Funny you should mention that...
 

I am remaking the whole first level in Hammer right now. It won't have a lot of the data unfortunately as that'd require a bit more scripting/programming interaction with the VMTs and then recoding and/or adding portions of code to the display system so that I could switch between systems (i.e. Neotokyo's multiple display modes)... but I can at least do all the architecture on my own.

I'm even remaking the terminals and whatnot in Photoshop. This has become my 'little side project'. Not that I have a lot of time to myself these days, what with working on Star Ruler and IronCast. I have to say that I haven't seen such large levels in quite some time -- I kind of miss the days where levels popped up in no time at all. Hopefully Solid-state drives will help take care of that.

Anywho, if y'all don't mind me using y'all's game as a means to improve my LD by trying to 'tweak and improve' levels of Wrath of Earth that'd be awesome and I guess I can throw some interesting pics up somewhere.

On another note, I am surprised (happily!) to see developers of little-known-games around here. If only I could get in touch with the guys who worked on Star Ruler way back when -- I'd really enjoy talking to them about the production of that game.

You, my friend, are brilliant. I've mentioned to Dave Faller about remaking it, and he's also said that he would like to make a Wrath of Earth 2. Maybe we could make something out of this... :sneaky:

So, I've been getting a bit distracted...
 

...and wondered if I could reverse engineer the game code and the data files, partly to keep those old gray cells working and partly just for the fun of it.

Anyway, I have managed to get some information about the game data!

OK, there's three main files, the executable (woe.exe) and two data files (woe.lib and woe.rsc).

woe.lib is very straightforward - it contains raw indexed colour image data for the walls and doors. Each graphic is a 64x64 pixel image or four 64x16 pixel images in one 64x64 block. There's 1360 tiles in all. There is no palette information in the file but you could get that data from a screen grab. Images are stored column wise, i.e. pixel (0,0) is followed by (0,1) then (0,2), (0,3)...(0,63), (1,0), (1,1), etc.

woe.rsc is a bit more complex. The file is a just a collection of files, a bit like a zip archive but without any compression. The number of files contained in the woe.rsc is given by the first word in the file. There follows from this an array of file information. The first dword in each record is the size of the data file. The second dword is ignored. The third dword is the absolute position in the woe.rsc file of the start of the data file and after that there is a zero terminated filename. The record is padded to 25 bytes long.

Once you've extracted all the data files, you'll have 309 data files. Of those 309, I've deduced the following:

Files with the extensions .fst, .spc and .smp are audio files. The format for these is 11Khz 8bit mono PCM. The .fst are footstep sounds, the .spc are the speech files and the .smp are general sound effects. There's also some .drv files and a snd.bin file which I think are the midi code/data. credits.bin and endgame.bin are RLE compressed data for the credits and endgame scrolling text, I'm not sure of the exact format. There's a bunch of PCX image files (H4.pcx is the one you might want to modify!).

I think the level data is in the 000 to 00b files - there were twelve levels in all.

There's also an RLE compressed set of images somewhere for all the sprites in the game.

The only other file type I can remember are the animation files - these were a modified FLC compressed format that double buffered the compression (so the image deltas were between even and odd frames).

Lastly, the order the files appear in the .rsc is important.

So, Firgof, you should be able to grab some of the original image data for your project.

You, my friend, are also brilliant. I shall write a LIB extractor tomorrow and work on an RSC extractor ASAP. Maybe we shall finally see some WoE mods. :) Now to find the BMP file format...

Right - here's a LIB and RSC extractor. It will produce 1360 BMPs from the LIB file and extract everything else from the RSC file. I tried to make one or the other optional with command line parameters, but for some reason, it failed. :p I've also discovered that half of a BMP header is redundant. :D

Wrath of Earth Extractor
Source Code (with Dev-C++ project)

hi

Does anyone here knows what is the combination of the valve-turning puzzle? There are 999 possible combinations. Do we really have to test them one by one?:(

Bump

23.11 - 16.11 = 7 days
999/7= about 140 combinations per day
that's not so bad :ouch:

(nope, i don't, maybe you missed some hint? also: tried googling for some walkthrough without any luck. perhaps you could find a youtube video with the location with the valves)

well, first, after checking i realized that it doesnt reach 999 combinations because each valve only has 8 positions, not 10. My mistake. But even so it must be several hundreds of combinations.

There is only one video of WoE at youtube, and it just shows the intro and the first part of the game.

There is no walktrough in the internet (then again, why should one exist? its an unknown old FPS. I dont think theres much interest in one out there)

In post nº 28 of this thread, made last year , one poster (alumiun) claims to have found the sequence...after experimenting 512 combinations. He said that there is no apparent clue to the solution of this puzzle. Even the game creator doesnt remember it...

Well sadly unless someone comes on who remembers the code, or has it written down somewhere you are going to need to just sit down and start guessing. That is at least if you want to beat the game.

Another idea might be to upload a save file just before the puzzle and see if anyone would like to help you with this problem (much better than asking people to start the game from the beginning and catch up.)