Sometimes I miss things that I really should have or wanted to respond to. Your last post here Biffsnot is a good example.

This part...

I was messing around with the graphics file for the character graphics, since I wanted to see if I could edit them outside ACK due to the limited editing functionality on that particular screen, and I found that they are raw bitmap files. No headers, just bytes for color data, and the palette isn't included in the file at all. By using a hex editor (HxD, which is free and awesome) I copied the bitmap header info from an actual bitmap into the character graphics file, and got it to load up in an image editor.

By character graphics did you just mean the tiles and by screen with limited functionality did you mean the tile editor? If so I am very sorry for not responding sooner and saving you all that work with the hex editor! I edit all my tiles outside of ACK in my favorite graphics editing prog (the latest version of Photoshop usually) and simply save my tiles in a size and format the ACK import utility will accept. If that is not what you meant please elaborate so I can try to be more helpful. If it is what you meant try my suggestion and if you need more specific guidance I am ready and willing to give it.

Why I mention this at all is that some enterprising coder, with some very basic knowledge of C#, Python, or whatever, could whip up some external utilities to edit certain things outside of the editor... Or at least convert the images to bitmaps so they can be worked on in Gimp or Photoshop, and then strip the headers off and replace them in the proper folders.

This is still a very cool idea even if your problem was solved by my response above. Like I said I edit all my tiles in Photoshop (and I have been using GIMP more often as well as I get more used to it), but I am still very much into the idea of any sort of ACK automation.

Should I add Hallam to the Works in Progress page in the Quick Reference site? The image links you posted a while back are dead so I would need to get those back. But I could just do it text for now.

A bot that targets forum threads with WIP in the title and attempts to impersonate the OP author? :o What will they think of next? Who the hell are these people who waste so much effort developing their ad-bot AI? Anyway I am glad this bot necro-posted here and triggered that thread update email to be sent to Biffsnot because now this WIP has a more recent progress report from the real OP author! :D

Hello all.

As an FYI (I am sure many could tell already due to the spam links on the signature line of the 'Alice Mayer' post) that this Alice Mayer is not me :wink:

It was kind of funny to see an email sent to me by the board about a new post to my topic, and it turns out to be someone promising to make 'great strides' on my project.

Anyway, I have been rolling around the idea of continuing this game for a while (long before the news of Wasteland 2, which I had missed until Garth let me know about it). I love the ACK system, bugs and all, and enjoy the old-school editing aspects of it. As it is, I have done all of the work of painstakingly, via screenshots, cutting out the tiles of Wasteland all those years ago, so I may as well do something with it.

I can't believe the original post was from 2008. /sigh

Anyway, my main focus as of late has been fiction writing, and my goal is to really do some great stuff with stories and novels. I think working on something like this will only help with story design skills, character growth, and all the rest of the skills needed to write great fiction. I will need to devote most of my (limited) time after long, mind-numbing hours of wage-slavery needed to pay the bills, to writing fiction and trying to improve my craft, but I think I can swing working on Hallam as well.

Hell, it would be cool to add 'Game Designer' to my list of achievements, even if I secretly know I used a creation kit :wink:

As an aside, I think anyone who creates a game in any way, whether they hand-code it on an Atari 800 computer using Assembly language, or uses a kit of some kind, is still a game designer. It is still the design that makes or breaks a game. Hell, in real-world game companies, the game designers no longer even touch coding.

And since I am blabbing on here... I was messing around with the graphics file for the character graphics, since I wanted to see if I could edit them outside ACK due to the limited editing functionality on that particular screen, and I found that they are raw bitmap files. No headers, just bytes for color data, and the palette isn't included in the file at all. By using a hex editor (HxD, which is free and awesome) I copied the bitmap header info from an actual bitmap into the character graphics file, and got it to load up in an image editor.

Why I mention this at all is that some enterprising coder, with some very basic knowledge of C#, Python, or whatever, could whip up some external utilities to edit certain things outside of the editor... Or at least convert the images to bitmaps so they can be worked on in Gimp or Photoshop, and then strip the headers off and replace them in the proper folders.

Anyway that was a hell of a lot more than I intended to post.

See you all around.

indeed... INDEED! :idea: Biffsnot lets do this!! You lead since its your project originally. Just tell me what you want me to do and consider it done!

With Wasteland 2 making the rounds, this WIP game feels far, far more relevant than it did four years ago (though I'm sure it is fabulous regardless of how "in" the current vibes says a specific genre is).

Though when I think of genres that require entrees, I wasn't reminded until recently that late 80's style adventures needed more games. So at the very least, the idea of this WIP is intriguing and worthy of a bit of my time, hopefully there is something to be seen of it by this time next year!

Hey are you Biffsnot? Breathing new life into this great old idea of yours!? Sweeet!!! :D Let me know if you need any help.

I will try to put out an update ASAP and I should be able to make some more large strides in the games design in the next week.

See you then!

Good point. Hey ICJ would you be so kind as to movie the last two posts to a new thread? Thanks. Maybe entitle the new thread Q&A with ACK Author Chris Hopkins or something like that.

To get this thread back on topic...

I have a question for Biffsnot the author of unreleased WIP PA ACK game Hallam. When you imported all those WL tiles one by one were you able to do so without having to change the colors everytime in order to make them look normal again or did you have the same palette problems I am having right now when I try to import the same tiles? Did all your yellow tiles for example come out blue or green when imported into ACK like mine do? And if so what did you do about it? Did you use the ACK pixel painting tool to recolor all those tiles pixel by pixel or did you figure out how to get a Wasteland color palette BMP to work with ACK? If so how exactly did you get that to work right? What exactly is in that 320 by 200 palette BMP file you use?

Hi Garth's,

Thank you very much for all the kind words.

To most of your questions, the answer is going to be, "because it's a DOS game." The core of the engine was written in '89 or so, was more or less 'finished' in '92, and then revisited and tweaked recently to add anything I possibly could (like sound) now that DosBox does such a great job of running it.

With jjsonick's awesome Windows launcher, it's very easy to forget that it's an ancient DOS game under the hood. When I started it, it was meant to be a cross between Ultima V and ACS -- back when those games were still on store shelves.

So most of the limits (especially anything around that magic number 256) are there because the platform required the economy of one-byte fields there. However, I'm not entirely sure those limits are all bad -- I think people who pick up ACK now are doing it to get back to the graphically simple gaming experience of the 80's, where one person actually could create a very immersive adventure game through sheer force of story. As games got more graphically realistic, the creators had exponentially more work to do, the engine became more and more specialized, and the player's imagination had less and less room to fill in the gaps. I think part of the genius of ACS was that the graphics were *so* crude that anyone could tackle nearly any kind of adventure with it. Compare that with a newer game editor, like Neverwinter Nights: incredibly powerful, but straying outside the pre-made objects is hard and going outside the fantasy genre with it is nearly impossible.

As for your questions about palettes and colors (you can use all colors in the same tile, by the way) we should probably start a new thread or I can help you out by e-mail, I don't want to irreversibly thread-jack a thread about what looks to be a very promising game.

Finally, I can't accept any suggestion that I have outdone Stuart Smith's ACS in any way. :) What he was able to squeeze out of a game that ran on the hardware it did was nothing short of amazing, and his creativity with Rivers of Light was phenomenal. He's on my short list of people I'd like to have a beer with.

- Chris

Thanks for the info Chris. Since I was last on here I went ahead and actually took the time to give your manual a thorough read. I could have answered all my questions if I had just read that to begin with - lol. Very thorough and well done manual. I am impressed! If only more documentation were like that.

How difficult would it be for you to just add a simple tile by tile import function... say command line, so you wouldn't need to do anything to the GUI at all? Any format would be fine by me as I can batch convert all my tiles.

Is there any reason why animation tile slots could not serve as static tile slots if I don't plan on using that many animation tiles? What exactly is the difference between the two anyway? What is animated about the animated tiles? Are those for tiles that will move over other tiles such as NPCs and the PC as well as anything the designer decides should move at some point?

Also, I remember that ACS had a rather lame animation for missile attacks which was just a blinking over sized solid white circle. I mean it was cool in that it would generally fire towards enemies no matter where they were positioned around your PC and it was cool that it would be closer or further from hitting the target depending on how high you PC's skill was.

It was just lame that the designer could not edit the missile sprite and change it to something a little more interesting or at least something a little more subtle than a huge flashing orb! So my question as I'm sure you've guessed long before now is does ACK provide the designer with the ability to change the missile sprite?

The Macros - I was already feeling nostalgic and wanting to pick up where I left off as a kid using ACS when I read the first half of the manual detailing the ACS like editor [except I will miss those cool pathway navigation trees ACS used!] but I was jumping up and down [on the inside of course - lol] once I dug into the macro section! ACK is totally badass Chris!!! I mean this thing is WICKED man!!!

Not to disrespect the honorable Mr. Smith but I do believe you have out done him here. I am sure some will say how you had the advantage of modern techniques and resources that weren't available back then - maybe you were even thinking that just now - but hey, Stuart didn't seem to care enough about his creation to keep it up to date or to improve it for all his devoted fans did he?

And no one else for that matter took advantage of new techniques and golden opportunities for keeping this gem of a classic alive did they? No, just you my friend. And I want to thank you for that. You have earned a place among the storied halls of CRPG legend as far as I am concerned.

Don't worry I'm not a stalking type of fan ;) but I am an extremely loyal one. I am after all still a fan of ACS - among other classics - after all these years. But my loyalty is not easily won. So be proud!

Ok enough of the praise. Now I shall give you the sort of feedback I am sure your most anxious to see. Questions, suggestions and constructive criticism! :)

First of all when I first attempted to import tiles using Alt-B and choosing a 320x200 256 BMP file of tiles I had saved to the IMPORT folder of ACK I wasn't getting any recognition that the file was even there.

I solved this problem on my own however. I found out my BMP was saved in 16 bit instead of 8bit and apparently that made a difference because when I went back into Photoshop and changed the format to 8bit and resaved it and restarted ACK it then recognized it. I guess that was meant to be assumed from the manual with it's repeated mention of the 256 color requirement but it wasn't immediately obvious to me.

I just thought maybe the manual could use a little extra information about that for the uninitiated or those totally unfamiliar with how older games and graphics formats work. Which brings me to my first real criticism. I do think that ACK could do with at least the possibility of using 16 bit graphics if not more. There could still be a restriction to 16 by 16 tiles and all that.

I really think you could update to higher res without losing the retro feel of the classic. It just makes this lost art you are trying to preserve or revive all that much more accessible to newer audiences and also allows us to use the newer tools we have at our disposal to help us make the games we dreamed of as kids. It is really the designer that is most responsible for maintaining the retro or classic feel of the games they create. But I think it would also be interesting to see what kinds of games people would come up with if they could using higher res.

Q: I am having a little trouble figuring out how the palette works. Once I imported my first tile from that 320x200 BMP the colors came out all wrong. I went back to the manual and read about how to import my own palette file. So I did that. But what I did was simply take the same image I was using to import tiles and copied it to the design folder and renamed it to palette.bmp. But it didnt work. So I am thinking the palette must only read from certain pixels in a certain order from the palette image. Is that right?

How does the palette image work? How is it used or read by ACK? Why does the palette image have to be so big if it is only looking for 256 colors? Seems like a 1x256 image would do, or even a 1 by 16 image if you only needed that many colors. Also although I can see how the editor allows you to choose from a rainbow of 256 colors it doesnt look like the editor actually allows you to use more than 9 colors in any single tile. Is that right? That seems like quite an unfair disadvantage to the designer when ACK clearly recognises 256 but the designer is restricted to using only 9 at a time.

Ok, one last question now. Are you familiar with color cycling? I remember having fun with trying different effects out using color cycling when I was creating graphics for my old FRUA games. FRUA also only used 256 color graphics but it also used GIF animation files too so I guess that is not going to be possible in ACK. Just a thought. I think Color cycling is very retro and very cool. [like anything it can be abused ofcourse]

What format were the Ultima V and 2400AD tiles such that they could be directly imported into ACK? Some arcane classic game format or an actual graphic format like BMP, GIF, JPG, TIF, PCX, PNG, etc.?

Some of the early tile-based games used just a plain old raw format, no header information or metadata, with each row of each tile written in order, either two pixels per byte (EGA) or one pixel per byte (VGA).

When I found that out, I put together a crude feature to import from those files, so that I could quickly make the "Ultima" kit. On the off-chance that others might find it useful, I left the utility in. (Import/Export module, Alt-R)

Wasteland, though, uses some pretty sophisticated compression. There's a great article on it here: http://wasteland.wikispaces.com/Tiles

I figured there would be plenty of cases like that, where I couldn't code for it directly, so I put in the option to import from BMP files as well. (BMP because it's so super-easy to decode the file format... no compression)

As for tile limits... there are two sets of 240 tiles each. The 2nd set is the "animation" set, used for the additional tiles involved in animating terrain objects or creatures. Which means you can't stuff anywhere near all of those Wasteland tiles into the game. Increasing that limit is something I'd love to do (and to a significant degree, was able to do when I added the animation set.. yeah, it used to all have to fit into one set of 240, ouch.) However, I don't think there will be any way to do so that isn't prohibitively difficult.

Chris H wrote:Method 1: take screenshots, re-save the screenshots into the ACK\IMPORT folder as 320x200 BMP files, and use the "import from BMP" option in the tile editor to grab 16x16 pieces of the picture to make the new tiles.

Method 2: Depending on the data format, sometimes you can import directly from the original game's data files. The tiles in the tutorial from Ultima V and 2400AD, for example, were grabbed that way. I haven't tried it on Wasteland.

Ok, so we can not import single 16x16 tiles into ACK they have to be all on one larger 320x200 BMP image so the ACK import tool can read it and extract from it? Or does method 2 do what I am talking about? What format were the Ultima V and 2400AD tiles such that they could be directly imported into ACK? Some arcane classic game format or an actual graphic format like BMP, GIF, JPG, TIF, PCX, PNG, etc.?

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:
1) I would loooooooove to see a modern-day version of Wasteland, that somehow puts the text of the game *into* the game. It is very awkward to have to have the story nearby and read it "off-line."

2) Garth's Equipment Shop is the best username on this BBS. :)

1) I thought the very same thing myself. If nothing else that is a great reason to recreate the classic in all its glory while remaining as true to the original as is possible. Fallout was a fantastic tribute to it but imitation is the surest form of flattery.

2) Wow thanks! BTW: I love how you refer to this as a BBS instead of a Forum. Reminds me of the good ol' WWIV ASCII/ANSI dial-up Bulletin Board System days before the web. Sure do miss those days. Especially Tradewars. Man I loved that game!

Chris H wrote:wasteland-tiles.zip

Although given how Wasteland uses its tiles, I don't think you'd want to import them all -- lots of repeats, and I don't think it actually does true transparency, it just has multiple tiles with various combinations. It also has way more tiles than ACK allows.

Thanks for sharing your work Chris. I'll share mine too as soon as I have something useful. What exactly is the tile limit in ACK? That sure would be useful knowledge. There needs to be a ACK FAQ and Wiki covering all of this useful info.

As for the transparency in WL you can see how it is done by examining the raw tiles you get when you decompile the original WL. I think you are right that it isn't true transparency. You can see that there are masks for certain icons. The color of the mask is black. I don't know how it does it since transparency doesn't exist at that graphics level does it?

Biffsnot wrote:I also surrounded items with a colored box to both hide the black square and denote the item type...Red for weapon, green for tool, etc.

I have a world idea I have been working on for a little bit that is Post-Apoc in nature but also a little bit 'The Dying Earth'-like (a series of books and stories by Jack Vance where the world is in its last years and strange creatures and magics are all over). My original idea was for the obvious nuclear war and destruction to bring about things we never expected from a scientific point of view like dark demonic creature skittering around feeding on the desolation, etc.

Congratulations on the new job. Good idea there for working around the transparency prob. I haven't read that series but your idea sounds a little like one of my favorite classic cartoons I used to watch every morning before school. Thundar the Barbarian. There are some great fan sites out there for it with plenty of screenshots and stuff.

There is at least one fan made game using the Thundar theme that I know of. But it was made for the hacked FRUA engine. FRUA is Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures. A modern clone of FRUA was made by FRUA fans since then. It was called UAForever but later changed to Dungeon Craft or DC for short. Like FRUA it is used to impliment your own Gold Box style RPGs but with better graphics and sound.

Chris H wrote:I vote for continuing the direction you're taking it -- and not being too worried about what other post-apoc games did or didn't include. The setting should serve the story.

I haven't read the "Dying Earth" series yet, but I've read the "Book of the New Sun" series by Gene Wolfe which I understand to be a vaguely similar premise... although I'd almost call that post-post-apoc. :)

By the way, I love what you've done with the "time of day" images in the upper right corner of the screen, that's awesome...

Glad to have you back!

I second that vote. "Post-post-apoc" lol. Good term. I always thought the PA genre needed to have more sub-genre titles to better define it and separate the different types of PA fiction out there.

jjsonick wrote:Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is one of my all time favorite series.

I'll check out the series. I am collector of any PA fiction. But I do pay attention to what other PA fans are recommending since there is so much out there to choose from. Unfortunately as with any genre quality isn't always a priority for it's creators.[/img]

Looks great, Biffsnot, can't wait!

I vote for you including the non-Wasteland elements - after all, we still have the original Wasteland if we need a 'purist' experience (and it sounds like the groups Garth's Equipment Shop mentions are already working on variations/expansions that will stay more strictly within the Wasteland mold).

Chris, Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is one of my all time favorite series. :)

I vote for continuing the direction you're taking it -- and not being too worried about what other post-apoc games did or didn't include. The setting should serve the story.

I haven't read the "Dying Earth" series yet, but I've read the "Book of the New Sun" series by Gene Wolfe which I understand to be a vaguely similar premise... although I'd almost call that post-post-apoc. :)

By the way, I love what you've done with the "time of day" images in the upper right corner of the screen, that's awesome...

Glad to have you back!

Wow, well hello there everyone! No the project is not dead, and all these posts may have lit a fire under my butt :)

Wedding in Florida (2k miles away), new job and other stuff has delayed my progress a little. However my new job is better than the last and has a constant 7:30am-4pm schedule...affording me time to work on the things I like. Not like the retail job I had, with a 2h round trip, and hours ranging from 6am to 11pm.

As an answer to the question by Garth (I am sorry for late response) is I used DosBox to take screen-shots and then painfully exported what I wanted. Sucked but didn't take to long. I also have made some custom tiles. I did save that great pic Chris did in case I want to pull some more tiles. I have used all but one of my pages of tiles however....


Inside a house.

Outside in the town of Hallam

Anyone hungry for post-nuke burgers?

Some inventory.

A Shady Dealer....or a flasher...damn post-apoc pervs.

Right now there is no transparency but that is only on items and creatures. I made chair graphics and the like with floor background so they look good. I also surrounded items with a colored box to both hide the black square and denote the item type...Red for weapon, green for tool, etc.

Well I hope to make something here that will please the Wastelanders all around :)

On that note, the subtitle 'All Things Hidden' denotes a deeper strangeness and evil at work in the world. I have a world idea I have been working on for a little bit that is Post-Apoc in nature but also a little bit 'The Dying Earth'-like (a series of books and stories by Jack Vance where the world is in its last years and strange creatures and magics are all over). My original idea was for the obvious nuclear war and destruction to bring about things we never expected from a scientific point of view like dark demonic creature skittering around feeding on the desolation, etc.

So this leads to the question - dipping into some of the stranger happenings may not fit directly into the Fallout and Wasteland style post-apoc game. The game will be similar in much of its content, but raiders and radscorpions may not be the worst things out there. Does this sound good to everyone? Or will deviating from the standard dilute the WL-like qualities?

Whoa! That thing is amazing! I had never expected to see them all together like that. Thanks for posting, Chris! Very interesting.

I have something to add: Wasteland has a LOT of tiles:



I've converted them all into one big picture (above) and then cut/pasted from that into series of .BMP files that can be copied into the ACK\IMPORT folder, and imported (one at a time, alas) with Alt-B in the tile editor.

wasteland-tiles.zip

Although given how Wasteland uses its tiles, I don't think you'd want to import them all -- lots of repeats, and I don't think it actually does true transparency, it just has multiple tiles with various combinations. It also has way more tiles than ACK allows.

However -- I can definitely see it being nice to have the tile collection handy, in order to pull in the odd thing here and there. (Like, there's a toilet tile. I mean, how cool is that!)

I have nothing really to add, except:

1) I would loooooooove to see a modern-day version of Wasteland, that somehow puts the text of the game *into* the game. It is very awkward to have to have the story nearby and read it "off-line."

2) Garth's Equipment Shop is the best username on this BBS. :)

Hey Chris, thanks for the speedy response. So you CAN import your own pregen tiles into ACK??? That is GREAT news! As I already alluded to in my previous post obtaining the actual WL tiles is no problem. My only concern was the feasibility of importing them into ACK. The best part of this is that the tile dimensions of the original WL sprites or tiles are also 16x16! So no editing need be involved at all if all one wanted to do was create a WL game using ACK and staying true to the original WL! If you have the original WL game files you can DL Wasteland Suite for free as it is opensource and then you use the unpacksprites option to extract all of the 16x16 tiles to PNG files and thats it, your done! I'm getting excited about the possibilities here!

WASTELAND SUITE project homepage

There has also been an actual fanmade Wasteland sequal in progress for years now using the Wasteland Suite and original WL resources. Check out their Wikispace:
Wasteland - The definitive deconstruction

Heres a screenshot of one of their new map layouts


EDIT: Sorry if the graphic is too large for some folks here. I just remembered I have my screen resolution currently set to 1280x800 so for me the graphic fits nicely.

You know if I did wish to create my own tiles pixel by pixel it would be nice if I could set my screen resolution to something below the 600x800 minimum of my current display driver.

Is there some prog that can force a high end graphics card to write to the screen in like 640x480 or something? Of course if I am going to use an external graphic editor like PSP or PS I could just use zoom and that would work fine but ACK has its own built in icon editor just like ACS did right? But I guess since it requires DOSBOX to run it probably emulates a 640x480 resolution. Or am I assuming too much here?

Maybe I should just quit guessing and go tinker with the damn thing! ;)

OH HEY! Just had a thought [uh oh - take cover!]

I can boot up my DOS 7.1 USB pendrive and run Windows for Workgroups 3.1 and run ACK from within it with no need for DOSBOX!!! Think it could work??? I'll try it and let you know.