Public Commander Keen Forum

I noticed the shadow-lands map music was different, a lot more stripped down, and all of the levels didn't contain any music at all.

Have you tried cracking open the CGA version and seeing if there were any treasures hidden in it?

I've been interested in creating the first mod for CGA, but I'm not sure if it's possible yet.

If anyone can tell me how CGA graphics work, I can whip up a graphics editor in a few days. Not sure if TED5 works with CGA, but it should, and making a CGA patch utility wouldn't take too long either.

You saw it and you save it for yourself! That doesn't count and you're mean!

Do people *want* the demo graphics or have they already been posted somewhere?

Interesting how none of the point items have tiled versions (although the raindrop, oddly enough, does), and instead only have sprite versions. Also, there seem to be sprite icons for Keen's workshop, the BwB, and some person with a question mark above their head (possibly the council page?); perhaps there was originally supposed to be a cutscene for the story, similar to the cutscene in the demo version of keen1?

Paramultart wrote:Have you tried cracking open the CGA version and seeing if there were any treasures hidden in it?

You should be able to view the maps of any CGA Keen game with my Galaxy level viewer. And you can press F4 (while viewing maps) to export ALL the chunks from the CGA-/EGAGRAPH file. The viewer will even save most chunks as 32 bit (RGBA) PNG image files, so you can view them without any trouble.

As Levellass said, it's not that much of a problem to create a tool that can create CGAGRAPH files. You might even be able to use IGrab (the original tool Id used to create xGAGRAPH files) to create them, but this will probably only work on LBM files, not PNG or BMP.

Quirky Moron wrote:Also, there seem to be sprite icons for Keen's workshop, the BwB, and some person with a question mark above their head (possibly the council page?); perhaps there was originally supposed to be a cutscene for the story, similar to the cutscene in the demo version of keen1?

Yeah. I already pointed that out in the very first post.

What are these strange tiles above the the pyramid with the red/black symbol?

I think they're steps that were supposed to be placed a the entrance of the pyramids, leading down into them.

Also, there seem to be sprite icons for Keen's workshop, the BwB, and some person with a question mark above their head (possibly the council page?); perhaps there was originally supposed to be a cutscene for the story, similar to the cutscene in the demo version of keen1?

What interests me is that Keen's parents icons were not removed with the other graphics... does that mean they're present somewhere in-game?

That's a good question. Given the incredible thoroughness with which the rest of the unused tiles were culled it seems strange that these two fairly obviously unused ones would remain.

Nospike wrote:What are these strange tiles above the the pyramid with the red/black symbol?

What also interests me around that area are the path tiles to the right of that. I wonder if it was planned that there should be paths across the grass?

What intrigues me, again in the same area, is that pair of exit signs (or the lower halves of exit signs.) The one on the left just looks like the usual brown-earth sign in the foreground, but the one on the right is clearly meant to be attached to some kind of metal floor. There's no other indication anywhere else in the tileset that a metal floor was going to exist, and even that metal sign among the others is at least attached to ice. Very strange...

StupidBunny wrote:What intrigues me, again in the same area, is that pair of exit signs (or the lower halves of exit signs.) The one on the left just looks like the usual brown-earth sign in the foreground, but the one on the right is clearly meant to be attached to some kind of metal floor. There's no other indication anywhere else in the tileset that a metal floor was going to exist, and even that metal sign among the others is at least attached to ice. Very strange...

The one with the brown-earth is directly from Keen Dreams, so it's possible that the other one is an unused tile from Keen Dreams.

My Demo graphics: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3940020/k4dem.zip

Notice the lack of 43 bitmap images and 2 sprites, plus some minor differences in some images.


We need to do a levelpack sometime, a Keen 4 Plus, that uses the extra graphics. (And maybe replaces 'Too hot' in all those levels!)

Levellass wrote:(And maybe replaces 'Too hot' in all those levels!)

DO EET PLZ

I'm late to this party, but I did some in-depth analysis (more like 5 minutes) of the tilesets from the K4 demo...

It would appear that the the tileset with the platforms was copypasta'd from Keen Dreams and then modified. There's several specific tiles that were in Keen Dreams that were left over from the copy-paste process. I've numbered them for your convenience:



1) Holdover from the wood platform tiles from Keen Dreams

2) This never seemed to show up in Keen 4, but it appears to be a modified version of the tiles where the log tiles butted up against the wooden wall tiles; this was made for the red path tiles, too.

3) Holdover from the old stone tiles in Keen Dreams

4) DEFINITLEY the old exit signs from Keen Dreams. The blue version is just a modified version of the original. What tipped me off was the green ground tile; it doesn't match up with the green ground used in K4.

5) Not really a Keen Dreams tile, but it merited comment:

Someone on here once speculated about the history of Miragia, saying it was built by some ancient people using advanced technology. The blue 'digital' sign would definitely support that claim.

^ I think the reason that exit sign (#5 in _mr_m_'s post) exists is because they decided to add the scuba-gear at the last minute and made acquiring it exit the level instead.