Level Viewer for KEEN VORTICONS and GALAXY (and more...)

Here is where to post about the latest Commander Keen fangame or modification you've finished, a new website you've made, or another Keen-related creation.
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

DHeadshot wrote:Still doesn't support Zoltan's Revenge
I said it before and I'll say it again: The files from Zoltan's Revenge are not in the correct format. And I'm not going to include any hacks in my viewer to support "illegal" modifications of the file formats.

But stop crying, I've got something for you: zoltan.zip

You can use these files to view either version of the mod, just copy them into the same folder as the mod and run the viewer. It works fine for the first demo ("minimod"), but the GAMEMAPS file of the second demo is not in the correct format (the string "TED5v1.0" is missing at the beginning of the file). The viewer can load the file with the MAPHEAD file from the archive and it will load map 0 upon starting. But once you switch to another map, you will never be able to scroll back to map 0! This is because normally, no map can start at location 0 in the GAMEMAPS file (because of the TED-string) and the viewer will skip any map that starts at location 0 or -1 when you switch maps. Just restart the program if you want to go back to map 0.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

Does it matter? I'm releasing the entire thing in a month or so anyway, in correct format. It's just the result of my knocked together level editor being total crud at saving maps.


Also, that UNP is good, it handles LZEXE? Might be worth including with KeenGraph.
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Syllypryde
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Post by Syllypryde »

Levellass wrote:Does it matter? I'm releasing the entire thing in a month or so anyway, in correct format. It's just the result of my knocked together level editor being total crud at saving maps......
Releasing the entire thing? That means a full Keen 4 mod?
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

Levellass wrote:Also, that UNP is good, it handles LZEXE? Might be worth including with KeenGraph.
DON'T! I just noticed that UNP produces a completely different file than UNLZEXE would, making all your offsets useless. Might be better to include UNLZEXE and the shareware version of PKLITE instead.
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Commander Spleen
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Post by Commander Spleen »

When did that Vorticons version appear? That = pretty coolgut.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

Releasing the entire thing? That means a full Keen 4 mod?
C full mod that will contain only a limited number of levels and stuff. It's too below par to be saved so I'm finishing it up and releasing it, then starting over.

DON'T! I just noticed that UNP produces a completely different file than UNLZEXE would, making all your offsets useless. Might be better to include UNLZEXE and the shareware version of PKLITE instead.
Links to PKLite? And in many cases it would just work to extract the data into memory for use, so the executable would not be affected.

Also, curious now on the differences between the files produced, any idea why?

Also curious about the method PKLite and UnLzexe use to compress stuff, might be worth writing into the program instead of using the utilities.
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

PKLite (and other DOS tools) can be found here: http://sta.c64.org/dosprg.html

The source code of UNLZEXE (C) should be included in the zipfile. I ported the code over to BlitzMax and and am already using it to deompress the executables in memory. I haven't found any code to decompress PKLite, yet.

The exes unpacked with UNLZEXE and UNP have different file sizes and therefore different offsets for the included datafiles. I don't know what's bigger in the UNLZEXE'd version because I didn't compare the files yet. And I don't know anything about the structure of executables to begin with.

The files produced by both unpackers seem to work fine, though.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

I can't read c, I can barely read basic, does anyone know how the LZW compression it uses works?
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

Okay, I think this is what most of you have been waiting for: GalaxyView v1.4

Sprite display is finally done. And you can now view Bio Menace as well! (Jim Norwood owned me by releasing the games with GAMEMAPS.BM* files that aren't even used. The "real" map files are the MAPTEMP.BM* files!)

I only included sprite mappings for Keens 4-6, though. But this can be added for all the other games by editing the INI file.
Last edited by K1n9_Duk3 on Sat Nov 05, 2016 21:46, edited 1 time in total.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

Aaaaand that's about the perfect level viewer. Excellent work!
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Post by Ceilick »

Can we get a mirror link? The executable is corrupted when I unzip it :dead2
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Post by FCTW »

Dude, this is sweet! K1n9_Duk3, I may have to ask you a lot of questions sometime. You're obviously very smart and very knowledgeable. That is, if you don't mind.
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K1n9_Duk3
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Post by K1n9_Duk3 »

Ceilick wrote:Can we get a mirror link? The executable is corrupted when I unzip it :dead2
I just downloaded it and it works fine for me. Try re-downloading it or use this mirror.

And by the way, most of the knowledge put into this viewer can be found on the ModdingWiki.
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

It doesn't open Keen Dreams plus levels for me, it says it doesn't look like a gamemaps file (Both Kdreams.map and the MAP file.) and then crashes. Possibly because The Omegamatic was used to make the levels?
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Post by FCTW »

K1n9_Duk3 wrote:And by the way, most of the knowledge put into this viewer can be found on the ModdingWiki.
I saw that in your README(and good on ya' for putting that in there), but even still. Being a natural computer enthusiast, I of course poked around on that site. I maybe understood 10% of it. Granted, it was late and I was tired(3+ hours past my bedtime.) Either way, this took some skill. Great job!

I'm largely interested in how this works because I'm a 'learning' member of the Commander Genius development team. I would like to fix level 12 of K1. I'm sure that someone else could do it, probably very easily, but I would like to do so myself.
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