Help with Chill Manor (PC-DOS) IMG format

[MartinVole]

Ha, thought I could let this rest, but in the back of my head this thing always nags me to come back into it. Crazy how that works out, eh? Now I just want to see this thing done and over with, but all I got is data, part of which I submitted ages ago on the Wiki.

So, as a quick, between I.M.Meen and Chill Manor, much of the formats remained unchanged. What did change however, was that graphics became variable in height, and possible width, with the extra bits of data, and the inclusion of mipmaps. This was enough to screw up the current graphics converter, some extra bits of data creating garbage even for 64x64 graphics for the ceiling and floor textures. Aside from the two changes to the format, the overall format is the same. If anyone has the free time to modify the code I'm attaching, or even find it useful, it would be appreciated.

Also included is a QuickBMS script for extracting files from the RES###.LAB data containers of both I.M.Meen and Chill Manor. The IMG2BMPChill source code files were modified mostly to add the palette of Chill Manor, instead of I.M.Meen's. Sorry, didn't get very far in reversing the extra data bits. Included examples of MeenIMAGES.IMG and ChillImages.IMG files for comparison.

[MartinVole]

Still no progress elsewhere, but here is the raw palette from Chill Manor. It is a shared palette. Unlike normal games, and like I.M.Meen, the game palette was stored within the HUD PCX.

[Nyerguds]

Um...

http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?f ... 9&start=30

http://www.shikadi.net/moddingwiki/IMG_Format_(Meen)

Seems there's enough information for decoding it already?

[MartinVole]

They changed the format some in Chill Manor that makes current methods no longer work, that previously worked in I.M.Meen. Research never went past a "hypothetical" phase and just rolled over and died, and now emitting a smell like an overripe carcass years later.

The Wiki page was made by me, you see, based on what I could discern about the format, along with a link to a tool that was made for I.M. Meen. Now I'm kinda figuring out that perhaps Animation Magic did some other oddball voodoo with Chill Manor's format with all these headers per tile entry which may contain more than just pointer data.

[donnie]

Got it, thanks!

[failuration]

Thank you Jesus Christ. Bless my mom Huong Thi Thuyen Vu; she says to give the executables out but keep the source codes. So this time I am doing just that! In the following attachment is an image translator. It is similar to IMG2BMP that you have. The only difference is it decodes a bitmap and puts it in assembly language text file.

[MartinVole]

Still trying to figure out how to adjust this for converting Chill Manor sprites and textures. My original plan was to eventually recreate Chill Manor in the GZDoom engine after I finish with I.M.Meen.

[failuration]

Thank you Jesus Christ.

If you are talking about my software above.... Bless my mom Huong Thi Thuyen Vu and honours to my mom Huong Thi Thuyen Vu and my dad Nguyen Binh Thuy; congratulations to my two siss Nguyen Khoa Thuyen and Nguyen Khoa Thi; myself Nguyen Khoa Tien created the above program to extrapolate/convert binary data into text. It is temporary situation however you can make it permanent by cutting and pasting into your program the "asm DB" section. Then you would have to develope code to display your graphics. This will cut out additional files. It was creates in Windows so you would put any image files in GZS.bmp and double click b.exe. It produces a third file calling it "checking.txt" where the data is stored.

Enjoy#

[MartinVole]

There... is clearly a miscommunication here, as this isn't even remotely similar. IMG is a texture container used by the game I.M.Meen and Chill Manor. I don't see how this is useful at all for the purpose of converting the game tiles to a more usable format, this is just... turning an image into a text file. I don't see how this is supposed to even be remotely useful to me.

[failuration]

It is my misunderstanding that you wanted to convert a BMP file to text.

[MartinVole]

How did you come to the conclusion that I wanted to convert a BMP to text? I thought it was made pretty clear this was from a game, about a game image format. That I am trying to convert to BMP, or really any format of usable image.

The situation is, and I emphasize, I provided source code to a program that extracts tiles from I.M.Meen IMG files, BUT, the sequel to I.M.Meen, Chill Manor, uses an updated form of IMG tile format that, as of yet, does not work with IMG2BMP because the tile sizes are larger, and it utilizes mipmaps. The current IMG2BMP does not handle mipmaps or tiles of height/width greater than 64x64. Will the IMG is basically the same format, it has extra bits of data that messes up the current IMG2BMP, causing it to spit out warped images.

Ultimately, I'm just requesting that somebody makes use of this to finally make an IMG2BMP for Chill Manor, or heck, it becomes useful to Camoto or something, I dunno. I'm just a modder who actually loves these old games and want to one day immortalize them by recreating them in an improved engine, and graphics are the only thing standing in the way of doing that with Chill Manor.

[failuration]

Hail Mary!

Once again MartinVole, I have to repeat myself. I am a DOS progerammer. I specialize in graphics however it has only been 5 years in DOS. Compared to Tom Hall's 30 years I am a kid! Please refrain from being a bully to a kid in DOS# Thank you in advance.

[arcnor]

Hi @MartinVole,

Yesterday I found your post and decided to take a look at the problem. I've managed to extract many of the "compressed" images (those are only on "IMAGES.IMG"), although I still have some stuff to decypher. I've attached an example of a working and broken one, for illustration purposes .

Working:

IM_C_22.png

Broken:

IM_C_25.png

[arcnor]

Finally got to fix that, now only centering is missing (images can be off-center when they have a lot of transparency), but this one should be simple to fix.

Wrong centering:

IM_C_58.png

[arcnor]

And after a bit more work, offsetting (more than centering, wrong word) is fixed as well.

I can provide all the extracted files, or explain what I did (the format of the compressed textures is basically RLE encoding plus some extra code to handle transparency), or both .

There are a few bytes I haven't been able to decypher yet, but they are probably not needed to generate the images (I can't see any image "wrong").