Trass3r's Realm

Many people have problems with some missions and are thus stuck cause there's no campaign mission selection in B&B.

I attached my UnBOX tool which you can use to unpack the .BOX archive files.
Execute UnBOX MISSIONS.BOX and you will get a subfolder MISSIONS containing all the 30 map files.

Copy one of them to the B&B main folder and rename it like a savegame: savegamX.sav where X is element of {0,...,9}
This should make it possible to play that particular mission by loading the respective savegame you replaced.

After all those years B&B's weird speech compression algorithm has finally fallen.
Thanks to Zench's hard RE work (http://forum.xentax.com/viewtopic.php?p=40916#p40916) I was able to add .m10 support to OpenBB.
Now the only thing missing is the map/savegame format code =)

I attached a commandline tool to unpack the speech files in SPEECHx.BOX.

So i tried to create a DirectDraw proxy dll.
What for? Well, e.g. for forcing old games into windowed mode to ease debugging them. Or for wasting my spare time, who knows.

To make it short, hooking IDirectDraw works flawlessly. I get full control there.
So I implemented an IDirectDrawSurface wrapper class exactly the same way as with IDirectDraw and modified CreateSurface to return my own object.

It strangely works for some time but eventually crashes. Anyone got a clue why this happens?

So I finally switched to Win7. Time to try out if B&B can still be run. Good news, it does!

First of all, like in XP, the setup needs to be run in compatibility mode so the registry settings are properly written.
IIRC this didn't work out of the box in XP. I had to copy the installation files to a folder on my disc and then I could right-click -> properties -> compatibility and set it to Windows 95.
Then the installation works fine.

The current OpenBB code can be found on bitbucket.
I don't sync it regularly and it's not really well documented but maybe someone wants to have a look.

It's licensed under the terms of the GPL. If you make any improvements please let me know.

http://bitbucket.org/trass3r/openbb

I've been trying to figure out the codec used for the speech sounds in B&B for ages. Now, with the help of some code documenting the QSound API I accidentally found somewhere in the net - in fact the ONLY information about it at all - I tried to get ahold of the iconic sounds once again.

tile sheets

I just reworked the modules dealing with B&B game files. Now proper sprite sheets are generated from .mfb graphics files that can be more efficiently used with OpenGL.
Hence the ground is now rendered using a tile sheet instead of single tile textures. This alone gives a speedup of factor 2.

Tried to compile gdc today. Unfortunately in a VM :D

It took hours to compile gcc (including GMP and MPFR).

But, hell yeah, in the end I got my own little GNU D compiler now ^^

Yeah just downloading the closed beta client for the upcoming Settlers 7.
I already wonder how long I actually play it until I start digging into its file formats :D

Man that server could be faster, only 2 MB/s ;D

After quite some programming my sprite viewer for Beasts and Bumpkins is finally working like a charm.
It loads the original video.box game archive file and allows to switch through all the contained mfb files and their respective single frames/sprites.

Here's a sample screenshot:

Many thanks to GameZelda who found out the RLE compression algorithm used for most sprites :)