Where are Those Tiles Hiding?

[Ben]

I've exported a lot of files from the Remake, but I still can't seem to find where the tiles are kept. Can anyone help me with this?

Thanks

[Krom]

Tiles are kept in Tiles.rxx. I don't remember if we have Menu>Export>Tiles though. I'll check now.

[Ben]

Hmmm. Any luck?

EDIT: Ooh. My clock is wrong (Daylight Savings time just came into effect). I thought you'd been checking for an hour.
It's funny that I just happened to check the forum a minute after you posted...

[Krom]

Tileset export was not there, I've added it.

You can temporarily rename tiles.rxx into houses.rxx and menu>export>houses to get the tileset.

[Ben]

Ugghh. So much work

Thanks, Krom. I appreciate it On a side note, why are they not exported as default? Does it take more disk space that way?

[Krom]

@Ben: What do you mean? Tiles are not exported because there were not in RX originally and I forgot to add the corresponding menu item when we made them into RXX.

[Ben]

No, what I meant was why are all the other files (such as trees, units, etc.) hidden if we can export them anyway?

[Krom]

What do you mean "hidden" ?

[Ben]

Hehe, never mind. I can't seem to explain it well. It doesn't really matter

[Lewin]

No, what I meant was why are all the other files (such as trees, units, etc.) hidden if we can export them anyway?

We're certainly not doing it to hide them from people, that's why we let them be exported and imported so easily. We pack them into RXX files for a few reasons:

1. It saves disk space by doing one lot of compression over all the sprites. Exported as PNGs the nearly 9,000 unit sprites are 36.3 MB, packed into RXX they are ~5.4 MB.

2. It's much faster to load. If we loaded all of the sprites as PNGs each one would need to be opened and uncompressed separately (PNG uses compression) which would take a few minutes (literally) every time you started the game. We could store them uncompressed (e.g. as BMPs) but then it would be hundreds of MBs. That's also nearly 9,000 individual reads from the disk (just for units) which is much less efficient than just reading in one file.

3. Stored in the RXX file they're in exactly the right format the game needs to use them as textures in OpenGL. Once the RXX file has been uncompressed no further processing is required, it just generates the textures out of each sprite. EDIT: Actually currently it has to pack all the smaller sprites into large atlases for OpenGL textures after uncompromising them, but we've discussed just storing the atlases in RXX files to make it even faster to load, but the current load times seem acceptable so we haven't got around to it yet.

[Ben]

Okay, thanks Lewin. That's what I wanted to know.

I've always liked digging around in games' data folders for the purpose of finding sound files and other media of the like, but they are often stored as rxx (is it always rxx or is that just one of many? I don't know). Some games have a lot of sound files already "exported" so it is easy to make ringtones and stuff with them, but like I said, this is often not so.

[Lewin]

RXX is just a format we made up (no other games use it) and the same with RX from original KaM as far as I know (unless the developers used it in other games that they made).

[FeyBart]

Wouldn't it be possible to unpack all those files and store them online, so people could simply download it? Or would that be unnecessary work?

[Krom]

@FeyBart: Don't forget that these pictures are copyright by TopWare(?), so uploading them in a form of a library might be undesired.

[FeyBart]

Ah, right.


Annoying copyright laws...