DUNE II INTRO.PAC framerate

[sudobash]

Hi all,

 

New here, but not to DUNE. I have been looking at the (sadly abandoned looking) dunelegacy port. I have some experience with c++ so I am having a go at fixing it up a bit. I noticed that the intro cutscene plays slow in some parts, but normally in other parts. Delving into the code, I found that the cutscenes have a hard coded 5.88 fps.

 

Looking online I have found plenty of information about modding level PAK files but almost about the data PAK files. Is there some place where I can find information about these files, and specifically how to determine the FPS?

[MrFlibble]

Cutscenes in Dune II use the WSA file format (which probably stands for Westwood Studios Animation), and Ultraq's Red Horizon tools are capable of handling this file fromat. I've used Red Horizon v0.28 to create working planet animations for the DuneX project, which (the animations) are also stored in WSA format. Apparently, animation framerate is coded into individual WSA files - at least, Red Horizon displays the framerate when converting WSA files to PNG images, and requires a framerate to be set when you create your own WSA animations.

However, while the data on framerate seems to be stored in WSA file headers, I have no idea if it is really utilized by the game or if there is a hardcoded override that sets the same framerate for all animations internally.

[Nyerguds]

If you're attempting to mod Dune II with c++, you're probably better off looking into OpenDune, since that's the actual game decompiled back to c++. Or heck, the OpenDune enhancement "Dune Dynasty". There's no telling what clones like Dune Legacy may do in terms of handling file types, and, in my opinion, researching that is not very useful either, since they're only remakes in the end. A lot of times, such projects just mess around with things until it comes somewhat close to the original game, and then leave it at that.

By the way, "PAK" files aren't animations, they're file archives containing all of the game's files. They can easily be opened with tools like XCC Mixer.

On the subject of WSA format, as far as I've seen in Command & Conquer, there's no specific function for playing WSA files, just a function for loading one frame of a WSA. Every single place where a WSA is played in C&C1 actually has a small loop to load the frames in order. I never really checked if they get the framerate from the file or if it's hardcoded, though.