Parsing the Creatures 1 Graveyard file

 
One more victim of my file format reversing spree : the "The Graveyard" file containing all entries of C1 cemetery.

Parsing it will allow us to retrieve/edit/add all entries from this game file.

Understanding in game stores (Doctor's page and Aprodisiacs). aka "Health" and "Aphro" files.

There are two "stores" in Creatures 1, at least that's how I call them.

Those are the panels allowing you to inject additional items to the world through the Doctor's page and the aphrodisiacs page from the reproduction kit.

The C1 "Stores"

In this post I will show you reversing of those stores file formats, so we can replenish, parse, and edit them.

Parsing the Creatures 1 "TheRegister" file. (extracting Norn birthdates and owner information).

This will be a real quick article about parsing the Creatures1 "TheRegister" file.
This is like a primitive version of the C2 history files. It's the file that holds all creature information saved when you register a creature's birth.

They contain information about the Norn such as name, parents, date of birth and all owner info.

There's nothing really fancy about reversing and understanding the file format, so let's get this done.

Repairing and understanding the lost "dde: pict" command (Taking photos of C1 Norns)

One promising nugget in the Creatures 1 CAOS reference, is the "dde: pict" command.

According to the documentation,

 Unfortunately, as many other things this command not only lacks critical bits of explanation but is also inherently broken (at least considering the above definition) and when used produces less than stellar results:

It's a shame we can't use this functionality in our own tools to take pictures as the Owner's kit does.
Or can't we ?

One of the main motives behind the site being uncovering such lost knowledge and abilities of the ancient Shee, come with me and find out how to understand and ultimately take advantage of this lost command.

Parsing Creatures 1 .spr files (Extracting/Manipulating any of the game's graphics)

In a previous article I showed how to read Creatures 2 .s16 files to extract any of the game image data.
In this obvious follow up I will show you how to read out Creatures 1.spr files for the same result.

The Creatures 1 .spr file format is only marginally harder to parse than the .s16 format.
This is because the .spr files do not directly contain color information for each pixel, but rather an index number, to be used as a lookup index inside an external palette file to get the actual color data.
 
Thankfully, Python magic can once again save us most of the hard work and makes extracting an manipulating C1 images files a breeze.

Parsing Creatures 2 .S16 files (Extracting/Manipulating any of the game's graphics).

"Back then" few easy image manipulation libraries were available, making the extraction of game image data an intricate process (that most creature fans/developers tackled in an easy but not very user friendly way as we will expose).Nowadays things got easier.

In this post I will explain the creatures 2 .s16 file format, and show you how you can now very easily extract any picture from the game using python.
Not only that but we can also harness the power of modern image manipulation libraries to convert the game sprites to any file format we like contrary to most legacy tools only proposing to export images as BMP's and letting us do the conversion work manually.

Reversing and Parsing C2 allchemicals.str file format

Aright, we already covered how to obtain an up to date list of Chemical numbers and names inside our programs by extracting it from C1 game files.

Obviously this is an ability of much practical value for C2 too, so let's see how we could do that now.
I haven't found the allchemicals.str file format described anywhere so far, but the format is simple enough so reversing it should be Norn's play for us at this point :)

Parsing C2 histfiles

Once again, a quick filler post about parsing a random creatures file format.

This time we will be investigating the Creatures 2 "History file" format.

 This one is also already documented online, but being able to parse it can allow us to extract some interesting data.

I guess this post needed at least one picture

Parsing C2 GameLog files with python.

In this post we will see how to precisely parse a C2 Gamelog file.
This file is an ordered collection of all main events happening in Albia : Birth, Ageing, Dieing, getting a Name, Exports or Imports.
Parsing it can be useful to redraw a full timeline of stuff happening in your world, or to see which Norns are still alive or were ever used, if you need to perform some cleanup in the game folder ( by default, genomes and sprites files accumulate in the game folder for each Norn and are never removed )

Whatever your needs are, I hope yo will find this quick reference useful.