Syndicate Map Viewer

Purpose

Make a map viewer for Syndicate, one of the best games ever made.

Assumptions

This repository and the tools have been used only from a Linux system, with the Good Old Games version of Syndicate, which comes with all files in uppercase. I run the game via DOSBOX, but there's no real need of that to use the tools.
Readable over optimized code.

Setup

run yarn install
Install Wine (to run command line tools)
From tools/bullfrog_utils_rnc.zip, you'll need the file dernc.exe to uncompress .DAT files.
From your game installation (\SYNDICAT\DATA subfolder inside it), copy the relevant .DAT files to this repository's data subfolder:
- HBLK01.DAT
- HPAL01.DAT to HPAL05.DAT (or the amount of palette files you wish to use for maps)
- MAP01.DAT to MAP94.DAT (or the amount of maps you wish to export)

Decompressing files

Usage is like:

wine dernc.exe <filename1> <filename2> ...

Note: overrides the original with the uncompressed version. Game will work without problems with the uncompressed version but just so that you're aware. That's why for safety this project uses its own folder and you must copy data files there.

Usage

tile-exporter.js

This tool extracts all tiles from HBLK01.DAT file (put it into data folder and de-RNC it) into png files under the tiles subfolder. It extracts one version of each tile per palette.

map-exporter.js

WIP

This tool exports a MAPxx.DAT map file into a png file under the maps subfolder.

References

This project would have never been possible without my initial inspiration, the great FreeSynd file formats documentation, although some documentation is either outdated or incorrect.
The libsyndicate project contains so many reverse engineered file formats that it is an invaluable source.

Sprites Information

An schema I've drawn to understand how sprites entities and files combine:

┌───────────────┐
│               │
│  GameXX.DAT   │
│               │
└───────┬───────┘                 next frame
        │                          ┌───────┐
        │ anim & frame indexes     │       │
        │                          │       │
┌───────▼───────┐             ┌────▼───────┴───┐           ┌─────────────────┐       ┌──────────────────┐
│               │             │                │           │                 │       │                  │
│  Sprite Anim  ├────────────►│  Sprite Frame  ├──────────►│ Sprite Element  ├───────►  Sprite Element  │
│               │ frame index │                │  frames   │      TAB        │       │       data       │
└───────────────┘             └────────────────┘   list    └─────────────────┘       └──────────────────┘

Kartones/syndicate-map-viewer