm guessing that the 19MB one is a ripped abandonware/warez version with some big non-essential files missing/removed for repacking. I guess that means your tool doesn't work with the cut-down version and that's fine because it's probably not legit.

So, I also guess that the one I was trying is not legit and the one I remember installing from a CD is the bigger file that I have just re-found.

Edit2: With my bigger backup, I was able to extract 1091 graphics and 276 sounds using the newer version of ALTViewer.

Edit3: Hmmm... a difficulty with the extracted files: sprites seem to extract with a black background, rather than transparent. The problem is, that many of the sprites have black areas. Is there a way to solve this?

[Thor110]

Glad to hear that it is working now, at least for the most part.

The tool should work with any version realistically, as I test on my own with non-essential files removed, so I am not sure what the issue was for you.

I setup a custom script which can remove all the games unused files and that can be found in the installation instructions.

Yes, sprites having a black background is a known issue for the time being which I forgot to mention or fix, I have updated the current release to handle this as Magenta.

[Enjay]

I have updated the current release to handle this as Magenta.

Much easier to work with. Thank you.

[Thor110]

You are welcome, I have also made a number of changes just now that should make it work properly with the original copy of the game, without requiring the removal of the unused files or use of my cleanup script to do so.

As well as a few fixes to used colour tracking in the palette editor.

Edit : I also noticed that different files use different values in the palette for transparency, this is peculiar, luckily enemies are all 0, language files are all 255, most of graphics are 0, except for two edge cases, however, the value used for level textures varies wildly across textures and will require that I manually track them all down.

[MartinHowe]

This is really cool. FYI, you can still find Alien Trilogy for PC on eBay, around £11 without the box and silly money with the box. Never heard of this, probably because I was too busy with Doom in 1996; but looks interesting.

Oh, and I know the OP is talking about editors and so on, but what's the betting it would also be used for improved A L I E N themed Doom mods

[Enjay]

It's a good game for its time (and it is very much of its time). It is tougher than most of the "Doom clones" of the day, very dark in places (too dark a lot of the time IMO) and a lot of the textures (in particular) are very low-res looking. By contrast, it also had lots of video elements and other nice graphics (for the time). It brought a good, challenging, sometimes scary ALIENS themed environment to PCs/consoles and was one of the first to do it well. I'm pretty sure there has never been any attempt to make a modern engine version of it. So, playing it today is challenging because of the 1996-style control system. I played it mostly on my PlayStation but (obviously) I had it on PC too.