https://github.com/lethal-guitar/saucermapviewer
Map viewer and asset exporter for Attack of the Saucerman
https://github.com/lethal-guitar/saucermapviewer
cpp cpp17 game-development opengl reverse-engineering
Last synced: 27 days ago
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Map viewer and asset exporter for Attack of the Saucerman
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/lethal-guitar/saucermapviewer
- Owner: lethal-guitar
- License: gpl-2.0
- Created: 2024-08-12T19:00:11.000Z (over 1 year ago)
- Default Branch: main
- Last Pushed: 2024-12-27T13:51:35.000Z (over 1 year ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-04-03T10:37:20.368Z (12 months ago)
- Topics: cpp, cpp17, game-development, opengl, reverse-engineering
- Language: C++
- Homepage:
- Size: 617 KB
- Stars: 3
- Watchers: 1
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
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README
# Map viewer and asset exporter for Attack of the Saucerman
I'm working on reverse engineering the file formats of the 1999 game [Attack of the Saucerman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Saucerman) (Windows version). This repository contains the results of this work so far:
* [Map viewer](#map-viewer)
* [Asset exporter](#asset-exporter)
* [File format specifications](/file_format_specs.md)
All of this is work in progress and not complete yet.
## Map viewer
The map viewer is written in C++, and uses SDL+OpenGL. It's currently fairly basic: It can open and display all of the game's level files, but it can't display all elements of a map yet, and only offers very basic camera movement.
Use the up/down arrow keys to move forwards/backwards, and left/right to turn. Holding shift + arrow up/down allows moving up and down vertically.
### What works
* Displaying terrain, level geometry, and 3D models
* Basic tank-control style camera movement
* Toggling display of different elements
### What's missing
* Displaying billboard sprites
* Texture animations
* Handling translucent surfaces
* Lighting (texture brightness adjustments)
* Displaying entities and other map elements
* More flexible camera movement (looking up/down, mouse look?)
### How to run it
Building the map viewer requires CMake, SDL2, and a C++-17 capable compiler.
On Windows, the SDL dependency can be installed using vcpkg, on Linux/Mac it's available via the usual package managers.
The build process is standard CMake fare. For example (using the Ninja build tool):
```bash
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -GNinja
ninja
```
The resulting binary, `bin/SaucerMapViewer`, accepts the path to a map file as command line argument. On Windows, you can also drag a map file onto the executable to launch it.
## Asset exporter
The asset exporter is a Python script. It reads files in the game's `wad` format (unrelated to Doom WADs), and currently unpacks the following assets:
* Textures and other images (converted to PNG files)
* 3D models (converted to glTF files)
* Sound effects (exported as WAVE files)
The exported 3D models currently don't support translucent surfaces, and aren't the most efficient representation.
The script requires Python 3 and the [Pillow](https://python-pillow.org/) library, which can be installed using PIP (`pip install Pillow`).
To use the script, first unpack the game's main data container `Saucerdata.pak`. This is basically just a ZIP file, and most standard tools should be able to extract it (I had trouble using 7zip, but Linux `unzip` and Windows Explorer's built-in ZIP support worked fine).
After that, invoke the script on the desired WAD file by passing its path as a command-line argument.
The dumped files are placed into a new directory called `_exported`.
For example, to unpack the first level's assets:
```bash
unzip Saucerdata.pak
python3 dump_wad_file.py LEVELS/ar51_1.wad
```