Tools to analyze files of the video-game "Futurama" (2003).
After watching a video by oddheader, about an undiscovered easter-egg in Futurama, I wondered if I could figure it out. I was initially going to use Xbox emulation and a debugger, but I quickly decided to take a different approach (pure file analysis, no debugging).
The first project was a simple disassembler for the "ful" files (which are scripts). I got stuck during development, so I added a parser for "dbg" files (which are debug symbols). Eventually that lead to proper "ful" disassembly. The disassembly is still hard to read (it's stack based), so I might work on an optimizer to make it more readable in the distant future.
I had originally used Game Extractor to extract the "ful" and "dbg" files from "img" files, but it's lacking the directory layout. Hence, I used the information on the Xentax Wiki to write my own script for "img" extraction.
Later, I added support "nif" support, by extending nif.xml for NifTools (including blender-plugin).
The modified nif.xml (base version 0.9) can be found in my futurama-tools-nifxml repository.
You'll need pip install --user -U git+https://github.com/neomonkeus/pyffi.git@hfloat.
I quickly gave up on this, because:
nifskopeuses nif.xml 0.9 and newer.blender_nif_pluginhas no full Blender 2.80 support yet, and it was buggy.pyffiuses nif.xml 0.7 and older.
nifskope is harder to debug and didn't even compile out-of-the-box.
Meanwhile, blender_nif_plugin also didn't work. And while the underlying pyffi works, it only supports very old nif.xml.
nifskope also handles these old nif.xml, but it still isn't fully compatible.
So I wouldn't be able to support both tools at the same time and working on upstream would be an issue due to my old nif.xml base.
If you still want to try the nif support, just run blender using NIFXMLPATH=$(pwd) blender from the futurama-tools-nifxml path.
I made a small tool for inspection, which can be ran using NIFXMLPATH="$(pwd)" ../futurama-tools/inspect_nif.py FutPAL00/levels/level1-1/stage1.nif.
For nifskope, just copy the nif.xml from futurama-tools-nifxml, to your nifskope path.
I added support for "ldb" files, so I could understand the mission plot more easily.
I also added support for "fnt" files for completeness. The "fonts/latin1_xbox.fnt" shipped with the game appears to be broken.
The tools are very incomplete and not very functional. I have never played the game and I probably won't maintain these tools.
I don't know if these tools work for the PS2 version, I've looked at the Xbox version exclusively.
If you want to know how these formats work, or how to use the tools, simply read the source-code.
If you like my work, a donation would be nice:
Even a small amount does help me and shows appreciation. Thank you!
(C)2019 Jannik Vogel
All rights reserved.