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1. Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:11:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

   I've been hacking on House MD (DS, 2010) and it's one of the weirdest games I've reverse engineered because of how aggressively un-weird it is.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:14:11 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     all the backgrounds are stored as PNG files.
     all the character are stored as PNG files.
     all the story text is stored as XML files, with comments, and it's easy to hack.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:16:28 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     the weirdest thing I've found so far is that in their UI layout XML they misspelled "num_polys" as "num_ploys".

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:18:59 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     all the files are stored in a filesystem that makes sense. there's folders and sub-folders that are reasonably named.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:22:41 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     it scares me. games aren't supposed to make sense when you look inside them. it feels like it's a trap

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:34:40 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     mind you, that's just the internals. The game is absolutely weird in terms of gameplay.

     It has a panty-sorting minigame!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:36:29 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     okay on all the portraits, apparently the (semi-)transparent color is defined as color-index... 65.
     That IS weird, finally.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:36:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     and the background images in the game are saved as higher quality than the DS can show, for no reason I can understand.

     They have to have their color-count lowered at runtime! There's no way to use that extra quality. Why not strip it out and save on filespace?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:36:31 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     although I guess some of their choices are kinda weird in a meta sense.

     Like, the game doesn't use DS layers at all. There's 10 layers on the DS and it uses one of them, essentially rendering the game as one big bitmap, copying it to the other screen.

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:48:15 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • shroomie/joan

     @shroomie I mean like the avatars for characters in the dialogue UI are stored under "UI\avatars", and not like "A00052\9852\borders"

   • shroomie/joan (shroomie@0w0.is)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:48:26 JST shroomie/joan

     in reply to

     @foone what’s an example of a good file system, i just make folders for when i feel like the things inside need them or when i need to hide something

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:51:30 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     oh thank god.
     it's not just 65: it's sometimes 66 or 97.

     FINALLY SOME FUCKING WEIRDNESS

   • violentlycar (violentlycar@techhub.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:53:25 JST violentlycar

     in reply to

     @foone How big is the cartridge? Maybe they just didn't need the space?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:53:25 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • violentlycar

     @violentlycar it's a 64-megabyte cartridge! they could have easily fit this game onto a 32 megabyte if they had tried to optimize it even slightly

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 04:55:38 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     maybe it's got different levels of shadow. like, some characters have darker shadows than others?

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 05:43:32 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Bippzy

     @bippzy I don't know and I don't really want to try and google it

   • Bippzy (bippzy@cyberplace.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 05:43:33 JST Bippzy

     in reply to

     @foone Does that even happy in House MD the show? I've watched it all the way through twice and I don't remember

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 07:41:36 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     so it turns out the way the avatar sprites work is weird.
     It's a 256-color PNG, but every sprite actually only uses 32 distinct colors.
     The palette contains 8 copies of the same 32 colors, identical in the PNG.
     But when they're rendered, it's converted into 8 different levels of transparency!

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 07:53:13 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     those levels being:
     0,40,60,100,141,185,205,255

   • Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 08:04:48 JST Foone🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • Alisdair Calder McGregor

     @A_C_McGregor I assume it just made the math easier

   • Alisdair Calder McGregor (a_c_mcgregor@topspicy.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 08:04:50 JST Alisdair Calder McGregor

     in reply to

     @foone Why would you have 32 different versions of complete transparency?